True Confections (7 page)

And then, not that it had anything whatsoever to do with the Blessed Chocolate Virgin story, after maybe only ten seconds (at most, for all that fuss and bother) of me squinting into the camera and unwrapping a Tigermelt and explaining the dark-chocolate tiger stripe all over again for the Channel 8 reporter the way I had done it for Channel 3, there was footage of the 1975 fire that burned down the Livingston residence on Canner Street, and guess what? Arson Girl, so called because she pleaded guilty to this terrible crime of arson and yet she never served a day in jail, what about that? She grew up to be a member of the prominent Zip’s Candies family! Are your children consuming candy made by a convicted criminal? Several people interviewed on the street expressed their determination not to buy candy made by felons. And now, in other news.

The shock of that unexpected exposure gave me a sick, punched feeling in my gut. Just remembering it now, I am feeling waves of nausea all over again. (I have never liked the word
prominent
. It always means more than it means.) I have felt that kind of panicky free-fall horror only a few times in my life. The day of the fire, the day of the sentencing, the day I got the letter from Middlebury telling me to never mind. Life has been much kinder to me for a long while, with many joyful experiences, and
it was not until the dawning of the whole truth about Howard’s other life in Madagascar that I felt such blackness again.

I certainly had a doomy feeling the day I first saw Frieda exhibit symptoms of dementia and had to admit to myself what I had known for a while, that she was losing it, but I suppose that was a different shade of black, in the pantheon of my darkest moments. Our relationship was always tricky, and she made it hard for me to love her, but there was something really admirable in her toughness and her loyalty to the family, and to the business, even though she was pretty hard on me over the years. She did soften a little toward me after Jacob and Julie were born (I once overheard her telling one of her Hadassah cronies that the problem with me was that I was a dumb goy with two smart Jewish children). Given that my purpose in these pages is to say everything I can about Zip’s Candies and to give history and background to establish my knowledge of the facts about the current issues, and given that every piece of Ziplinsky family history is also Zip’s Candies history, and also given that I have just described an instance of Frieda’s dementia that was potentially harmful to the business, I might as well describe that first incident now, given that Frieda’s behavior in her final years could have exposed Zip’s to very damaging liabilities, for which I could have been blamed.

I documented this incident at the time, seven years ago. I was helping with a pour and blend for a big batch of Tigermelt nougat. People are amazed at how much is still done by hand at Zip’s. Creating the necessary machinery to automate some of these functions on the line would cost a fortune, and our batches are so small, it just wouldn’t pay to automate each of these steps unless it was part of a bigger plan to increase production and distribution in a substantial way. And it could be surprisingly difficult to get it right, to create efficient machines that would
duplicate precisely every step of the unique processes that are integral to production on our three lines.

Ironically enough, Tigermelts contain no butter. We all know what happened to the competitive tigers in
Little Black Sambo
—“they all just melted away, and there was nothing left but a great big pool of melted butter … round the foot of the tree.” For the Tigermelt centers, when the marshmallow nougat (a proprietary blend of egg whites, sucrose, and corn syrup) and the caramel (dried milk solids, sucrose, molasses, and vanilla) are cooled to just the right temperatures in their blending pots, they are then poured and swirled together in a partial blend, not a fifty-fifty blend, more like seventy-thirty, with more nougat than caramel, and then the hot fried peanuts are stirred in. This all takes both physical strength and coordination and also really specific timing, so it requires teamwork. You are rushing to beat the clock as you blend this beige goop just a certain amount in a very precise way, on a big, sinklike batch table.

Time and temperature are two key ingredients in every candy line. Time and temperature, Sam used to say, they’re your friend, or they’re your enemy. If you don’t control the time and the temperature, you will have no quality control, you may ruin your product, and you will never have a smooth-running line. You have to own the time and the temperature, or the time and the temperature will own you. Eli cared about tempering, and it was a point of pride for Sam that Zip’s Candies has always had a high standard for well-tempered chocolate, and it is a feature of the Tigermelt coating. Tempering is chocolate alchemy, mechanical manipulation plus precise heat in order to force chocolate into the desirable crystalline form so that when it is properly cooled it forms a stable solid with a smooth and shiny surface.

