I know that many of you have heard a great deal about the lead content of certain Mexican candy products, and how "dangerous" and so on it is. Well, all I have to say is, if lead is so dangerous, why does the doctor make you wear a lead apron when you get an X-ray? And if you think about it, having a lot of lead in our blood may be the only thing that prevents a lucky few people from being killed by the inevitable nuclear holocaust. Clearly, lead is a life-saver, not a life-taker--well, except for the odd lead bullet. But I don't think bullets are made of lead anymore, they're made of steel. And no one ever argues that steel is dangerous. I mean, restaurants are required to have stainless steel kitchens, for crying out loud! Restaurants that make food for kids! Like the American Girl Restaurant in New York! Which is a real place! If America's most pampered, overprivileged children are allowed to be fed overpriced chicken fingers named after "Cassie, Girl of the Yukon," or whatever, made in steel-covered kitchens, clearly a little lead can't hurt.
The connection should be obvious to even the meanest understanding. No, lead doesn't cause erratic and incoherent thought processes, Mr. Smarty-Science-Pants! And so, without any further wringing of hands over the addition of valuable heavy metals to our foodstuffs--at no additional charge to you, the consumer--let us plumb the depths of El Mundo Del Dulces. Which I just made up.
Well,
I thought for my first venture into the world of Hispanic candy, I would try
to go cheap and get a variety-pack of some sort…y’know, some
weird chocolates, maybe some of the milk candy that Ursula Buendia makes
in 100 Years of Solitude that gives everyone amnesia (Come to think
of it, maybe I did do that), some fruity crap, some gum, whatever.
So my first stop
was where my first stop for candy always is—Smart and Final. For those
of you who don’t know it, S&F is sort of a Costco with training
wheels…In other words, it’s got all the kegs of ketchup and pallets
of beer, and so on, but it’s only the size of a regular grocery store,
and it only has groceries and restaurant supply stuff. And
candy, of course. Which I would argue is a grocery. A "groce?"
But after looking up and down the candy aisle, on both the Anglo and Hispanic
sides (yeah, it’s like that), I could only find retail-ready bulk "paks"
of single products.
So I opted to try to find one item that had as many of the non-Anglo characteristics
of Mexican candy as possible. And so my eye lit on the Pulparindo 20-for-$2
pak. Why? Because it’s made of tamarind pulp, which you will never find
in any North American candy product under any condition; because tamarind pulp
is sour and gummy and has little seeds in it. And because it’s salted,
and because it has hot chile powder on it. And because the face of Pulparindo,
a smiley, but gooey, anthropomorphized bar of same, looks a lot like Mr.
Hankey, the Xmas Poo from South Park. Thus, my strangeness threshold
was crossed.
Of
course, I opened up the box, and set it up on my desk with the little fold-up
display, just
like my own l'il bodega. The brown rectangle within
had a powdery coating, which served both as a seasoning
(it’s
the salt and maybe some of the spice as well) and as a separator of the sticky
tamarind from anything it might want to stick to. The first impression was
sour, or "tangy" if you prefer, followed by the sweet stickiness,
with the chile zing only setting in after I had consumed the entire thing.
The texture?
Like the center of a Fig Newton, sans Newton, I guess. But
definitely under
my raisin-like food threshold,which is good, because as we all know, raisins
are the Devil's spoor. All in all, pretty good!
And let me tell you,
you take a couple of these in your pocket and they serve as a fascinating conversation
piece. I offered ol' Rindo to many of my friends, and received a range of responses
from outright refusal to a guarded admission of enjoyment. I think a lot of
people have issues with the whole crossed-circuit aspect of sweet with spicy
and sour and salty. For many people (I won’t say ‘most,’ because
I don’t know most people), candy is sweet and that’s all there
is to it. And it’s not like I’m sitting around eating pickles covered
in chocolate, so don’t go mailing me any medals for culinary bravery.
After all, when I was a kid, I ate nothing, and I mean NOTHING, but chicken
noodle soup for about three years.
But I digress…Anyway, my only complaint, and it's pretty niggling, about
the Pulparindo is
that the spicy comes across as more of an afterthought. You kind of get the
tongue-burn
after the fact…as in “Oh, yeah, these are supposed to be spicy!” However,
a rapid perusal of the Internet shows me that there are Pulparindo versions
with “MAS CHILE!” so clearly De La Rosa, the makers of this fine
product, are much more responsive to their cutomers than, say, the moribund Annabelle's folks.
OK, maybe these are the hardcore Mexican candies. Maybe the Pulparindo is the equivalent of the California roll—the “starter Mexican candy” for the gringo, the gwailo, the gaijin; whatever the word your culture reserves for clueless white guys. Fine.
