Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (13 page)

SOUTHBOUND WITH THE HAMMERS DOWN

So I left Marty riding a high of borrowed optimism. Great things seemed possible. What I needed was a positive attitude, an appreciation of my own history, a sense of possibility. This lasted 23 minutes.

I was four hours early for my bus, so I wandered down Sixth Street, past the hospitals, toward the wide and muddy Missouri River. Sioux City reminded me of El Paso, weirdly, because of the various down-in-the-mouth Mexican restaurants, but also because of the low-slung dustiness of the place, the proximity of a strong-smelling industry (in El Paso it was lard), and the general sense of lassitude. It even looked like El Paso on a map: the convergence of three states around a river. North Sioux City was actually in South Dakota. South Sioux City was in Nebraska. Neither of these states, thankfully, had felt it necessary to post guards at their border. Last of all, there was the bus station itself, which I initially mistook for an abandoned dwelling. It was a fantastically grim little spot at the top of a ragged bluff, full of tired, yellow air.

I thought about the rental car I might have been driving, had I not lost my driver’s license, had I not hated myself quite so much, had I grown up in a different family, one with a finer appreciation for the simplicities of love. By now, just after four, I’d be on the outskirts of Kansas City already, checking into a hotel room, settling into a bath, with one of the
Rocky
pictures blaring on cable.

But I was, instead, in a gravel lot, shivering alongside a group of passengers with duffel bags and battered plastic sacks. If you ever want to know what America really looks like—and I direct this chiefly toward the residents of the coastal cities who tend to write about America most frequently—I would suggest you abandon the airports. The only people in airports are rich people. Take a bus from Sioux City to Kansas City, via Omaha and Maryville. Here is where America lives, more often than not overweight, beset by children, fast-food fed, television-dulled, strongly perfumed, running low on options and telling their stories to whomever will listen, hatching schemes, self-dramatizing, preaching doomed sermons, dreaming of being other people in other lives.

The woman next to me, thickly shadowed about the eyes, munching on a fried fish sandwich, told me she’d been in Sioux City for the weekend, up from Council Bluffs to visit her boyfriend, who hadn’t seemed to love her so well when they were living in the same town, had even mistreated her, but was now pledging undying love, had asked her to move in actually, and even proposed marriage, though without a ring.

“I’m waiting for the ring,” she said.

“That sounds like a good idea,” I said.

I thought about my own romantic history, such as it was. I’d been no better than this fellow in most cases—a little slicker, maybe, a little cagier. My last serious girlfriend had been the woman from Sioux City. She was the one who had turned me on to the Twin Bing, a few months before I politely bailed on her. Recently, she’d sent me an e-mail to let me know she was getting married, and this note, more than I liked to admit, had contributed to my blue mood. It occurred to me that I was envious of my neighbor. She was, at least, engaged in that most human of struggles, toward love, while I was playing it safe in solitude, keeping my hands busy, my heart on ice.

The bus hurtled on toward Omaha, where we took an hour break. The station there was bigger, full of ancient video games and vending machines, a bacterial snack bar, and crowded with people in an amped state of transit. The kids were running wild as a response to all the anxiety and their parents were overdoing the discipline—tears, recrimination, the whitehot building blocks of future arrests. On the grainy TV overhead, an anchorwoman was waxing eloquent about the next day’s elections. Her demeanor suggested the basic message:
Isn’t democracy neat?
Democracy is neat. The notion that the poor man’s vote counts as much as the rich, that the poor might band together in order to choose benevolent leaders; this is as neat as civilization gets. But you would have never known that the election had anything to do with the people gathered in that station.

Outside, in the cold clear night, an old man, drunk to the point of disorientation, kept trying to board the bus. When the driver approached him, he would back away, hands up, and mutter into his sleeve. There was a family of six, no dad in sight, who seemed to be moving their entire estate south, suitcase after battered suitcase, even the little ones with their load to bear, midwestern refugees.

The driver for the second leg of our trip was a jovial fellow who looked like Ichabod Crane and sounded like Louis Armstrong, a combination I found disorienting. “Howdy back there,” he growled into his intercom. “We’re headed southbound with the hammers down. So just re-lax and leave the driving to yours truly.”

