My sister-in-law Sarah ruined American candy for me with two fell sentences. "All you can taste is sugar," she said. "It's too sweet." I'm sure I've heard people say that before, but I guess I never took it in or fully realized the truth of it. And I had never before had English candy.
Until fairly recently, when I developed a painful and no doubt karmic allergy, my approach to chocolate would have furnished material for any number of Cathy cartoons. While I've gone through extended chocolate-free periods over the years, the disciplined times have been interspersed with no-holds-barred chocolate binges.
And I prefer it in its pure and concentrated form, as candy. I like other sweets---cakes, cookies, that sort of thing---fine, but I normally wouldn't go out of my way to get them. My weakness was candy.
Prior to my first trip to England, I'd been through a fairly long chocolate-free phase, and I really didn't expect to find myself weakening once we'd made the trip. If I'd expected to lose all sense of decency and control, I would never have loaded up during my first trip to Sainsbury's with chocolate of every sort for my nieces and nephews in South Carolina.
Nick is fairly indifferent to sweets. In his family, they have a perverse habit of eating one small square of Swiss chocolate every night after one of my mother-in-law's perfectly prepared and presented meals. And in a way, I can understand this. After dining on her French cuisine, scarfing down a bag of M&M's would simply be vulgar.
Nevertheless, to see people eating ONE SQUARE of chocolate always struck me as appalling and unnatural. I had to look away; and I always declined the chocolate.
But then Nick introduced me to plain old English grocery store chocolate. When I tasted my first Topic, I swear I heard heavenly choirs singing. I had bought a dozen or so for my nieces and nephews, none of which made it home. It's chocolate with hazelnut nougat. The chocolate tastes rich; it tastes like chocolate, not chocolate-flavored sugar. The nougat is creamy and faintly salty; in other words, it tastes like hazelnut, not hazelnut-flavored sugar.
It made me understand that the American consumption of sugar is not completely our fault. I am certain that we would prefer English-style chocolate if we could get it here. But even English brands of candy, such as Cadbury and KitKat, are much, much sweeter here. (With all the moaning over the growing rate of obesity, why isn't the FDA leaning on manufacturers of sugary foods to use a lot less of it?)
I found out in England that sweets which are less sweet are also more satisfying. You don't eat as much English chocolate (note that I said "you," not "I") because, miracle of miracles, English chocolate candy actually tastes of chocolate. I realized when I was there that part of the reason for my chocolate binges was simply that I wasn't really tasting the chocolate.
I suppose it's a good thing, since when I came back I found I no longer really enjoyed American cookies or candy.
If you're in England and want to indulge, here are some names of basic grocery-level English candy you might want to bring back for the kids (or yourself):
- Topic (see above)
- Mars Bars and Milky Ways (which are reversed in England and better either way)
- Curly Wurly: a long braided strand of chocolate-covered caramel
- Smarties: I had written "the British version of M&M's," but Nick wasn't having it. "Nothing like," he insisted. Fine. Similar in appearance to M&M's, they are little round buttons of candy. They taste of chocolate and definitely WILL melt in your hand (which I'd call a good thing)
- Malteasers (malted milk balls, which are delicate concoctions nothing like the chewy or rubbery ones you get here)
- Rolos: You can get them here, but they're not the same (this is according to Nick; I don't like them)
- Yorkie: A chocolate bar, with variations. Very good.
- Cadbury Chocolate, the same as we have here, only English.
- Cadbury Flake: A chocolate bar. Made of flakes.
- Crunchie: A honey-combed center chocolate bar that set my teeth on edge, but that Nick and Don both loved.
- Aero: In plain chocolate and mint chocolate, an air-filled bar that was a big hit with my nieces and nephews.
- Walnut whips: Individually wrapped walnut creams with a walnut on the top. One of my friends called it "a little chocolate-covered orgasm."
- Terry's chocolate oranges, which I've seen here. I don't know if they are the same here as there, but the one I had there was delicious.