But here’s what makes the Pulparindo so great: It’s an integrated flavor experience. From start to finish, your taste buds are being wooed, or assaulted, by a gamut of sensations. These watermelon pops, though, are more bipolar in their appeal (?). Essentially, it’s a watermelon Jolly Rancher on a stick, which someone has maybe licked and then kindly rolled in salt and chile for you. So, rather than having the nice balanced effect of sweet and hot and salty, the chile and salt coating (and there’s quite a lot of it; I mean, it looks like a red-hot charcoal briquet on a stick) serves as sort of perimeter defense around the watermelon pop. It's more of an effort than I was willing to make twice, I must confess.
But I must play devil’s advocate, I suppose, and posit the notion that whoever invented this wanted you to have the dinner part and then the dessert part, which was thoughtful, but suggests the go-go-go mentality of North Americans, who are somehow willing to accept “Soup in your hand!” as a great idea, rather than the languid and indulgent feelings we should conjure up by eating candy from south of the border.
So, in short, Los WCP's are more of a candy you’d eat on a dare than for pleasure. I suppose they might be more palatable if you bash the lollipop into pieces and then eat those, so as to mix the flavor. But that kind of ham-fisted, violent Anglo-fication of anything, even candy, is a little too culturally imperialistic for this particular fuzzy-wuzzy bleeding-heart candy consumer.
Is it better to live in a civilization on the ascendant or the decline? How can you tell? I don’t know. I just know that I like candy. I am a grown man with a perverse attachment to the ever-changing offerings of the worldwide candy industry. It’s not the sweet tooth, it’s not the nostalgia for childhood pleasures—no, it’s the entire candy experience, from finding some oddball item at a gas station in the middle of the desert to strapping on an aqualung and venturing into the shark-infested abyss with the underpaid, ill-used, salt-water-taffy divers.
Having recently moved to a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic city on the west coast,
I realized that it was my civic duty to be a bold culinary cosmonaut and explore
the diverse offerings available to me. In the future, I will be making my opinions
known to you via the medium of the World Wide Web, that well-known fount of
useful and accurate information. So without further setup, flourishes, etc.,
I will dive right in, beginning with what I am told are regional classics of
Southern California, the Annabelle’s Candy line.
My introduction to these supposed classics began at the Farmer’s Market
in LA, where there is a shop that claims to specialize in “classic”
or “old-school” candies, and the Annabelle products are given pride
of place, particularly the Abba-Zaba, which immediately caught
my eye with its yellow and black checked wrapper and “zany” font
treatment…deliberately “ retro” or the sweet equivalent of
a coelacanth, dredged up by my whimsical candy fetish?
Once I spotted the Abba-Zaba, the other Annabelle items made
themselves known to me, their similarly dated packaging creating the necessary
mental links that would implant them in my subconscious. But for weeks or months
I did nothing. Finally, in a spontaneous fit of curiosity I asked a co-worker
to retrieve the entire Annabelle line for me at Rite Aid. His disbelief was
echoed, he claims, by the clerk at Rite Aid, who said “no one ever buys
that stuff.” He was only able to retrieve the Abba-Zaba,
the BIG HUNK, the LOOK! Bar, and the U-NO,
so for today’s entry, I’ll confine myself to reviewing just those.
Abba-Zaba—the packaging, as noted, is redolent of paste-up
and ruby-lith, the design tools of yore…the yellow is that mustardy gold
that may have once excited the eye of youngsters, but to the children of today,
whose eyes are saturated with a surfeit of neons and fluorescents, it can only
have vaguely medicinal overtones. There’s something so Soviet or Warsaw
Pactesque about the packaging of these products…the message seems to be
“Well, I GUESS we have to dress it up a little, as a sop to the increasingly
Westernized and spoiled eyes of our jaded youngsters.” One gets the feeling
that Annabelle would be perfectly happy to market these candies in brown kraft
paper or maybe leftover Christmas wrap. On the other hand, maybe they think
their design is a classic. And the name--What, was "Goo 'N' Spew"
already taken?
Anyway, I open the wrapper and what’s inside is a smooth, almost oily
white rectangle of taffy, concealing a granular core of what the candy folks
like to claim is peanut butter. Taffy and peanut butter?? Whose idea was this?
A unique blend of the chewy and the very chewy? Where is the crunch, or the
cream to offer some relief to the palate in the midst of all this chewing? Nowhere,
that’s where. C., a native-born Angeleno, tells me that the preferred
method of dealing with the Abba-Zaba when she was a kid was
to suck out or otherwise remove the peanut butter and leave the taffy core to
dupe unsuspecting scavengers. Although, for reasons that will become clear later,
I have serious doubts about the adaptive powers of the Annabelle folk, it may
be that since the initial launch of the Zaba they have rendered the taffy increasingly
tasteless in the knowledge that it has become merely a husk for the peanut butter
prize. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se, it just offers
nothing except a sweetness only slightly greater than paraffin and an aerobic
workout for your jaw. The strenuous, potentially dentally damaging mouth-wrestling
thrill of a Bit-O-Honey, Sugar Daddy, or Mary
Jane is only faintly echoed. Unfortunately, the same can be said for
the peanut butter. It has neither the overpowering sweetness of the stuff found
in Reese’s products nor the salty-sweetness of jar brands; it’s
more like a peanut “crème” or “whip”—it
reminds you of peanut butter, in the same way that burnt breadcrumbs were supposed
to remind British sailors of coffee, back in the 1800’s. I managed to
finish the entire thing, but it will be a while before I am duped again into
investing so much masticating effort for so little return.
