True Confections (29 page)

Abba-Zaba shares more than vintage with Little Sammies. It also had a problematic icon. The original wrapper featured a savage-looking, almost simian jungle baby with a bone through the topknot in his hair, in silhouette, hanging from a vine. The Abba-Zaba jungle baby has vanished from the official story. According to Julie, who looked into this for me, a couple of candy blogs mention this and report that the company will only say that the design of their Abba-Zaba wrapper hasn’t changed since they started making Abba-Zabas. Which is perfectly true.

I like the spirit of the Annabelle Candy Company, which was founded by Sam Altshuler, who came to America in 1917 from Russia, and was next headed for years by his daughter, the eponymous Annabelle. It is now run by his granddaughter Susan Karl, an energetic former prosecutor who took over running the business from her brother a few years ago (she’s something of a role model for me). I have wanted to raise the delicate subject of the original Abba-Zaba wrapper when we meet at conventions, but I haven’t yet found the right moment.

It seems likely to me that the name of the candy itself, when Cardinet started selling it, was probably somebody’s idea of made-up African lingo. Possibly it was the Abba-Zaba baby’s own utterance in the early brand concept. But that’s just a guess. Perhaps the creator of this image was influenced by Kipling’s
Jungle Book
, or by the popularity of Josephine Baker’s Cuban-and African-inflected repertoire of jungle songs and dances, some of which were rendered with scat syllables.

Which is not to say that America invented this particular sort of casual racism. The French embraced Josephine Baker, and they still exhibit an unabashed nostalgia for their colonialist
relationship to Africa. Jean de Brunhoff’s
The Travels of Babar
, published in 1932, featured some wild cannibals dwelling on a remote island who resemble the Abba-Zaba creature. On French supermarket shelves today, there are all sorts of food labels featuring black Africans, including the Y’a Bon Banania man, a grinning Senegalese soldier who has been featured on the label of the Banania chocolate and banana breakfast drink in various versions since 1915.
(“Y’a bon”
is meant to represent his pidgin French for “It’s good.”)

From Rastus on the Cream of Wheat label to Uncle Ben (Uncle Ben’s rice is owned by Masterfood, which is to say, Mars) to Aunt Jemima (who has been around since 1890, and who bears an uncanny resemblance to Helen Bannerman’s 1899 illustration of Little Black Sambo’s mother, Black Mumbo), there is something in our white American culture that has long made us want to associate plain, comforting foods with the suggestion that they are being provided to us by jovial black people. Let’s not forget the Oompa-Loompas, who love their work so much. (Question: Why weren’t there any dark-skinned winners of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets?) Privileged Caucasians seem to have an abiding fantasy that the dark-skinned people who prepare and serve our food to us are actually quite fond of us and love feeding us.

I can offer no excuses for our own Little Sammies, which had been in production at Zip’s Candies for more than fifty years before I arrived. It is beyond question that by the mid-1960s, if Little Sammies hadn’t already been established as a successful brand, there is no chance they could have possibly seemed like a good idea to anyone.

Is
Little Black Sambo
truly racist? I could argue for its being naive rather than truly racist. Sambo is an adventurous child who survives his encounter with the vain and rapacious tigers who
compete with one another for grandeur in their bits of clothing stolen from Little Black Sambo. His doting parents, who have provided him with his colorful outfit (the entire family dresses in a stereotypically riotous mix of colors and patterns), also feed him lovingly, while taking smaller helpings for themselves. Black Jumbo brings home the pot of melted butter made from those whirling tigers, which is poured over the “huge big plate of most lovely pancakes” Black Mumbo prepares for the family. So they are industrious, and are certainly not clichéd lazy Negroes. The story, which has the timelessness and simplicity of a fable from start to finish, concludes with the three of them sitting down to supper. “And Black Mumbo ate Twenty-seven pancakes, and Black Jumbo ate Fifty-five but Little Black Sambo ate a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry.”