All around us, darkness was coming to the plains. The children were settling down to sleep and a few adults were murmuring in their little cones of light. I tried for sleep, but the night had called my anxiety out of hiding. I could feel it rippling my stomach, whispering its ancient incantations.
You are unworthy of love. Candy will not save you
. We barreled south into Missouri and detoured at Maryville, through a freak hailstorm that clattered off the roof of the bus and frightened the children from their dreams.

9

THE CANDY BAR ON YOUR CHIN

At nine the next morning a white van emblazoned with the orange-and-brown Sifers Valomilk logo pulled up to my hotel. Russ Sifers hopped out. He was wearing a white sweatshirt, also decorated with the Valomilk logo, and matching brown corduroy pants. “This is what I wear to work every day,” he announced. “You look in my closet, it’s pretty boring. Five pairs of cords, five sweatshirts. I’m at a point in my life where I can be very laid-back. I’m not out to set the world on fire.”

This was not entirely true. Despite running what was, by any standard, a tiny operation, Russ Sifers had generated a massive amount of press, in part because he had a good story to tell and in part (as I would discover over the next few hours) because he so relished telling it.

Russ had the sort of face that makes for an excellent mall Santa, ruddy and full-cheeked. He even wore the requisite gold-rimmed spectacles. He moved deliberately and spoke in a Missouri twang so slow as to suggest a kind of theatrical folksiness. When he related a story, which was often, he acted out his own role in an exaggerated version of this sodbuster accent. “Got an e-mail this morning from a lady who can’t find Valomilks in Des Moines,” he told me, as we sped north toward his factory. “So I’m gonna have to check that out when I get home. No computers in the office, course. I tell folks we’re computer-free. No PDAs, no beepers, no cell phones, though we do have an electric typewriter with correction ribbon.”

Russ pulled up in front of a small building with a flagstone façade. It did not look like a factory. In fact, the building had housed a day-old bakery before Russ rented it out fifteen years ago. He checked the production schedule taped to the wall outside his office. It listed each day, followed by the word
cook
or a blank space. The inventory as of that day was one box. When Russ told people that Valomilks were made to order, he meant it.

His office had the feel of a museum. A copper kettle stood in one corner, along with antique bottles of vanilla, candy molds, yellowed ads, photos, mixing spoons, and punchboards. Sifers was one of the first candy companies to produce punchboards, and one of the last. Russ’s grandfather, Harry, had nearly gotten himself arrested for selling them, because they were considered gambling.

A framed photo above the kettle showed the company’s headquarters, circa World War II, a stately building rising from the heart of downtown Kansas City. When people asked Russ how long he’d been in the candy business, he always told the same story, how on Easter morning 1948, his mother brought him down to the factory. Russ was in a basket and his proud grandfather toted him around, boasting to all his employees, “This is the heir apparent to the company.” For a long time, Russ figured this was just his mom, telling a quaint little Moses-and-the-bulrushes-type story. Then, one day, he received a letter from a former employee. “Dear Russ,” it began, “I’ll never forget the day your grandfather brought you around the factory in that Easter basket.” To Russ, this story had acquired the semimystical power of a creation myth: he was born to make candy.

The Sifers family began producing confections in 1903 in Iola, Kansas, before moving the business north to Kansas City. Russ’s great-grandfather Samuel Mitchel Sifers was one of the most prolific figures of the candy bar boom, creator of such delicacies as the Old King Tut, Subway Sadie, Ozark Ridge, Rough Neck, Jersey Cow, Snow Cup, and the KC Bar.

The Valomilk didn’t come along until 1931. Like many of the most famous candy bars, it was the result of a snafu. Back in those days, vanilla had a high alcohol content and, as the legend goes, Sifers employed a candy maker named Tommy who’d been hitting the vanilla pretty hard. He was supposed to make a batch of marshmallow, but it came out all runny. Harry was always looking for new ideas for candy, so he put scoops of the runny marshmallow in milk chocolate cups. The Valomilk (the name is a rough amalgam of the ingredients) was an instant hit. Russ’s father later introduced a chocolate version, and a crunchy Valomilk, with toasted coconut, followed soon after. “My dad was liable to experiment,” Russ explained. “People write me sometimes and say, ‘Why don’t you make the Crunchy anymore?’ My dad loved coconut. He’s dead and gone. I hate coconut.”

I told him I understood
completely
.

