America’s Whitman

The candy, not the poet, silly. It’s the diamond jubilee of that great breakthrough in chocolate munching, the “indexed” Whitman Sampler box that discouraged faint-palated scroungers from pinching candies to avoid a detested filling.
 
Civilization inches forward by just such tiny increments. So hooray (and slurp) for Walter P. Sharp, who got the bright idea (one year after he inaugurated his presidency of the company with “Fussy Package for Fastidious Folks”) of the sampler from a treasured family heirloom.
 
It was a savvy bit of marketing as well, for thus could chocoholics sample candies from all the firm’s lines. Another Sharp idea: protect the freshness with the new cellophane, making his company the largest single user of the stuff in the 1920s.
 
In 1939, those canny marketers appealed ever so delicately to the national lust with the notorious slogan: “A woman never forgets a man who remembers.” Then, not so delicately, they unleashed movie star testimonials through the Saturday Evening Post in the 1940s and ‘50s. But new ploys are needed today as women have displaced men as the primary Sampler samplers.
 
The lore unleashed by Pet, Inc. (St. Louis), which gobbled up our local sweet-talkers (54 new boxes are confected every 60 seconds at the ten-acre factory in Northeast Philly), is as tasty as a Hershey almond bar (whoops, sorry, Pets). Blame the Aztecs for your benign obsession, for they started concocting a cold, bitter drink from local cocoa beans a thousand years ago.
 
Since they regarded it as a special gift from their great god Quetzalcoatl, they dubbed it Xocolatl (choc-coat-el). Only the Aztec upper classes got to sip. It was regarded as aphrodisiacal, so much so that the priapic-hoping-Montezuma was alleged to imbibe 50 golden goblets a day of the stuff.
 
Lots of good it did him when Cortez showed up; that conquistador was always after things to get him on the good side of Carlos V, so before you could say “Xocolatl” three times, the Spaniards had added hot water and sugar to make Europe’s favorite new drink. Uppity aristoi opened chocolate houses across Europe to quaff the new craze.
 
But it remained for those mass-market-seeking Brits to invent the chocolate bar in 1847. The culprits were a firm called Fry and Sons. Cavity Emptor, they didn’t warn, and British teeth have been marginal ever since. In 1876, those mollifying Swiss added milk chocolate.
 
The caloric disasters could have been predicted: The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that last year Americans stuffed themselves with 2.3 billion pounds of the brown gold, for a rake of $4.8 billion. There’s even a “Chocolate of the Month” club for those whose tastes are more unappeasable than selective.
 
So much a memorial nougat for Stephen F. Whitman, whose patriotism prompted him in 1842 to open a confectionary and fruit shop on a Delaware River wharf to “compete with French candymakers.” Eat American during the jubilee, compatriots. Swiss bash. Boycott Cadbury’s, cads.
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, February 10, 1988