Nazi Chocolate Plot

Much as I have moved on from all things chocolate since the publication of my last novel True Confections two years ago, today's news reveals a story I would surely have included in my novel about chocolate, racism, and the Third Reich's Madagascar Plan for the Jews of Europe.  Wire stories report:

London, July 18 (ANI): Secret wartime papers exchanged between MI5 officials have revealed that the Nazis' plans to conquer Britain included a deadly assault on Sir Winston Churchill with exploding chocolate. Adolf Hitler's bomb-makers coated explosive devices with a thin layer of rich dark chocolate and then packaged it in expensive-looking black and gold paper.

The Germans planned to use secret agents working in Britain to discreetly place the bars of chocolate - branded as Peter's Chocolate - among other luxury items taken on trays into the dining room used by the War Cabinet during the Second World War. The lethal slabs of confection were packed with enough explosives to kill anyone within several metres.

But Hitler's plot was foiled by British spies who discovered that they were being made and tipped off one of MI5's most senior intelligence chiefs, Lord Victor Rothschild. Lord Rothschild, a scientist in peace time as well as a key member of the Rothschild banking family, immediately typed a letter to a talented illustrator seconded to his unit asking him to draw poster-size images of the chocolate to warn the public to be on the look-out for the bars. His letter to the artist, Laurence Fish, is dated May 4, 1943 and was written from his secret bunker in Parliament Street, central London.

The letter, marked 'Secret', reads "Dear Fish, I wonder if you could do a drawing for me of an explosive slab of chocolate...We have received information that the enemy are using pound slabs of chocolate which are made of steel with a very thin covering of real chocolate," the Daily Mail quoted the letter as reading. "Inside there is high explosive and some form of delay mechanism... When you break off a piece of chocolate at one end in the normal way, instead of it falling away, a piece of canvas is revealed stuck into the middle of the piece which has been broken off and a ticking into the middle of the remainder of the slab. When the piece of chocolate is pulled sharply, the canvas is also pulled and this initiates the mechanism. I enclose a very poor sketch done by somebody who has seen one of these. It is wrapped in the usual sort of black paper with gold lettering, the variety being PETERS. Would it be possible for you to do a drawing of this, one possibly with the paper half taken off revealing one end and another with the piece broken off showing the canvas. The text should indicate that this piece together with the attached canvas is pulled out sharply and that after a delay of seven seconds the bomb goes off."

The letter was found by Fish's wife, journalist Jean Bray, as she sorted through his possessions following the artist's death, aged 89, in 2009.  Incredible!  Not only would Alice Ziplinsky have had a lot to say about this, but I would dearly love to have been able to weave it into the Ziplinsky family history and the story of Zip's Candies.  This is exactly the sort of headsmacking item that compelled me to name this blog Staircase Writing.

The Perils of Vanity

One of the charmingly weird pieces of information that has come out about the arrest of fugitive gangster Whitey Bulger (see previous post) is that his girlfriend, Catherine Greig, was obsessed with her appearance and liked to have her teeth cleaned professionally once a month. This helped identify her, which led to their arrests last week. It's a telling character trait, which is why in True Confections, Alice Ziplinsky likes to impress her hygienists by secretly alternating between two practices so each will admire her impeccable oral hygiene. One wonders about the connection between Greig's oral fastidiousness and the intriguing description on the Tulsa, Oklahoma "Wanted" posters for Whitey (one of many murders for which he is a suspect was a hit in Oklahoma), which describe Whitey Bulger having "extremely bad breath."

Kids and Grownups Love It So!

At the spectacularly fun candy convention in Chicago in May, one of the most useful nuggets of information I acquired was the correct pronunciation of the name of the gigantic maker of all things gummy, or rather, gummi -- Haribo.

It's a name that has made me nervous for years. Harribou? Hairy bow? Harry boo? The nice Haribo lady presiding over the serpentine counter of glistening gummi goodness that is the Haribo space every year at the convention taught me the way to pronounce it, chanting their enduring slogan: "Kids and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo!"[harry-bow] This is a translation from the original German slogan, "Haribo macht kinder froh / und Erwachsene ebenso." A mouthful of gummi candy would make it easier to speak German, I think.


In True Confections, Zip's Candies has a red and black licorice line called Mumbo Jumbos, named for Little Black Sambo's parents. These are a pair of red and black licorice discs about the dimensions of a backgammmon piece. I await the call for product licensing for this among several of my more reasonable fictional candy lines. But of course, not all gummi lovers would accept Mumbo Jumbos or the nonfictional Red Vines and Twizzlers as gummi, per se. I regret that I didn't have Alice ponder the distinctions, the equatorial line dividing the gummi hemisphere and the licorice hemisphere.

I am not an indiscriminate gummi lover by any means. But I have a thing for those peculiar, nonpareil-ish raspberries. And after much scientific testing, I can say definitively that the dark ones do taste different from the red ones. I think. Not really sure. More testing is required.

The Most Boring Game in the Universe!

