Salt Water Taffy
For the lucky, summertime is vacation time. From mountain lodge to shore house, from tent to resort, Americans hit the road (and the rails and the skies) in July and August. For those who have them, second homes beckon, and if the destination is a stay with friends or relatives, that’s the best kind of second home. In an earlier America, entire destinations grew out of the practice of summer vacation: places where families descended, often en masse, with local economies dependent on those few weeks of intense activity, plus whatever tourist trade role rolled in during the off season. Downtown America used to be defined by these places, and the trip between them – ideally behind the wheel of a Detroit automobile -- became a patchwork of the American experience.
Each town developed a specialty or two to attract tourists. Some attractions, such as Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, were large scale. Some, such as the Home of Little League or the Artichoke Festival, were more modest. There were specialty playgrounds for adults (Las Vegas), spring breakers (Fort Lauderdale), even movie stars (Palm Springs). Some, such as the Ozarks and Indian Country, were specialized to local culture. Places had their own distinct character – a quality that in our largely homogenized contemporary society we have sacrificed – and that “local color” painted the portrait of America, in everything from slide shows and souvenirs to scrapbooks and great American novels.
If the true goal of vacation time was to See the USA in all of its expressions, it is not a stretch to state that Americans are particularly drawn to beaches. New England’s craggy shorelines offer lighthouse points from witchy Salem to seafaring Mystic. Southern shores range from the tidewater to the outer banks, from coral beaches to the gulf coast. Miami went up on a shoreline, as did other great American cities from New Orleans to San Francisco, Seattle to Anchorage, Chicago to Saint Louis. For the Great Lakes have shores, as do our mighty rivers. A highway dedicated to the Pacific coast travels alongside it from Mexican border to Canadian. Shoreline is so important to America that our fiftieth state is comprised of islands.
In the middle Atlantic, the shorelines gave us Baltimore, Boston, New York City. Coney Island became the playground for New York City, as those citizens who didn’t vacation on the Island or up the Hudson swelled city beaches to capacity. And along the legendary Jersey Shore, amid the painted ladies along boulevards and their more modest suitors along side streets, grew the grandest of American playgrounds: Atlantic City.
Anyone’s who’s played a game of Monopoly knows that the Boardwalk is the costliest piece of real estate in Atlantic City. It was the intersection of two other properties on that board – the railroads – that first brought vacationers to Atlantic City, but it was the beach that attracted them there. It was also the beach that provided Atlantic City with its signature attraction. The first boardwalk was built in Atlantic City in an effort to keep beach sand out of the hotel lobbies. Though it had been an important tourist destination since the mid-nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century, Atlantic City had become one of the most famous and priciest resort towns in America.
The boardwalk stretched for seven miles, and along it were to be found everything from costly hotels and casinos to penny arcades and, once Prohibition hit, speakeasies. There were also merchants of more genteel vices, from ice cream parlours to candy stores. It was in the latter that, as the story goes, salt water taffy was created. For if you can count on encountering recreation and renewal on a stroll along the boardwalk, you can also count on encountering sea spray and the occasional squall.
It was during the latter in 1883 that a candy shop along the boardwalk was flooded. The proprietor, David Bradley, was open for business even as he surveyed the damage. The traditional story is that a girl came in to buy some taffy. Bradley jokingly said that he had “salt water taffy,” referring to the supply of taffy that had been drenched during the storm. The girl tried some, and then bought a supply to take to her friends on the beach. Bradley’s mother was in the back of the shop during the transaction, and after the child left, she tried the “salt water taffy” and liked both the candy and the name. And so, at least popularly, was salt water taffy born.
No one particularly disputes the story and so Bradley, in partnership with the Atlantic Ocean, gets the credit for inventing salt water taffy. He sold his taffy from a stand on the boardwalk, wrapped in wax paper to make the sticky pieces of candy easy to dispense. