True Confections Read Free Page A

how in fact the myth that Little Sammies were named for Little Black Sambo is just one of those erroneous beliefs that circulate, because the truth is that the candy was really inspired by the birth of the owner’s son, Little Sammy Ziplinsky, born the same year Zip’s Candies started production.
    In 1921, the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago changedtheir Kandy Kake bar into the Baby Ruth, claiming former president Grover Cleveland’s dead daughter Ruth had somehow inspired the name. This was implausible at best, and it is most likely that the Baby Ruth bar was an unauthorized attempt to cash in on the popularity of baseball great Babe Ruth. It hardly seems fair that in 1931 Curtiss won their case to shut down Babe Ruth’s own licensed candy bar on grounds that it was too close to their bestselling product.
    Nothing happened to Zip’s Candies during the Black Panther trial. There was no angry march from the New Haven Green across the railroad tracks, even in that season of turmoil when anything was possible. The whole city of New Haven seemed to be one spark away from a great big Black Panther conflagration. It was a potentially threatening time for a company known for making small, chewy, Negroid candies, no matter what the explanation for the name might be, no question. All it meant to me at the time, a couple of miles up leafy Whitney Avenue (named for that other ambitious and inventive Eli, whose ingenuity gave the world the cotton gin, which led to a vast expansion of cotton production in the American south, which of course increased the demand for the slave labor necessary to pick all that cotton), was that my parents watched the news on television compulsively and I wasn’t allowed to leave our block on my bicycle.
    I COULD SEE through the big mullioned windows on the first two floors that the factory lights were on. I turned off my Subaru before the engine could overheat, which it tended to do, which was why my mother was driving her new Volkswagen and I was driving this old wreck, and I sat there. I knew I needed to backtrack to the highway entrance I had passed on my way. I couldget to work on time if I left now. Something kept me sitting there in the still car. I don’t know what, beyond a general reluctance to face the day, to face the rest of the summer, and after that, to face the rest of my doomed life stretching out in front of me.
    I harbored a hopeless vision of spending all eternity at Helen’s Double Dip, where I would turn into an aging spinster furiously scooping triple Nutty Buddy cones with my by-then crippled arm while life passed me by. There’s poor old Alice, people would say. The sad one, with the mustache. (I would have let myself go completely. Doomed felons don’t pluck.) They say she’s worked at Helen’s Double Dip all her life.
    The truth is, that summer, that day, that moment, I had come to the end of something. I had lost my place.
    Sweat trickled down my neck in the suddenly stifling car. I opened my window. A certain burnt sugar and chocolate aroma hung in the air, that marvelous, inevitable, ineffable, just-right aura of Zip’s Candies, that unique blend of sweetness and pleasure and something else, a deep note of something rich and exotic and familiar that makes you nostalgic for its flavor even though you may never have tasted it before. I have loved that smell every day of my life from then to now. Some days, I go to work for that smell. When I travel, I miss it, I long for it. On Mumbo Jumbo days there is an added spice in the air, a dark hint of cherry and anise that adds a top note of danger. In retrospect, I believe this was a Mumbo Jumbo day. The aroma wafting through my car told me what I already knew I had to do. I went in and applied for the job.
    M Y FUTURE FATHER-IN-LAW , Sam Ziplinsky, appraised me with a sidelong glance from behind his messy desk, never takingthe unlit, moist stub of a cigar out of his mouth (he couldn’t smoke on the premises, so he nursed a