When the Tigermelt center mixture is sufficiently blended
and cooled, you have only about a seven-minute window to stir in the hot fried peanuts. It has to happen at just the right time as the temperature of the mixture cools, so the peanuts are blended all the way through the nougat, so they get mixed in with the caramel swirls instead of sinking too quickly or failing to penetrate and getting stuck all bunched together on the surface, which creates enrobing problems and leads to misshapen bars. (It’s like baking
shmura
matzo; to prevent inadvertent leavening, within eighteen minutes the flour and water have to be mixed, the dough has to be kneaded and rolled, and the matzo has to go into the oven.) The average number of peanuts in a Tigermelt is twenty-eight. Other than Baby Ruth, I defy you to name another combination bar with national distribution that has such a high proportion of whole peanuts. (Not peanut halves or pieces, whole peanuts.)

It’s simple enough, but if the blending isn’t done correctly it throws off the texture and the consistency of the Tigermelt bar. Most popular combination bars are made of these same ingredients and the same inclusions, more or less, in varying proportions and consistencies. What gives each bar its unique flavor and texture are the recipes—the established proportions and protocols that guarantee predictable results and uniformity, batch to batch. When you take a bite of an Oh Henry!, a Baby Ruth, or a Tigermelt, you know what to expect. That’s what makes you take your favorite candy bar off the rack at the supermarket checkout and put it on the belt with your grocery order week after week, even though you would never write it on your shopping list.

Your mouth and taste buds have their own kind of sense memory. You have a deep, semiconscious anticipation and desire based on experience for what’s going to hit your tongue and your teeth first, and then what happens after that, how it’s going to
blend when you bite down and start to chew and the flavor hits the roof of your mouth and then the back of your throat as you begin to swallow. If there is no consistency to the consistency, then there is nothing on which to build loyalty. And loyalty is a fundamental key to success in selling candy bars, along with creating in you, the consumer, certain deep feelings of desire, cravings that can be reinforced and triggered in calculated ways by branding and advertising.

Loyalty is the key. The successful candy bar is supported by a consumer belief that he or she is honoring family traditions, so that loyalty is all bound up with nostalgia for childhood experiences either actual or longed-for. Ideally, too, the consumer has a sense of entitlement to self-indulgence driven by an ambivalence toward guilty pleasure. I mention all these things because my knowledge and experience in the candy manufacturing business in general, and with Zip’s Candies in particular, should be above question, but they have been questioned, so it seems necessary for me to provide ample evidence that will establish my credibility in these matters.

To give one more example of my role in the business over the years, Sam told me many times that I was a smart cookie for advising him long ago that Zip’s could do better at Easter, a holiday with which I had personal experience. Consequently, Zip’s Candies ended up in more Easter promotions and in more Easter baskets. I loved being able to provide that valuable insight. I love the candy business.

S
O, THE MOMENT:
Frieda, who was kibitzing as usual, telling everyone to hurry up or be careful or slow down and then hurry up, the way she always did, suddenly went quiet, which was, for her, unusual. We finished the pours, without her customary
admonition about squeezing out the last caramel sludge from inside the nozzle so as not to be wasteful, and then I looked across at her in time to glimpse an expression of confusion sweep across her face, as if she didn’t quite know where she was, as she backed away from the batch table. She immediately bumped against a rolling rack that holds the wooden mogul trays for Mumbo Jumbos, but the rack, being empty, this not being a Mumbo Jumbo day, wasn’t chocked, so it rolled back, causing her to lose her balance a little. Then Frieda took another step back, and now she was at the edge of a worktable against the wall. All this happened in just an instant, a few seconds, and it was really nothing, but some tiny sense that there was something wrong kept me watching her. Sally Fernstein, one of the steadiest line workers at Zip’s, passed just then, pushing a stack of Tigermelt wrapper boxes on a dolly, and she eyed Frieda quizzically, also sensing something awry, then looked over at me with a raised eyebrow.

