Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October/November 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October/November 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 6
The candy bar as we know it was born in America. So too, many centuries earlier, was chocolate itself. Mexican natives cultivated the cocoa bean for more than twenty-five hundred years before Hernán Cortés took it to Spain with him in 1528. Spanish royalty drank a cold, sweetened beverage made from the beans, but they liked it so much they kept it a secret from the rest of Europe for the remainder of the century. Not until the 1840s did a British firm, Fry and Sons, make the first chocolate bar. The candy bar, agglomerating a variety of flavors and textures—almost always including chocolate—in one piece, was a purely American invention, and it’s still not one hundred years old.
Milton Snavely Hershey, the father of the modern candy bar, had already built a successful business in caramels when he first saw German chocolate-making machines at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. He ordered some for his factory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and began turning out chocolate bars the next year. By the turn of the century he was through with caramels. He made not just plain chocolate and milk-chocolate bars but also innovative items like almond bars, kisses, and chocolate cigars. By 1911 his company had sales of five million dollars a year; by 1921 it was making four times that.
Such dazzling success begat swift competition, and soon a multitude of companies was making bars of chocolate combined with caramel, marshmallow, peanuts, crisped rice, and anything else that might sell. Perley G. Gerrish, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought out the first peanut bar, Squirrel Brand, in 1905. One of the first combination bars, with multiple ingredients, was the Goo Goo Cluster, concocted in a copper kettle in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1912, of caramel, marshmallow, peanuts, coconut, and milk chocolate. Its advertising identified it as “a nourishing lunch.” The Goo Goo Cluster is still sold today, as is another bar from 1912, the Nut Goodie, one of the pioneer nut rolls.
Throughout the first two decades of the century, a bewildering variety of candy bars appeared on shelves across the country, most of them fleetingly. There have probably been more than one hundred thousand different candy bars sold in the United States, including some thirty thousand that existed only in the years just after World War I. Nearly every confectioner in the land turned out a candy bar, choosing a name that might reflect a news or sports event, a popular hero, a food, a place, or even a popular saying of the age, like Boo-La or B’Gosh. If there was a classic recipe, it was the nut roll, made with a fudge center, caramel, peanuts, and an outer coating of chocolate. Baby Ruth, Oh Henry!, Love Nest, Old Nick, and Chicken Dinner all were popular nut rolls.
The industry began on the East Coast but quickly fanned out across the country. Since the basic ingredients were dairy products,