Here in Brooklyn Heights, my little elf and I journeyed hither and yon in search of your basic classic candy cane. You know the one I’m talking about: peppermint, white with red stripes. The Classic, to hang on our tree.

How many drug and grocery/food stores do you think we visited before we found this basic Yule-time staple? One? Three? Guess again.

We found the candy canes in store number NINE! Yes, eight stores, and nary a cane.

1. Duane Reade Drug Store: one box of Skittles brand fruit canes

2. Perlander Natural Foods: no holiday candy (hardly any candy at all, actually, but I was hoping for some “all natural” canes)

3. Key Food: Christmas? Who knew?

4. Sahadi’s Specialty Foods: Beautiful Hammond’s lollipops, but no canes

5. Rite Aid: one box Skittles brand canes, one Lifesavers, all lurid un-Christmasy colors.

6. Rite Aid (another one): large pink and white Barbie cane

7. Garden of Eden (expensive specialty foods): closest they had here was pretzels coated in white chocolate and peppermint crumbs.

8. Duane Reade (another one): a couple of boxes of Skittles brand and one other with green apple and strawberry flavored canes.

9. City Chemist: EUREKA! An independent store with a “old time” candy section, at last we find real Christmas candy canes. We almost missed them, though; they were stashed below some discounted boxes of Christmas cards, not even with the Christmas candy proper. No respect! But at $1.99 per dozen, and 30% off, we are happy.

Is it just that all the candy canes are sold out? Or is the old-fashioned hard peppermint just not hip enough for the Facebook generation? Any theories?

After promising early results from Dr Pepper Ten, a low-calorie version of its flagship soda, Dr Pepper Snapple is giving the same treatment to five of its other sodas…. Starting as early as January, the company will start testing 7 Up Ten, Sunkist Ten, A&W Ten and Canada Dry Ten in Columbus, Ohio, Des Moines, Iowa, and central Pennsylvania. It will also test RC Ten, a cola, in Chicago, Evansville, Ind., and Des Moines.

As we chroncled in these pages a few weeks ago, Ten is NOT FOR CHICKS! So what about all these other perfect Tens, I wonder?

The real story isn’t getting diet soda into men so much as getting HFCS into diet soda. Evidently, the company’s proprietary blend of non-nutritive sweetener and HFCS makes the calories go away while keeping the “real soda” flavor. I guess we’ll all be Tens soon…

By the way, if any beverage executives are listening, I’ll tell you what I’d really go for: a low or no calorie drink that wasn’t so sweet! I don’t like the extra sugar of sweet drinks, so I prefer the diet sort (I save my sugar quota for real candy). But why should I have to choose between the sweet-bomb of Diet Snapple Iced Tea and the mouth-puckering virtue of the totally unsweetened stuff? I don’t want sugar, just a little sweetness, just a pinch…

This ad is featured in Bee Wilson’s Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee  (2008). It’s a terrific book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in fake food.

Book writing is cruising along, so apologies if you’re not getting your regular Candy Professor fix. I’m working on a chapter on candy adulteration and “poison candy” right now. Wilson has been by my side for weeks, along with a few other more “academic” histories of the Pure Food movement. By the way, about that poison candy? File it under “urban legend.”

Cactus candy is now being made in Louisiana from the spineless cactus grown for cattle food. Tills Candy makes a palatable confection, with only a reasonable amount of sugar used, the cactus being peeled, dipped in hot sirup or molasses, and coated with granulated or powdered sugar. …  Cactus candy can be made by housewives on southern farms, using home supplies of cane sirup, a standard farm product of the south.

Add this to my “candy from anything” file… (see also: potatoes, lima beans, yams, garlic, cottonseed, alfalfa…)

Related Posts:

• Some Candies You Won’t Be Making for the Holidays
• Eat More, Weigh Less: Bulking up Candy With Vegetables

I have not actually seen this candy in person. I was at Harvard to look at a book, the NCA’s 1907 report on candy poisoning allegations called “Facts,” only one copy of which exists. It was totally worth the trip.

And then, poking around in the Business Library Historical Collection, I stumbled on a reference to a box containing “lozenges and labels” associated with business records of Ball & Fobes (which became Fobes & Hayward, which merged with a couple of others to become NECCO). Alas, the box was off-site in the depository, and I only was there for the day, so I couldn’t actually look in the box. But by a stroke of good luck, the very helpful reference librarians were able to track down pictures of the contents.

Amazing! They are pale pinkish and brownish flat opaque disks. The substance looks like Necco Wafers, chalky and dry. These style lozenges were the forerunners to our wafers. The shape is obviously machine made. They are round with scalloped edges. Each is stamped with a cameo-like bas relief. The detail on the images I looked at is murky, but they appear to be animal and classical type scenes; one looks like a woman holding a vase or urn, another looks like maybe a deer. I can’t tell what size these are, there is no scale reference.