Russ graduated from Kansas University with a degree in business administration and went on to get certified as a candy technologist. There was never much doubt as to whether he’d join the family business. When his father retired in 1974, he took over at the ripe old age of 26. During the fifties, Sifers had been one of the most prominent candy concerns in the Midwest. But by the time Russ came along, the business had been bought out by Hoffman, a Los Angeles–based company that produced a similar marshmallow cup called the Cup-O-Gold. They had grand plans, to consolidate and go national. In effect, though, Hoffman was an absentee owner. The arrangement “didn’t work worth a hoot,” Russ recalled. In ten years, the owners visited Kansas City a grand total of three times. In 1981, they opted to shut the Sifers factory down and the Valomilk disappeared from the candy landscape. Six years later, Russ decided to resurrect the company on his own, using equipment salvaged from the old plant.

Russ settled himself behind a vast mahogany desk. It, too, had been handed down from his grandfather. A Depressionera canvas banner hung on the wall behind him, advertising Valomilks at five cents a piece. Nearby was a map of the United States beset by colored push pins. These were intended to chart various aspects of Valomilk’s distribution, though the system had been somewhat compromised by Russ’s tendency to use dark blue pins, for instance, when he ran out of light blue ones.

Russ cocked his head. “You hear that?”

I didn’t hear anything, just the dull roar of traffic. Then it came to me—a faint syncopated rhythm: ba-
bum
-ba-
bum
.

Russ smiled. “There’s a real music to the line when it’s up and running. Let’s go see what they’re doing.”

Before we could do that, a young man in a blue uniform appeared and introduced himself as a fire inspector. “I was hoping to look around the premises.”

“Sure!” Russ said. “Of course! You ever seen a candy factory? You’ll love it.”

He led us down a short hallway, which was (like much of the available office wall space) decorated with press articles about Valomilk, then outside, and then back inside through a second door. The ba-
bum
noise was now louder and more distinct: a sharp hydraulic hiss followed by a metallic ping.

To call the operation a factory is technically correct, but somewhat overstates the scale of things. It looked more like an industrial kitchen. Russ gestured toward a squat cylindrical machine, the chocolate melter. A worker opened the spigot and filled a small pail with chocolate, which he set about vigorously stirring. He allowed the chocolate to cool a bit, checked the temperature with a thermometer (which I very much wanted to lick), and began stirring again. It took me a moment to realize that he was actually tempering the chocolate
by hand
. This is almost unthinkably impractical—the rough equivalent of GM casting their bolts by hand. But it was typical of Russ’s approach to candy making, which was attractively fanatical.

He was equally picky about ingredients, insisting on pure cane sugar, for instance, rather than beet sugar, and bourbon vanilla, which is grown exclusively on the island of Madagascar (formerly the Isle of Bourbon), the source of the world’s finest vanilla beans. The vanilla cost Russ $200 per gallon. Years ago, Russ told me, he used spray-dried egg whites for his marshmallow. Then he heard a rumor about a slightly higher-quality product, pan-dried egg whites, and knew, at once, he had to have them. He started making calls and eventually found a gentleman at the American Institute of Baking, who told him there was only one company in the country that made pan-dried egg whites. Russ was so thrilled when he finally tracked them down that he rushed home to tell his wife.
Guess what, honey?
he said.
I just increased the price of our egg whites by 53 percent!

We caught Roman, the head cook, in the midst of making a batch of marshmallow filling. On the table were six Tupperware bowls filled with pan-dried egg whites, which were being rehydrated—in distilled water, naturally. A large, gentle man with mournful eyes, Roman moved with superlative grace as he carried the egg whites across the room and poured them into a large mixer. In a matter of minutes, they were whipped into a snow-white meringue. Meanwhile, Roman prepared a concoction of corn syrup, sugar, salt, and vanilla, which he lugged over to a second mixer. The scent of bourbon vanilla suffused the room.

“This mixer is called a Hobart,” Russ said. “I was using one of these when we first started and it broke down. I called the manufacturer to see if I could get the part I needed and they said, ‘We haven’t made parts for that since the fifties. What are you doing with that thing?’ I said, ‘I’m using it to make candy.’ They couldn’t believe it.”