Ever wonder why the game of CANDY LAND was SO b-o-r-i-n-g? A certain Eleanor Abbott, herself afflicted with polio, dreamed up the game in 1946 as an entertainment for children on polio wards. Introduced in 1949 at the price of one dollar, CANDY LAND was advertised as fulfilling "the sweet tooth yearning of the younger set without the tummy ache aftereffects."

Since the game requires no skill or strategy whatsoever, and originally had no personalities either (they came in later editions), only those rather creepy board landmarks, anyone with even minimal consciousness can play it, even someone immobilized in an iron lung. The good or bad luck of the draw of the cards is really all there is, which is why this "sweet little game for sweet little follks" takes forever. As you may recall, some of those cards cause major setbacks, and when you get stuck while turn after turn passes, the boringness of this game reaches a level that makes you yearn for the hullabaloo and drama of drying paint.

I hated CANDY LAND as a child, and I wish I had included some sort of CANDY LAND trauma for Alice in her grim Tatnall childhood. It would have suited that aspect of True Confections. But unlike Hasbro and all their casual Queen Frostine mutations, I won't be making changes in future editions.

(This post was inspired by the ever-wonderful http://candyprofessor.com/ )

Daylight Savings, Halloween, and the Candy Industry

During the Q & A at an event for True Confections yesterday afternoon, I was asked if I had a comment about the candy industry's efforts to have the end of Daylight Savings fall after Halloween, in order to preserve a valuable extra hour of daylight trick-or-treating. (There are also safety considerations; every year, children die in trafffic accidents on Halloween night.) This was the first I had heard about such lobbying efforts on the part of the confectionary establishment, but it makes perfect sense. DST was extended to November 1 starting in 2007, but I am not aware of any specific stats on a surge in candy sales in the last few years to match that extra hour. Alice would have had something to say about this, on page 170 of True Confections.

Hot Chocolate

As Alice Ziplinsky notes in True Confections, the brand and image connection between comforting foods and jolly black people is an old and and persistent one, especially in France. Here's another example I had not heard of before now, "Negrocao," a portmanteau brand name presumably consisting of Negro + cacao. The word "Negronoir" is also made up, sort of blackblack. Love the cup and saucer hat. Note the white-bearded Caucasian gent (he looks like Matisse or Freud) offering a steaming cup of this product to a delighted doll-like Caucasian child.

Generic Racist Candy Name

Here's a vintage candy box showing an instance when there was so little imagination devoted to producing a candy with this familiar, racist marketing strategy that a generic name sufficed. Alice Ziplinsky would have talked about this one too, for sure, and probably would have given points to Eli for his misguided creativity and more subtle approach. Yet another candy invoking the weirdly persistent white culture's condescending caricature of the Negro? How shall we at Heide's* Candy Company distinguish it? Let's call it....um...how about Black Kids! Why not?

*Further exploration reveals that Heide's Candy Company was founded in New York in 1869 by Henry Heide, who died in 1931. He was succeeded by his son Andrew, who retired in 1992, and it was his son, Philip Heide, who was to follow the usual pattern of family businesses in the third or fourth generation, and sell out to a large corporation. He sold to Hershey in 1995. But then Farley’s & Sathers Candy Co. Inc. (a hugely complex corporate entity with a convoluted history intertwined with Kraft, Hershey, Nabisco, Brach's and others) acquired all the Heide brand products from Hershey in 2002.

You have never eaten a Colored Kid (one hopes), but have you ever consumed Gummi Bears, Jujubees, Jujyfruits, Mexican Hats, Wunderbeans, or Red Hot Dollars? Those are Heide brands, too. (Sort of like discovering you do business with the nice people who used to make Zyklon B, isn't it?) Colored Kids were artifically colored and black anise flavored. Heide also made a "mello cream candy" called Chocolate Babies. (Not to be confused with those other problematic Babies, which were smaller and more Tootsie-like in texture.)

The Abba-Zaba Holy Grail!

Found it at last! In True Confections I had Alice speculate about the murky origins of Abba-Zaba, which, rumor had it, used to feature jungle savages on the package. A later design featured the Abba-Zaba baby, a sort of monkey-like savage. Alice was looking for context for Zip's Candies own Little Sammies with their "Say, Dat's Tasty!" slogan. But as I was writing the novel and desperate to see with my own eyes the original Abba-Zaba label, these Abba-Zaba wrappers were not findable anywhere. Nobody really knew for sure what they looked like, and even the Annabelle Candy Company, which bought Abba-Zaba when they acquired Cardinet, didn't have those original wrappers. (It turns out Cardinet had bought the Abba-Zaba license or had taken over an earlier company, Colby & McDermott, a name new to me. Abba-Zabas seem to have been around since 1922.)

But during a recent idle internet search (the number one procrastination tool of today's writer), I found them at last, newly posted at a candy wrapper museum website. Looking at the original Abba-Zaba savages, I am even more convinced that I am correct in my theory that the name of this candy was based on a kind of made-up imaginary Zulu jungle savage utterance. Look at the picture, and say the words Abba-Zaba. Again. Again. Abba-Zaba, Abba-Zaba! Listen. Can you hear the jungle drums? The natives are restless!