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."

The Music Lesson redux

This week, the new Broadway paperback of my second novel, The Music Lesson, was published. I am thrilled that my 1999 novel has steadily appealed to readers in more than a dozen languages and has been a perennial with book groups. The Picador paperback ran through eleven printings, and I am optimistic that the Broadway edition will have a nice long shelf life.

I am especially happy that Random House/Broadway are my new paperback publishers, with True Confections just out from Broadway, and with my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, scheduled to appear later this year, in July. It is a major big deal for a novelist to have an entire backlist in print. It's a terrific vote of confidence from the publisher, and I am grateful.

$1.9 BILLION DOLLARS for Halloween Candy?

According to Nielsen Research, America spent approximately $1.9 billion for candy this Halloween season. That's a lot of candy.

The most popular Halloween candy is the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Offensive as this may be to some people, I must confess that I really dislike Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. The peanut butter always seems to me to be a terrible combination of stale, rancid, and sugary. I know that I am in a minority and we are a nation of Reese's lovers.


The Peanut Butter Cup was created by Harry Burnett (H.B.) Reese, who had worked for a while for Milton S. Hershey on the dairy side of the business. Reese's first candy bar attempts were Johnny Bars (molasses) and Lizzie Bars (coconut). Untasted, I would trade a PB Cup for a Lizzie Bar in a heartbeat. In True Confections, Alice Ziplinsky would have referenced the Johnny and Lizzie Bars if I had known about them before now.

One Out of Four

Many of the brands we think of today as classic or even iconic herald from the golden era of candy manufacturing, when there were hundreds of regional brands that were often short-lived. Here is a collection of four vintage candy boxes. One of these is not like the other: Tootsie Rolls. It succeeded while the other three failed. Why? The name, the flavor and texture, the packaging, the marketing? Maybe all of those things.

Chances are you have never heard of the Mars confection called Dr. I.Q., or the "delicious" Cabbage Candy Bar, or Guernsey Girl Malted Milk Chocolate Candy. I would have happily included these long lost confections in True Confections had I known of their existence.

Enough Cacao Beans for Five Billion Chocolate Bars?

What's the story with the cocoa bean guy? Big screaming headlines around the world have been reporting on the mysterious hedge fund manager, Anthony Ward, who has really almost cornered the world market in cocoa. There are estimates that he has now stockpiled enough cocoa beans to make more than five billion chocolate bars.

Is he stockpiling cocoa in a bid to drive up already high prices so he can sell later at a big profit? Cocoa prices have now reached a 30-year high. Nobody knows exactly what he is doing, but chocolate manufacturers around the world are nervous. His private investment firm, Armajaro, now controls something like 7 percent of annual cocoa production worldwide. Armajaro maintains offices in West Africa, close to the source. Apparently the company name is an amalgam of the names of his and his business partner's four children. I wonder if he gives much thought to what he surely knows, that children in West Africa are performing slave labor to harvest a significant percentage of those cocoa beans?

True Confections was inspired by the troubling child slave labor on West African cacao plantations. From that issue grew my question: for whom would this be a moral dilemma? Who would be most personally confronted by this siuation? Someone with a chocolate candy factory. And from there came Zip's Candies and the Ziplinsky family. Who would tell the story, and why? From that question came Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, the insider-outsider narrator. Chocolate candy seems like such a manufactured product, we can forget that it is derived from nature, from a plant, and far too often, from an agricultural industry that mistreats children.

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.

It Probably Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Maybe this was the thinking:

Miley Cyrus, popular with kids, check.

Candy, popular with kids, check.

Hannah Montana Candy, genius!

Candy should be in the shape of a guitar, why not?

Candy should be flesh colored, okay, sure. BAD, BAD, IDEA!

Alice Ziplinsky made some serious miscalculations with some of her candy lines, but nothing was this bad. I regret that she didn't make mention of this product in defense of her Little Susies.

Is There a 4th of July Candy Tradition? No There is Not.