Roman turned the Hobart on and slowly eased the speed up. Then he went and got the egg whites and carefully folded them into the vanilla mixture. The result was a satiny white liquid that lipped over the edge of the bowl with every rotation of the blades but never quite spilled. The whole process looked deceptively simple. But that was how it often was with candy production. The perils were hidden. “You can’t expose the egg whites to too much heat or they’ll coagulate,” Russ explained. “The other thing you have to watch for, if you try to speed up that mixer too quick you wind up covered in marshmallow. We learned that one the hard way.”

Roman nodded. He returned to the table with the egg whites and bent down to record the details of the batch he’d just finished—not on a computer, but in a dog-eared business ledger.

I had never seen a cup candy being manufactured, though I had spent a good deal of time admiring the crinkled ridges of chocolate and thin walls and pondering how in the hell an automated machine could produce such an elegant shape. What happened was this: A depositor plinked liquid chocolate into each of the brown glassine cups. These cups then passed under a row of brass pipes, which let out a sharp burst of air, blowing the chocolate up and onto the sides of the paper cup. (It was the sound of this process that produced the distinctive hiss and ping I’d heard earlier.) The cups were blasted with cold air again, to solidify the chocolate. A foot later, the marshmallow syrup was deposited into the cups, coiling down snakelike and settling flat. Then, get this,
another
plink of chocolate was released onto the (now full) cup, producing a chocolate and marshmallow yin/yang design. I should mention that the young fire inspector was fascinated by this process. He spent a good two minutes watching the liquid chocolate rise up into the sides of the cup, a gorgeous sight to be sure, though probably not, in the grand scheme of things, a major fire risk.

But how, you might fairly ask, did this yin/yang design transform itself into a finished Valomilk? The answer was diabolically simple.

“We shake them,” Russ said.

He led me into the next room, where workers were removing each rack of molds and shaking them in a distinct circular motion, so that the top layer of chocolate oozed down and around and connected to the rest of the cup. It was a process that didn’t look that hard—imagine hula-hooping with a metal rack in your hands—until you considered that the chocolate only stayed liquid for a minute or so and that you had to worry about 30 different cups and make sure that all of them, no matter where they were positioned on the rack, got full chocolate coverage. If you allowed the chocolate to seep too far in any one direction, you were screwed. I stood and watched one woman tip the rack first one way, then the other, applying a gentle shake at fixed intervals, so as to coax the chocolate into place. The image called to mind the waning of 30 tiny, gibbous moons.

“When we first started doing this, it was a real mess,” Russ said. “We had a ton of leakers. Of the three batches we tried, only one of them came out right.”

There was no room for a cooling tunnel in the factory, so Russ had been forced to improvise, using a large, standing fan to blow cool air through the racks.

That was the whole process. The cups, once cooled, were set on a tiny conveyor belt and shuttled, two at a time, onto a strip of cardboard, which was then heat-sealed in an elegant plastic wrapper, a method of wrapping that went out of vogue more than three decades ago. “What I’ve done, basically, is taken our technology backwards. Most of this stuff is somewhere between forties and fifties technology. I spent weeks trying to imagine how to set up the factory. And when I got stuck, I asked myself: ‘Now, how would my grandfather have done this?’ ”

Russ then asked me the question I was afraid he was going to ask me: Had I ever actually eaten a Valomilk?

I shook my head.

He squinted in distress, grabbed a freshly wrapped pack, and pressed it into my hands.

THE MARSHMALLOW PARALLAX

The truth is I’m not a huge fan of marshmallow. In fact, I sort of hate marshmallow. What I was hoping would happen is that I’d be able to slip the candy bar into my pocket and eat it later. But Russ led me back to his office and sat down and folded his arms across his chest. His expression was unmistakably smug. He looked like a major cocaine lord waiting for a new buyer to sample his goods. (Not that I am intimately familiar with the facial expressions of major cocaine lords.)

As I bit down into my first cup, I immediately understood why: the interplay of the chocolate and the vanilla syrup was astonishing. Until that moment, I had never understood the synergy between these two flavors. The pairing had just been a trope, to my mind, a cliché. But here, inside my mouth, it was finally dawning on me: the way in which the airy tones of vanilla infused the chocolate and lent the heavy tang of cocoa a sense of buoyancy. What I realized in that moment was this: it wasn’t the
flavor
of marshmallow that bothered me so much as the texture, that fluffy, half-empty springiness. But the Valomilk filling was really more like the gooey center of a toasted marshmallow, though that’s not quite right either, because the vanilla in a Valomilk is far more pungent than any mainstream marshmallow.