There is a nice website called Hometown Favorites, which markets grocery items from around the country: items that are generally only available locally. In Rhode Island, for example, we’re talking about Eclipse Coffee Syrup, and Kenyon’s Clam Cake Mix, and New England Frozen Lemonade (sorry, kids, I don’t like Del’s).
And sometimes I long for the candy bars of my Pacific Northwest childhood, and Hometown Favorites has them.
They have Mountain Bars. They have Rocky Road bars (my favorites: chocolate-covered marshmallow bars, with bits of cashew in the chocolate). They have Zero bars (white chocolate). They have bags of Brach’s Chocolate Stars, which, inexplicably, you can’t buy in the Northeast.
And they have the Idaho Spud.
What? You've never heard of it? It’s only “the candy bar that made Idaho famous.” It’s made in Boise (I checked the wrapper), by the Idaho Candy Company. It’s an ovoid-shaped bar, rather like a used bar of soap, and it has a nubbly chocolate-coconut coating. The inside is marshmallow mixed with something else I've never quite figured out. I gave an Idaho Spud to a coworker not long ago, and she described it this way: “The outside was delicious. The inside was – just flavorless. Like a husk.”
And yet: I still buy them, five or ten at a time, and I eat them, or I give them away. I tell people: “Even if you don’t like the candy bar, the wrapper is a novelty.”
But, sincerely, I like them. They remind me of my childhood, for one thing. And there’s something profoundly simple about that brown wrapper. And I like giving them to people who’ve never seen them before, who invariably say: “What is this thing?”
Why, it’s an Idaho Spud, you silly goose.
Just close your eyes and surrender to the experience.
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