Candy is associated with many American holidays, but to the eternal sorrow and frustration of the candy industry, there is nothing really indelible about the 4th of July, candy-wise. The Hershey's people have been brilliant in recent years about cross-marketing the Hershey Bar with Nabisco Graham Crackers and Kraft Jet-Puffed Marshmallows for some s'mores end cap and bin displays in supermarkets, but that's really about it. (See page 42 of True Confections for Alice Ziplinsky's views on this subject.) Most efforts to grab some 4th of July dollars from supermarket shoppers consist of feeble seasonal cellophane wrappers on boxes, but even then, what is the symbol for the 4th of July? Christmas is a tree or an ornament, Valentine's Day is a heart, but what is the 4th of July? Red white and blue, the American flag. Maybe there are some compelling patriotic jelly bean mixes out there. But red, white and blue and the flag are also symbols for Memorial Day, Veteran's Day, and also other [problematic to many of us] patriotic endeavors like "supporting" our troops, depending on context.

One company that has tried harder than most to corner the 4th of July candy dollar is Tootsie. But the flag labels don't convince me that Tootsie Rolls are a traditional element of the day, and I doubt that shoppers will ever make their lists for their 4th of July cookout or picnic so that right after hot dogs, hamburger, buns, ketchup, pickles, chips, anyone is going to write Tootsie Roll Midgees. But nice try, Tootsie!

The Ingenius Q

Immortalized by Ian Fleming as Q in the Bond books, Charles Fraser-Smith was a resourceful inventor employed by the British Ministry of Supply during World War II to create a panpoly of tools to aid the war effort. His creations included tiny Minox cameras disguised inside cigarette lighters, flashlights with one genuine battery and a dummy 'battery' containing a secret compartment, shaving brushes with secret compartments (accessed by tops that unscrewed the "wrong" way, so any ordinary attempt to 'unscrew' the top would only tighten it), uniform buttons containing a compass or explosive charge, boot laces containing Gigli saws (thin, flexible band saws used by surgeons for brain surgery), maps printed in invisible ink on handkerchiefs which needed to be soaked in urine in order to be seen, cigarette holder telescopes (complete with nicotine stains) -- and that's just a few random examples.

Why tell you about him?

Because he created a garlic-flavored chocolate tablet specifically designed to give secret agents operating behind enemy lines the correct 'continental' breath. Presumably this was chased with a swig of coffee or red wine concealed inside one of those secret compartments. If only Eli Ziplinsky had been asked to produce these garlic chocolate tablets at Zip's Candies for the US Army!

Man Bait!

Last week in Chicago, as I wandered the aisles of the Sweets & Snacks Expo at McCormick Place, I had the recurring hall of mirrors experience of being halfway in the fictional world of True Confections. Certain sweet and snacky items especially made me think that the three iconic candy lines inspired by Little Black Sambo for which Zip's Candies has been known since 1924, as well as some of the newer products manufactured by Zip's, are actually perfectly reasonable, realistic, viable candy lines, in comparison.

Exhibit A: Das Lolli's Man Bait Maple Bacon Lollipops. They're odd. A bit sweet, but why not, given that it's a lollipop. I am not sure how the man baiting is supposed to work. You put them out and men are attracted? But do they swarm you, or your lollipop? What has actually been achieved here?

Tastes Like Red!

I am just back from the fabulous 2010 Sweets & Snacks Expo in Chicago -- the largest candy trade show in the Americas -- and one of the many exciting things I discovered there (while experiencing the three days as a complex sort of deja vu, given the scenes in True Confections that take place at this show, where this year I was signing books in the Candy Industry Magazine booth) was that America's favorite flavor is "red." Cherry, strawberry, whatever -- so long as it's red. This is why one of the dominant new flavors popping up across a range of familiar products is pomegranate. And then there's the just-released variation of Just Born's Mike and Ike -- Red Rageous, a mix of red flavors (grape, raspberry, cherry, strawberry, melon). If Alice Ziplinsky had known that most people think their favorite flavor is red, she would have had something to say about that in the pages of True Confections.

The Hershey Train

Why didn't I include a reference in True Confections to Milton S. Hershey's train, still functioning in Cuba today? In 1927, Hershey, having first established his own sugar refining source in Cuba in order to avoid being at the mercy of fluctuating sugar prices, built his own train line that crossed the island, making it possible for workers to travel easily to the Hershey sugar cane factory, and to transport the sugar back to the harbor, for export to his chocolate manufacturing plant in Hershey, Pa.

