“Dream Sweets,” by Jeffrey Steingarten, was originally published in the October 2009 issue of Vogue.
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Whether you’re four or 40, it’s never too early to start planning for Halloween. And planning means candy. If you’re an average American, you consume a half-pound of candy a week, a good deal more around Halloween. If you’re a way subaverage American, you may be in trouble. Remember the study about ten years ago from the Harvard School of Public Health? People who eat candy live longer than people who eat none at all. Eat candy or die? No, the figures are not quite so dramatic as that. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Before you can stock up on candy, you need to know what candy is. As usual, square one is the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines candy as “crystallized sugar, made by repeated boiling and slow evaporation, more fully called sugar candy; also any confection made of, or incrusted with this.” Sounds sensible as far as it goes. But they left out the sweet part, the idea that candy is sweet. (Many sugars are not particularly sweet.) And that the sugar in candy is sometimes replaced by a nonnutritive sweetener, where nonnutritive means “noncaloric” (and is rarely successful at simulating candy). The U.S. Census Bureau, which counts candy as well as people, excludes cough drops, medicated candy, roasted peanuts, and unsweetened popcorn, and who could argue? It divides up the rest among chocolate confections, non-chocolate confections, and chewing gum. (I would also exclude pastries, but here the distinctions become sticky. True candy never requires you to eat it with utensils. I haven’t told you about my trip to Syria around a year ago; in Damascus, we visited Le Maison Pistache d’Alep, widely considered the greatest sweetshop in the Middle East. The confections were nearly all tiny pastries, beautifully made from the finest handmade phyllo dough you can imagine and filled with nuts, especially pistachios, dates, honey, and sugars. You eat these tiny gems by hand. Are they candy?) The Census Bureau divides non-chocolate confections into six categories: hard candy (such as sour balls, candy canes, lollipops, lemon drops, and brittles punctuated by nuts); chewy candy (such as caramel; toffee, which is stiffer than caramel; taffy; and nougat, grainy or smooth); soft candy (like fudge, candy corn, jellies, and gummy worms); iced or coated candy; panned candy (rolled in a circular pan to form a shell, as in jelly beans and Red Hots and jawbreakers and their cousins, which are nearly all shell—that is, many shells formed upon one another); and licorice (my favorite).
Or we can define candy as whatever they sell in candy stores. To my mind, there are four, maybe five, pivotal candy stores on the island of Manhattan. Of course, there’s Dylan’s. I would tell you all about Dylan’s if you didn’t already know all about Dylan’s. Founded a few years back by Dylan Lauren (Ralph’s daughter), this is the most perfect American candy store in existence, all three airy floors designed and decorated in the happiest possible manner, each clever, colorful detail conveying the deepest candy love imaginable. Most of the candy is in spotless Plexiglas bins, hundreds of them, and throughout the shop are fresh confections such as ice cream, sodas, a chocolate fountain. My only disappointment is the sadly inadequate licorice department. Nevertheless, Dylan’s remains a New York City landmark.