On to the BIG HUNK…The blocky white letters on the black wrapper are doubtlessly meant to suggest the sheer brute force of goodness and size contained within, but all they do for me is reinforce the sense that the marketing folk at Annabelle Candy Co., Inc. are utterly comatose. And the nod toward diet trends is merely pathetic--LOW FAT? C'mon, Annabelle's, the Atkinsites will tell you that fat is the new healthy. Get with it! A reasonably sharp sixth-grader, one who merely placed, not even medaled, in the science fair could whip up a better design with press-type and a magic marker. And what’s inside is even worse. Now, in all fairness, it may be that the candy shelf at the Rite-Aid in Long Beach doesn’t get a high volume of traffic. This particular BIG HUNK may have been there since the Carter administration. Which could perhaps be an excuse for the dried-out, yet strangely resistant consistency of the rectangle of white nougat inside. But it doesn’t excuse the awful taste. I can best describe it as "freeze-dried wedding cake," with an almost institutional sweetness that is devoid of complexity or interest. It really does taste like the Annabelle people just slathered cheap frosting on some leftover drywall from an Oompa-Loompa slum on the wrong side of the Wonkaville tracks. This bar is quite frankly an abomination, and should be shunned at all costs. If you need sweets, you're better off drinking the goop out of a Stretch Armstrong doll.
The LOOK! Bar goes a short way toward redeeming the Annabelle
line, although not enough to justify the peremptory command of the name LOOK!—unless
it’s meant to say “LOOK! Not everything we make
is terrible!” And you can't argue with the bold "CHEWY GOOD!"
Yes, Mr. Incredible Hulk, Mr. Frankenstein, sirs, chewy is good. Needless
to say, it’s composed of nougat—because nougat is involved in nearly
all of the Annabelle offerings- wrapped in oh-so-continental dark chocolate.
I honestly can’t determine if there is any difference in the nougat in
the BIG HUNK and the nougat in the LOOK!,
but the cumulative effect of the dark chocolate and the nougat is much more
gratifying than the wretched “oh, well” you feel when entangled
in a BIG HUNK. If you are familiar with the Charleston
Chew, you can consider yourself on nodding terms with the LOOK!,
which like the aforementioned Chew, can be frozen for an even
more intriguing and strenuous taste experience.With the dark chocolate and the
freezing, it's like a trip to Europe---in the luggage compartment.
The last Annabelle item I’ll survey this time is the U-NO
Bar, which is perhaps short for “U-NO THIS SUX, Y DID U BY IT?”
I guess the nearest decent candy bar it can be compared to is a 3 Musketeers,
except that the three swashbuckling fellows this “treat” recalls
are not good old Porthos, Aramis, and Athos, but Stale, Gritty, and Tasteless.
The heralded addition of ground almonds seems like some sort of whitewash on
a horrible industrial accident—I mean, did the Annabelle people think
they’d get one up on the Musketeers by
adding “mystery grit?” Not exactly a gambit worthy of Cardinal Richelieu
or Lady DeWinter.
I notice that on the lavishly designed Annabelle
Candy, Inc. website, there is a small announcement that the mint-flavored
U-NO bars have been discontinued…I guess those EPA folks do some
good after all.
There are many products that in spite of their utter inability or unwillingness to adapt to market changes and modern times, people still cleave to, defend and champion—products like Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, Moon-Pies, etc. You like them because they represent old-time values, unpretentiousness, nostalgia, whatever. You defend their fogeyish aspects, make excuses for their idiosyncrasies, look the other way when they grope their nurses or pee on the floor, and go out of your way to blow the dust off the bottom shelf of the candy aisle to get them.
But then there are products like Annabelle’s candy that should have gone the way of the Chevy Vega, Red Dye #2, or George Bush the 1st. There is an underlying stinginess and failure to maintain quality both in the concept and execution of these bars that makes them unredeemable. The waxy chocolate, the flavorless nougat, and so on, could only stir up feelings of nostalgia in those who had undergone the deprivations of WW2 food rationing, Soviet communal farming, or China’s Great Leap Forward. There’s a taste of grim consolation in the Annabelle’s line, a belt-tightening around your taste buds—you almost expect some grey-suited government spokesman to announce that all of the good chocolate is going to the Front, and we must all do our parts by gnawing on this Victory Nougat or that Freedom Chocolate. Of course, given the Orwellian direction the country’s heading in, it may be that the Annabellians are more forward-looking than I gave them credit for--they may be the perfect candy-maker for "Gen LX"-the generation of lowered expectations.
Next Time-Mexican Candy, Unleaded and Otherwise.