Helen Bannerman, a devout member of the Free Church of Scotland who lived most of her life in India and believed that blacks and whites would meet in heaven, probably didn’t think that people with black skin were intrinsically inferior to people with white skin so much as she held them in her imperial British gaze as less fortunate Others. Eli the immigrant (whom she also presumably would have regarded as an exotic, less fortunate Other), eager to get ahead in his new American life, read her little book over and over as the train carried him from New York City to New Haven, finding in those pages his inspiration to make sugary treats based on what he thought was a simple American folktale. He didn’t understand what he was looking at any more than Helen Bannerman did with her white dissecting gaze that sliced and fixed the specimens under that confident and superior microscope. Yet each of them in their misguided way made something beloved and enduring.

B
EFORE
I
GO
into detail about what happened with Little Susies, let me explain a few more things about brand extensions. One of the brand extension areas that has been quite successful for a lot of established lines is a white-chocolate version, from White Chocolate Kit Kats and White Chocolate Twix bars to Reese’s White Chocolate peanut butter cups. I have always been ambivalent about white chocolate. It is so often really terrible and cheap, very sugary and often gritty or chalky, with a predominant lingering flat note, that harsh telltale artificial metallic vanillin aftertaste. It isn’t “real” chocolate. That’s what so many people say, which is correct, though in true white chocolate there is substantial cocoa butter, and it is the cocoa liquor (this is the paradoxical term for the crushed and ground chocolate mass) that is missing. Unless it has been adulterated with vegetable fat swapped for the cocoa butter (which is actually a common practice, and makes for what is technically candy, not chocolate), true chocolate has a melt temperature that is almost the same as our body temperature. This, I believe, is one of the reasons we love chocolate so much—it loves us back. It melts from the heat of our tongue. Of course it’s sexy.

I have tasted my share of white chocolate over the years, but since I have mostly been unimpressed or disappointed, in recent times I have chosen to avoid it. As I have gotten older, I have learned from experience and I have a greater willingness to offend rather than suffer. Like dubious hollandaise sauce that’s been sitting for hours on a brunch buffet, or any item on any menu that begins with the three words
twin baked stuffed
, white chocolate is usually just something you’re probably better off not putting in your mouth.

But then at last year’s All Candy Expo in Chicago, I had an epiphany. I was taking a break from our booth, wandering the aisles, sampling a little more than I had intended to (it’s pretty
hard to resist nibbling, even for those of us who work in candy factories; you become immune to your own lines, but that doesn’t mean you don’t succumb to all kinds of candy outside your own product range).

My weakness is always the gummy aisle, and I would do well to avoid it altogether at trade shows. It’s true that Mumbo Jumbos are technically gummy, but I hardly ever eat them, and I have to admit that for years I have preferred the aroma that comes off the mixtures as they are being molded to the experience of putting a Mumbo Jumbo in my mouth. The vast Haribo space was especially alluring, and I lingered there awhile, admiring the jewel-like mounds of Gummi everything; I admit to an intense relationship with their red and black nonpareil raspberries.

I spent some quality time at the Goelitz candy corn display. Fresh candy corn is such a different experience from stale candy corn. While I wasn’t tempted by Farley’s & Sathers’s Jujyfruits, Now And Laters, or Jolly Ranchers, I did have a few Lemon-heads at the Ferrara Pan space before going for a visit with my good friends at Just Born, who make Mike and Ike and Teenee Beanees as well as Peeps.

I had worked my way through a lot more sugary sampling than is a good idea, and I suddenly realized I was feeling lightheaded and jittery. I suppose I should have been carrying an Index bar, but since our contract work is confidential, I wouldn’t ever want to be seen in public with an Index bar or a Detox bar in my hand. It would be too risky, especially at a candy show, where people could put two and two together. I suppose it is widely known in candy circles who makes what for whom, but that is still a confidential agreement, and I am an honorable person who means to respect not only the letter of the law, but also the spirit of the law.

