Read Online True Confections by Katharine Weber - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Katharine Weber
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causing her to lose her balance a little. Then Frieda took another step back, and now she was at the edge of a worktable against the wall. All this happened in just an instant, a few seconds, and it was really nothing, but some tiny sense that there was something wrong kept me watching her. Sally Fernstein, one of the steadiest line workers at Zip’s, passed just then, pushing a stack of Tigermelt wrapper boxes on a dolly, and she eyed Frieda quizzically, also sensing something awry, then looked over at me with a raised eyebrow.
On the worktable behind Frieda was a coffee can (Maxwell House, I can see the blue can with that tilted cup in my mind’s eye even now) filled with small pliers and wrenches, greasy bolts and brads, pins and washers and screws, and stubs of little pencils, along with some pushpins and a couple of rolls of electrical tape and little springs and hinges and coils of wire and who knows what else. That can of essentials was part of our arsenal for keeping the ancient equipment chugging along for one more day (and of course it shouldn’t have been anywhere near an active production line, but hardly a day passes when something isn’t being tightened up or readjusted, if not flat-out jury-rigged, at some point in the shift).
Just as Petey Leventhal (who came to Zip’s in 1978, when Cadbury took over Peter Paul in Naugatuck) returned on cue, lugging the ten-gallon stainless-steel pail of hot fried peanutsand calling out, “Hot soup! Hot soup!” over the factory din the way he always did to clear his path to the batch table from our medieval-looking peanut fryer (it’s a repurposed vat originally designed for use in a poultry processing plant, when freshly electrocuted chickens are dipped briefly into boiling water to loosen the feathers before being processed through the plucking machine), I saw Frieda pick up the coffee can and peer blankly at the contents.
As Petey poured the peanuts into the mixture and I began stirring with a big wooden mixing paddle that looks like a small rowboat oar, and then Petey set down the empty pail and picked up his paddle and began stirring even more vigorously, Frieda (who should have been dabbing at the mixture by now as well with the third paddle), as if mimicking his gesture of pouring out the peanuts a moment before, emptied the contents of the coffee can into the mix in one big sweeping motion. Out of this cornucopia of hardware remnants came a cascade of nuts and bolts and screws and springs and cogs, all instantly deployed in a perfect parabolic wave across the surface of the peanut-studded Tigermelt nougat and caramel mixture. The metal pieces sank down and were instantly and inextricably bound into the cooling sweet and chewy, salty (we salt the fried peanuts) and crunchy secret blend that gives Tigermelts their irresistibly delicious Tigermelt taste. Most people can taste this core of the bar and recognize the Tigermelt identity instantly, even before the two applications of enrobing milk chocolate and the final dark-chocolate signature tiger stripe have been applied.
Why on earth did I do that? Frieda murmured under her breath before walking away from the batch table, still holding the empty coffee can. Petey and I just stood there for a moment and watched the shrapnel glistening in the blend, stupefied. Both of us had kept stirring for one more moment, as if keepingon with our routine could in some way override the reality of what had just happened. We had to shut down and throw away that entire batch, of course, and sterilize the batch table. When I told Howard what Frieda had done (he had been out on the Yale golf course with a grocery-chain buyer from New Jersey most of that afternoon), he laughed it off, and went around the rest of the day singing an adaptation of that pernicious and effective Peter Paul jingle, so his version was about how sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes a bolt. But we both knew it was a turning point, even if no one ever
On the worktable behind Frieda was a coffee can (Maxwell House, I can see the blue can with that tilted cup in my mind’s eye even now) filled with small pliers and wrenches, greasy bolts and brads, pins and washers and screws, and stubs of little pencils, along with some pushpins and a couple of rolls of electrical tape and little springs and hinges and coils of wire and who knows what else. That can of essentials was part of our arsenal for keeping the ancient equipment chugging along for one more day (and of course it shouldn’t have been anywhere near an active production line, but hardly a day passes when something isn’t being tightened up or readjusted, if not flat-out jury-rigged, at some point in the shift).
Just as Petey Leventhal (who came to Zip’s in 1978, when Cadbury took over Peter Paul in Naugatuck) returned on cue, lugging the ten-gallon stainless-steel pail of hot fried peanutsand calling out, “Hot soup! Hot soup!” over the factory din the way he always did to clear his path to the batch table from our medieval-looking peanut fryer (it’s a repurposed vat originally designed for use in a poultry processing plant, when freshly electrocuted chickens are dipped briefly into boiling water to loosen the feathers before being processed through the plucking machine), I saw Frieda pick up the coffee can and peer blankly at the contents.
As Petey poured the peanuts into the mixture and I began stirring with a big wooden mixing paddle that looks like a small rowboat oar, and then Petey set down the empty pail and picked up his paddle and began stirring even more vigorously, Frieda (who should have been dabbing at the mixture by now as well with the third paddle), as if mimicking his gesture of pouring out the peanuts a moment before, emptied the contents of the coffee can into the mix in one big sweeping motion. Out of this cornucopia of hardware remnants came a cascade of nuts and bolts and screws and springs and cogs, all instantly deployed in a perfect parabolic wave across the surface of the peanut-studded Tigermelt nougat and caramel mixture. The metal pieces sank down and were instantly and inextricably bound into the cooling sweet and chewy, salty (we salt the fried peanuts) and crunchy secret blend that gives Tigermelts their irresistibly delicious Tigermelt taste. Most people can taste this core of the bar and recognize the Tigermelt identity instantly, even before the two applications of enrobing milk chocolate and the final dark-chocolate signature tiger stripe have been applied.
Why on earth did I do that? Frieda murmured under her breath before walking away from the batch table, still holding the empty coffee can. Petey and I just stood there for a moment and watched the shrapnel glistening in the blend, stupefied. Both of us had kept stirring for one more moment, as if keepingon with our routine could in some way override the reality of what had just happened. We had to shut down and throw away that entire batch, of course, and sterilize the batch table. When I told Howard what Frieda had done (he had been out on the Yale golf course with a grocery-chain buyer from New Jersey most of that afternoon), he laughed it off, and went around the rest of the day singing an adaptation of that pernicious and effective Peter Paul jingle, so his version was about how sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes a bolt. But we both knew it was a turning point, even if no one ever
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