Hershey was an extraordinarily thoughtful, idealistic, humanitarian, and also very, very practical businessman. He decided to locate his sugar refining operation in the province of Matanzas because he believed its higher elevation was a healthier (and therefore more productive) location. Hershey constructed a small village near his sugar cane plantation, rows of workers’ cottages with front porches and tile roofs. Unlike most sugar plantations, the Hershey operation paid weekly wages, instead of hiring and firing workers seasonally. The Hershey village had a medical clinic and grocery store, and he provided this little worker community with a school, complete with playground, and its own power plant generating electricity, as well as sewers and a water supply. All of this was in the name of productivity, but there was also a fascinating and admirable humanitarian intention manifest in this way of doing business.

Milton Hershey guessed wrong about the longterm stability of Cuba when he chose his sugar plantation location for its proximity to the U.S., and when Castro came to power in 1959, Hershey enterprises were closed down. Today the plantation is a jungle, and the workers' village is a ghost town, but the train still runs. Alice Ziplinksy would have had something to say about this, probably an identification with Hershey's good intentions being thwarted.

I forgot the bris!

Why wasn't there a ritual circumcision for Jacob Ziplinsky in True Confections, complete with a contentious Ziplinsky family gathering and a chopped chicken liver centerpiece? How could I have overlooked this opportunity for Alice Ziplinsky to report on, mock, analyze, and feel superior to this particular Ziplinsky family custom? Rats.

Strange Candy Bar Concepts

If you thought the Fat Emma, the Cherry Hump, and the Chicken Dinner were strange candy bar names, consider the Love Nest, which I have never heard of before now or I would have mentioned it in True Confections. What were they thinking?

A Supreme Court Candy Moment

When you hear the words "Whitman's Sampler," what does it conjure up? A box of chocolates, designed to resemble a traditional stitched sampler to show its all-American goodness, often presented at holidays or other special occasions? Ever hear of the once-popular Whitman's Pickaninny Peppermints? Here's why not. In 1941 a certain NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall published an article about Whitman's racial insensitivity in a journal called Afro-American. The Whitman's people tried to insist that the term "pickaninny" only meant "cute colored kid." (See Heide's "Black Kids" candy posted here on 03.06.10 -- perhaps that was somebody's idea of an updated and enlightened product name.) Not so coincidentally, after four years of defensive corporate correspondence with Marshall on this topic, Whitman's Pickaninny Peppermints were withdrawn. Thurgood Marshall, of course, went on to become the first African American (or Negro, as he was called at the time) to serve on the US Supreme Court. Today we have a president of color soon to make his second appointment to the Supreme Court bench. Yet another instance of racism and candy product marketing and history that would have been terrific grist for Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky's complex and conflicted mill in True Confections.

Building the Cinnamon Bomb

Nello Ferrara of the Ferrara Pan Candy family invented the Atomic FireBall in 1954, inspired by the postwar optimistic embrace of all things atomic. (Think of those George Nelson clocks.) A red hot candy that could blow your head off, great idea!

In True Confections, Little Sammies are panned for their thin hard-shell chocolate coating ("just a little more brittle than a Raisinet's, that gave them their signature sheen"), but a panned candy like the Atomic FireBall begins life as a grain of sugar to which liquid sugar is added gradually in the rotating drum (the "pan" in case you have never quite understood what the Ferrara Pan thing means and had visions of frying pans) in which the candies tumble for an astonishing two weeks as the microscopically thin layers of sugar build up on the original core grain. I wish I had devoted more attention to this peculiar process in True Confections.

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.

Cocoanut Ping!

I have recently discovered a trove of obscure Mars candy bar boxes. Apparently the new Coconut M&Ms are not the first time Mars has ventured into Mounds territory (I am convinced the new coconut M&Ms are a response to the Hershey Mounds Pieces). Too bad they gave up on this particular Mars confection long ago. It would have been included in True Confections. I like the name a lot, and it lends itself to marketing campaigns. Ping me!