It all started when we got a delivery of corn syrup. I worked in a seaside candy kitchen, and we had a tank suspended from the ceiling about the size of a tanker truck you would see hauling fuel on I-95. A lot of corn syrup goes into your candy.
One of those tanker trucks showed up to refill our corn syrup, and the driver and his assistant hung out with us while the viscous liquid pumped.
“That’s a monster hose,” my boss absent-mindedly observed, after they hooked up the connection.
“That’s what we call Sid,” my part-time professional wrestler coworker chimed in. “Monster Hose.”
Suddenly we all had nicknames, and our workspace became the Big Dick Kitchen: Monster Hose, Jimmy Three Legs, ShhLong and Needle-D**k the Bug F***er (the wrestler tended toward self-deprecation), among others.
There’s also a lot of sugar in your candy. My first summer working there, my day off was Tuesday. Tuesday was the sugar delivery day. My next five years there, Tuesday was not my day off. We would get deliveries of, quite literally, tons of sugar. It came in 100-pound bags, and we had to rotate the stock, which meant removing the remaining 100-pound sugar bags before stacking the new ones.
After carrying a good fifty bags of white sugar off the truck, we started with the 100-pound bags of brown sugar. The wrestler said, “Good thing this is LIGHT brown sugar.”
The recipes were all written by the “Old Guy,” who only came in for a month before the summer season and a month after. Not that he needed to. He used to work for the New England Confectionery Company (which recently produced its one-trillionth NECCO Wafer). One year during the depression, his boss called him in and said, “There’s no money for bonuses or raises this year. But because we value you, we’re giving you some [worthless] shares in the Boston Celtics.” The Old Guy used to go to the Boston Garden every day after work and sweep the floors, take out the garbage, whatever he could do as a volunteer to tend his worthless investment.
Then a guy called Red Auerbach moved to Beantown and the Old Guy became a multi-millionaire.
The wrestler walked me through the recipes. I remember him saying, “This one calls for 6-to-8 ounces of shortening, but I like to use 7, give or take an ounce.”
There was also an Old Lady. She owned the place, but her kids and grandchildren ran it, because she was ancient and getting senile. “Ma Perkins*” we called her. One day a local police cruiser pulled up out front, and the patrolman said over his loudspeaker, “Ma Perkins – that’s my gal!” If you’ve never seen a 90-year-old blush, it’s a hoot.
One year, I was her midday personal assistant and would fetch her lunch from the seafood restaurant at the other end of the boardwalk. Always the same thing: fish sandwich and hot water with lime. Hot water with lime.
What a crew. Besides the wrestler, I worked with one guy whose family had settled the town in 1640 and considered everyone who came after an interloper; a drug dealer; a born-again evangelist; an adult film aficionado; and a compulsive liar who would tell us about the ladies he was flying in from Greece on his candy-store salary. And me, pretty much all of the above.
Apparently they used to make ice cream 100 years ago, but that space was now occupied by the “dipping room,” where candies are hand-dipped in one of three kinds of chocolate. It’s an art to observe. And also the only air-conditioned space in an open-flame summer kitchen, so I frequently checked their chocolate and cocoa butter levels.
There was a blower above the main cooking station, which blew the air out to the front of the store on the boardwalk. When we had time, we would boil a little of the flavoring the guys were processing in the taffy before the crowd, so the potential customers would smell what they were seeing. But in the height of the season, we didn’t have time for that. Once the Old Lady said to the Old Guy, “Where’s the smell?” He was way too busy, so he said, “Where’s the smell? I’ll give you the smell!” peed in a kettle, and sent the boiling fumes through the blower.
Ma Perkins would open the door to the kitchen once in a while to show someone what she remembered to be the operation. We would all shout in unison, “Taffy, ice cream, doggie’s out back!”
Old Ma Perkins couldn’t lift her head, so anything above eye level was out-of-sight, out-of-mind. My boss used to take naps on top of the huge pile of sugar bags, where she couldn’t see him. The one time I saw her bend her whole body to raise her line of vision was when she walked by our kitchen radio – inevitably tuned to WBCN – right when the Wooba Gooba declared, “Open up the door, BITCH!” That became our informal shorthand for “Ma Perkins is around – be careful.”
This kitchen has also been written up in the literary magazine of Bowdoin College. That was Jimmy Three Legs.
* Pseudonym.