I knew my sugar rush would be followed by a crash, and I was feeling worse by the minute, so I headed to the meat snack area, where I usually never bother to set foot throughout the three days of All Candy. I helped myself to some venison jerky, which saved me. When a candy show includes other snacks (like nuts, chips, dried fruit, cookies, and meat snacks), the meat snack and chip areas are always a strange departure from the festive, carnival aesthetic of the rest of the show. In meat snacks, most of the vendors are men. And a lot of them are burly lumberjack types dressed like Paul Bunyan, which makes sense, since a candy and snack show is our one point of intersection, and the rest of their trade-show calendar consists of gun shows, boat shows, and camping and hunting shows.

Having reached the end of the fortuitous meat snack aisle, I cut across the chips and nuts area and was on my way back toward the Zip’s Candies booth when I stopped at the Green & Black’s booth to see what they had going on. There I talked with the guy who designs their bars, whose cards say “Head of Taste,” which is a cute term for product development manager. I admire the way Cadbury has strategized this brand since they bought it in 2005, letting it be independent and focused on quality, in much the same way Hershey’s has managed Scharffen Berger and Dagoba since it made those acquisitions in 2004 and 2006. (Most casual consumers have no idea that these three companies are no longer the artisanal start-ups they once were, which is no accident.)

The Green & Black’s guy was passionate and persuasive about his products. He had samples attractively laid out, and he was cutting up bars as he talked to a couple of buyers and a journalist about how the company sources the entirely organic ingredients and how they balance the cocoa mass and the cocoa butter for best mouthfeel. Since I was standing there with them, it
would have been rude for me to refuse the proffered samples, so I nibbled on each as we discussed their lines, planning a return to meat snacks for some teriyaki turkey jerky I had espied, to balance this latest sugar infusion.

Then we got to their white chocolate. He spoke of the clean and fragrant taste of the Madagascar vanilla they use exclusively. I said, No thanks, I don’t like white chocolate, and he laughed at me, holding out a small square on the tip of his knife, which I took. I put it in my mouth. Ecstasy! Revelation! Incredible mouthfeel! Creamy vanilla pleasure flooded through me. The intense chocolateness of this ambrosial substance was hidden in plain sight. He laughed at me again, holding out another square on the tip of his knife.

E
VEN THOUGH
Z
IP’S
Candies takes one of the smallest possible spaces at the expo, the expenses for us to show our three little candy lines at this annual event are horrendous, more than twenty thousand dollars, and so we usually bring along only a couple of employees, and we like to have a strong family presence in the booth. I notice that other family-owned candy companies do too, and sometimes you talk to a third-or fourth-generation family member who is attending law school or who lives across the country from the family business and isn’t involved in the day-to-day operations at all but who shows up at times like this. It’s good for the company image.

I had never done Chicago without Howard before, and even though I was of course very angry that he had left me and gone to Madagascar to live his authentic life, I missed him incessantly for those three days of the show. It was so different, being there without him. I had a hard time smiling and giving vague answers when people asked for him. Everyone expected to see
that nice guy Howdy Ziplinsky at the Zip’s Candies booth the way they always had. Howard loved this show. It’s a schmooze-fest, and that’s the part of the business at which he excelled. I had never appreciated how good for business it probably was that Howard had an uncanny ability to remember every name and every face (a skill he honed at Yale fulfilling his pledge requirements at DKE, when he memorized the names of every frat brother).

It was even harder to carry on imperviously when people we’ve known for years at these shows—lots of buyers, but also some of the perennials from our tribe, the other small, family-owned candy companies (like the Sifers family, who make those quirky Valomilks in Kansas; or the Sioux City–based Palmers, who make Twin Bings (and even
they
have ventured into an extension with King Bings), or the Wagers, who make the Idaho Spud Bar, the Old Faithful Bar, and the Cherry Cocktail Bar)—didn’t ask for Howard, because they had heard through the grapevine that he had left me. I am sure there was a buzz of speculation about the future of Zip’s Candies as well. But isn’t this always the question for every small family-owned candy business in its third or fourth generation, how long they will hold out before selling?