On the worktable behind Frieda was a coffee can (Maxwell House, I can see the blue can with that tilted cup in my mind’s eye even now) filled with small pliers and wrenches, greasy bolts and brads, pins and washers and screws, and stubs of little pencils, along with some pushpins and a couple of rolls of electrical tape and little springs and hinges and coils of wire and who knows what else. That can of essentials was part of our arsenal for keeping the ancient equipment chugging along for one more day (and of course it shouldn’t have been anywhere near an active production line, but hardly a day passes when something isn’t being tightened up or readjusted, if not flat-out jury-rigged, at some point in the shift).

Just as Petey Leventhal (who came to Zip’s in 1978, when Cadbury took over Peter Paul in Naugatuck) returned on cue, lugging the ten-gallon stainless-steel pail of hot fried peanuts
and calling out, “Hot soup! Hot soup!” over the factory din the way he always did to clear his path to the batch table from our medieval-looking peanut fryer (it’s a repurposed vat originally designed for use in a poultry processing plant, when freshly electrocuted chickens are dipped briefly into boiling water to loosen the feathers before being processed through the plucking machine), I saw Frieda pick up the coffee can and peer blankly at the contents.

As Petey poured the peanuts into the mixture and I began stirring with a big wooden mixing paddle that looks like a small rowboat oar, and then Petey set down the empty pail and picked up his paddle and began stirring even more vigorously, Frieda (who should have been dabbing at the mixture by now as well with the third paddle), as if mimicking his gesture of pouring out the peanuts a moment before, emptied the contents of the coffee can into the mix in one big sweeping motion. Out of this cornucopia of hardware remnants came a cascade of nuts and bolts and screws and springs and cogs, all instantly deployed in a perfect parabolic wave across the surface of the peanut-studded Tigermelt nougat and caramel mixture. The metal pieces sank down and were instantly and inextricably bound into the cooling sweet and chewy, salty (we salt the fried peanuts) and crunchy secret blend that gives Tigermelts their irresistibly delicious Tigermelt taste. Most people can taste this core of the bar and recognize the Tigermelt identity instantly, even before the two applications of enrobing milk chocolate and the final dark-chocolate signature tiger stripe have been applied.

Why on earth did I do that? Frieda murmured under her breath before walking away from the batch table, still holding the empty coffee can. Petey and I just stood there for a moment and watched the shrapnel glistening in the blend, stupefied. Both of us had kept stirring for one more moment, as if keeping
on with our routine could in some way override the reality of what had just happened. We had to shut down and throw away that entire batch, of course, and sterilize the batch table. When I told Howard what Frieda had done (he had been out on the Yale golf course with a grocery-chain buyer from New Jersey most of that afternoon), he laughed it off, and went around the rest of the day singing an adaptation of that pernicious and effective Peter Paul jingle, so his version was about how sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes a bolt. But we both knew it was a turning point, even if no one ever said another word about that incident.

A
ND TO FINISH
about that ambush of a Channel 8 evening news report on the Blessed Chocolate Virgin story two years ago, by the time the eleven o’clock report rolled around, they had expanded their coverage. Having broadcast teasers for the story in the little newsbreaks between commercials all during prime time, they led off with a breathless intro about a developing story uncovered by their team of investigative reporters. I kept expecting my phone to ring at any moment with a call from a friend, a family member, an employee, but either nobody had caught it or everyone had.

The piece began with the Zip’s Blessed Chocolate Virgin story recap, with a good exterior shot of Zip’s and a few words from the generally incoherent Diaz sisters, then there I was with the Tigermelt, followed by a nice little sidewalk interview with Jacob about the history of the family business, and then came some footage of the procession into the church, led by Father Asturias, with the Blessed Chocolate Virgin on a platter, held aloft by a throng of worshippers. This was followed by a dramatic candlelit glimpse of the Blessed Chocolate Virgin safely
ensconced in a place of honor inside Saint Thomas’s, on her own blue velvet altar. Then the story shifted back to 1975 and there were dramatic captions and dramatic scenes of the blazing Livingston house, ornamented by useless streams of water pouring from the firemen’s hoses into the smoke and flames.