Dating the lozenges: There are several labels that are in the same collection. It is impossible to know whether they are contemporaneous with the lozenge candies, but assuming they are, they provide some clues to dating. The labels read “Fobes & Hayward.” The puts the date after 1865, when when Ball & Fobes became Fobes & Hayward. The labels are for lozenges, comfits, and sugared cardamom and flagroot. These are candies that lean more toward the early nineteenth century than towards the developments of the 1880s. So I think it is unlikely that these lozenges are older that 1880, and I’d be comfortable putting them closer to 1870.

I can’t wait for my next trip up to Boston. I really want to see that box, and put my hands on, or at least near, such an amazing piece of candy history.

And an even better treat: a glimpse of  a very interesting early precursor to trick or treat. At about 24 minutes into the film, the aunties retire to the kitchen. Dashing Cary Grant follows, and we see some very strange action around the back door. A swarm of masked children are hollering and shouting and holding out their arms, and the aunties are passing them goodies. Sort of. They hand them: two big pumpkin jack o’ lanterns, and one pie.

I have done research into the origins of trick or treat: I wanted to know when kids started coming to the door, saying “trick or treat,” and demanding a treat or else threatening a trick. It emerges in various places in the mid to late 1930s. By the late 1940s, it is a familiar part of Halloween all across the country. For example, trick or treat features in episodes of Ozzie and Harriet and The Jack Benny Show (both 1948). By the 1950s, the trick part is gone and it’s all about the treats.

The scene in Arsenic and Old Lace was filmed in 1941. (The film is usually dated 1944; this is the release date because the film was held back while the play continued to fill houses on Broadway.) In 1941, trick or treat has just started showing up in other states, but the phrase “trick or treat” hasn’t yet arrived in New York. In the 1920s and earlier, kids on Halloween mostly went around doing pranks. What happens in Arsenic and Old Lace  is trick or treat almost: the kids are at the door, but they are more unruly mob than organized trick or treat squad.

I would love to know more about what is going on in this scene. Was this what kids did on Halloween in Brooklyn in the 1930s? Or maybe even in Los Angeles? The movie was filmed in City Island, NY, and in Burbank; Frank Capra grew up in Los Angeles and made his career in Hollywood. Where did the inspiration for this scene originate?

And if this is an accurate representation of what kids either in New York or Los Angeles were doing in 1941, what did they call it? I wonder if it’s possible to deconstruct the audio and hear what they are shouting.  And were these pumpkins and pies really the sort of thing a household would offer? I mean, what are the kids going to do with this stuff?

No, there was no candy at the beginning of trick or treat. In 1941, it was Jack o’ lanterns and pies. But it’s easy to see how candy eventually took over as the treat of choice.

Happy Halloween!

For more on trick or treat before candy, see my piece at TheAtlantic.com.

I talk to CBC’s Brent Bambury about Halloween fun, candy corn, kisses, and more on this morning’s radio show “Day 6.”

You can hear the pod cast here.

You go every day after school to see what kinds of candy you can buy. You examine the sizes, the varieties, the colors. You think very hard about what you like, what other kids like, what would be good to give to big kids and what would be fine for little kids.

You buy a little candy today, a little another day. You dump it all out on the floor each time you buy more. You admire it. You count it, you sort it, you think about whether you really have enough for all the kids.

You contemplate which kids might like which ones. You consider whether you should hand out these first or those, or whether you should mix them all up and just reach in and hand out which ever you grab.

You think about the candy in its big sack, in an unobtrusive corner. When other kids come over, you remember it but don’t mention it, because they might want some. And its not for eating. Not now.

You wait for Halloween to come. You wait and wait. You ask your Mom every day, how many weeks? How many days?

You might have to try one piece. Just one. After all, it’s your favorite.

It’s called Dr. Pepper Ten, and its NOT FOR WOMEN.

This is where marketing has taken us, people. A “manly” diet soda that surrounds itself with monster trucks and beefy plaid-clad pecs. The can looks like a bullet. Suck it up guys! 10 calories! That’s real stuff!

Manly man voice over: “Hey ladies. Enjoying the film? Of course not. Because this is our movie and this is our soda. You can keep the romantic comedies and lady drinks. We’re good.”

Over on Facebook, they won’t even let women onto their special man page.

Ten has real calories and 2 grams of real sugar, manly virile stuff. That regular Diet Dr. Pepper, with zero calories, is just so femmy, so frilly, so embarassing for a calorie-counting sort of guy.

Unfortunately, I can’t put the video of the commercial here, because everybody who has tried to upload it has been slammed by Dr. Pepper Snapple Group for copyright infringement. Which is kind of  a funny way to get the word out. Especially when the whole point of the campaign is to create social “buzz” and controversy (what! no women!)

How long do you think this product will last? I of course immediately think of another “not for women” line: Yorkie Chocolate Bar. Or, as we call it in my candy-discriminating household, Yukkie. After spitting it out, I concluded that it is not for women because women are too smart to eat such bad candy. As for Dr. Pepper Ten, well, I guess they’ll try anything.

This lawsuit is a shot fired across the bow of all those healthy looking processed foods that populate your grocery aisles. Read my take on fruit snack justice at TheAtlantic.com: The Candification of our  Food: The Case of the Fruitless Fruit Snack.