Despite the name, Turkish Taffy wasn’t always directly interactive, since it was originally stored behind Woolworth’s store counters in giant sheets. The helpful attendant would help you size out the piece you wanted, then would shatter it with a ball peen hammer, packaging up the resultant shards. The candy also isn’t Turkish, invented in the United States by the son of a Sephardic immigrant from the country. Albert Bonomo emigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and took up a trade as a candy maker in Coney Island, a business into which his son Victor followed him, developing this candy in the 1940s after a string of moderate successes ripping off more popular brands. Known as a ‘soft' or 'short nougat,’ similar to Italian torrone, it results from a mold-set mixture of egg whites and corn syrup. Victor Bonomo died in 1999 at the age of 100, but his company lives on, solely dedicated to the production of taffy bars and smaller ‘taffy nibbles.’ Also purchased on this same trip: a Zagnut, the odd coconut-covered peanut brittle bar whose 1960s TV ad campaign was even more memorable than the ones for Turkish Taffy.
Invented in 1912, Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy bar is billed as the ‘first interactive candy.’ A bit of a stretch, perhaps, considering the extent of the ‘interactivity’ here is bashing the extremely chewy candy against a surface hard enough to shatter it into a million pieces. If you miss this step, as I did after purchasing the bar from the Lower East Side’s always amazing Economy Candy, you may find yourself hopelessly gnawing at a series of too-large chunks, which remain totally resistant to stretching/bending. They can be cracked with teeth, but one attempt at this put such stress on my molars that I was afraid trying again would cost me a few fillings.
Despite the name, Turkish Taffy wasn’t always directly interactive, since it was originally stored behind Woolworth’s store counters in giant sheets. The helpful attendant would help you size out the piece you wanted, then would shatter it with a ball peen hammer, packaging up the resultant shards. The candy also isn’t Turkish, invented in the United States by the son of a Sephardic immigrant from the country. Albert Bonomo emigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and took up a trade as a candy maker in Coney Island, a business into which his son Victor followed him, developing this candy in the 1940s after a string of moderate successes ripping off more popular brands. Known as a ‘soft' or 'short nougat,’ similar to Italian torrone, it results from a mold-set mixture of egg whites and corn syrup. Victor Bonomo died in 1999 at the age of 100, but his company lives on, solely dedicated to the production of taffy bars and smaller ‘taffy nibbles.’ Also purchased on this same trip: a Zagnut, the odd coconut-covered peanut brittle bar whose 1960s TV ad campaign was even more memorable than the ones for Turkish Taffy.
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The origins of marzipan are hazy, involving the amorphous circuitry of medieval Middle Eastern trade routes and Hanseatic League-affiliated ports, but the candy’s history has at least some connection to medieval Italy. It was here that it may have gotten its modern name - derived from the term ‘March Bread’ (Marza Pane) - although this is only one of several competing claims. Whatever the case, marzipan's unique moldability has always allowed it to change with the times, and it reaches new heights of expressions at Brooklyn’s Fortunato Brothers café. Here, two proud Italian traditions merge, with the almond-based confection taking on the shape of a plate of spaghetti, a Margherita pizza, and perhaps most puzzlingly, an unadorned turkey sandwich.
On my 5th day in Colombia I found myself in a white and teal painted restaurant in Cartagena’s Old City, grateful to finally be out of the sun. The temperature was at this point topping out around a 116 heat index, twenty of those degrees coming solely from the miserable, momentum-crushing humidity. Having sweated out at least a few water bottles worth of moisture, I was soaked, scorched, and about to collapse from fatigue. This meant I was also less than enthused when the waitress brought out the complimentary Sopa de Pescado, its herb-flecked liquid steaming in a small bowl.
Before there was Billy Joel, there was Sergio Franchi, whose 1968 album Wine and Song celebrates the magical ambiance of the old-fashioned red-sauce joint. The album’s priceless back cover finds Franchi, a Lombardy born crooner who made his bones covering standards in a smooth tenor, cutting it up with a 12 foot hero. I like to believe that, at the moment this photo was taken, he was actually recording, singing his heart out to a sandwich. None of the songs from this album appear to exist online (a shame, considering that Al di Là also provided the name for one of my neighborhood Italian joints), but here's a sampling of Franchi singing his heart out for Ed Sullivan: New York City’s Japan Society is currently hosting a two-month series on Okinawa, the country’s southernmost prefecture, home to a culture that skews far from the rigid intensity of the rest of the archipelago. Held on Tuesday the 3rd, the ‘Explore Okinawa’ event seemed like the most general of these, a broad primer on the island’s culture, history and cuisine. Okinawa is actually the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which existed as an independent kingdom / Chinese affiliate state until being brought under Japanese control in the 17th century, persisting as largely autonomous entity for centuries afterward. Absorbing influences from all over the Western Pacific, the island culture has produced distinctive exports like bingata, a painstaking, multi-step textile form, and karate, Japan’s best-known martial art.
A page from Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow, demonstrating the Western affectations of the Japanese upper class circa 1913. In the novel this is a sign of decay, the abandonment of proud native traditions, specifically the warrior-caste pride of the weakling protagonist’s nouveau-riche family. Looking like something out of the Gilded Age, from a book written in 1965, the menu provides an interesting time capsule of an era that’s been referred to as Japan’s Jazz Age, a period of curious cultural rebellion quashed by the economic unrest and mounting nationalism of the early '30s. Years before Japanese flappers would embrace Western clothing styles, the affectations of the Taisho era demonstrate the same obsession with illicit outside influence that would make way for modern confections, from sponge cake to milk bread. Both of these seem like modern, post-war innovations, but trace back further, to the early influence of Portugal, perhaps the world’s preeminent seeder of European culture abroad, and conversely a big importer of overseas flavors back to the mainland. It was the Portuguese who originally brought bread (not to mention tempura, itself possibly derived from Indian pakora) to Japan in the 17th century, with the word pan, like the Indian pav, coming from the Portuguese pao.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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