- Wine gums: chewy fruit-flavored candy that do not taste of wine or have anything to do with wine (unfortunately). As gummy-based candies go, Nick says they are the best (I don't like that sort of candy)
And I'm stopping there because I am sort of starting to hate myself for knowing all this.
One thing that I had never eaten before I went to England was nougat. According to Nick, the premier nougat bar was Callard and Bowser's nougat, but they seem to have stopped making it. We therefore had to settle for some other brand. I don't know what plain nougat is, and I can take it or leave it alone, but it was certainly nice enough to explain one of Nick's earliest instances of culture shock.
During Christmas, we went shopping to buy candy to put in Christmas boxes we were making for some people at work. When we got home, I noticed that Nick had bought two bags of a sort of candy I hadn't seen since childhood: circular white candies, similar in appearance to taffy, with Christmas designs printed on them with food coloring. I'd never heard of the manufacturer. "What on earth did you buy these for?" I asked him. "Nobody eats these. It's junk candy. It's stuff you put around for decoration. I can't put these in the boxes."
Nick looked hurt. "But It's Christmas nougat," he said. "Everyone likes nougat. I'll eat it if you won't use it."
Later, when I was doing some frazzly Christmas-present assembling in another room, I heard what sounded like a howl of pain. "Ugh," he yelled. "Ugh! Ugh! Yuck!"
He was sitting on the sofa holding a wadded up paper towel with a half-chewed piece of Christmas nougat in it. "It tastes like Pine Sol!" he said furiously. "I've eaten nougat since I was born. I've eaten it all over Europe. I've eaten it in France, Switzerland, and Germany. I've liked it every time I've had it, so what's wrong with this?"
I tasted one; it tasted exactly the same as it had when I was a child: chewy stuff flavored with (I guess) some sort of mint-like extract or other substance. I remember that one of my elderly aunts used to keep a bowl of similar-looking candy in her living room at Christmas-time "for decoration." After one experiment, I never ate any more, ever. It tasted of disinfectant soap, just as Nick said. I never saw anyone else eat it. I hadn't even realized that it was nougat. We just called it "decorations."
"I wasn't expecting it to be spectacular," Nick said, "but I did expect at least to taste something like food."
FAVORITE ENGLISH CANDY JOKE.
In the endlessly ridiculous My Hero, which everyone in America should watch for Ardal O'Hanlon if for no other reason, the perpetually sour-faced nurse Mrs Raven, holds out a bag of Malteasers to George. "Like a Malteaser?" she says. "Oh no, Mrs. Raven," says George, "I think you'll find it is a Malteaser."
Anyway, if you are going to England, and you're looking for comparatively low-cost gifts (or for candy for yourself), be sure to stock up. You're not going to want to go back to American candy afterwards.
copyright Damozel 2006.
That was wonderful! The joke at the end made me laugh out loud.
The odd thing is that there's a Simpsons episode where they go to England and get extremely high on the candy because it has so much more sugar than ours does. I don't think they meant chocolate per se, but it's still weird.
And I enjoyed the Cathy reference because it reminded me of last week's episode of 30 Rock. They showed a fake Cathy strip where nearly all the lines were "chocolate! chocolate! chocolate! aack!!" around some discussion of Halloween and kids. Someone tells Tina Fey's character that they put what she said in the paper - and of course we think it's something horrible about kids - and then there's a flashback to her, with her hair straight and flat a la Cathy, grabbing it and yelling, flatly, "Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. Aack!" It made me happy because she's so one-note and ridiculous, and Fey's depiction of her captured it perfectly.
There, now I've retold a sitcom joke at length to a total stranger. Ta da!
I recently realized that M&Ms taste like nothing. They don't do much to satisfy my chocolate cravings, but they're great when I want sugar. Fortunately, I live in the Bay Area, where there are tons of upscale fancy locally-made varieties of dark chocolate. If they stop selling out to Hershey's, we might eventually catch up with Europe....
Posted by: Danica | April 18, 2008 at 12:11 AM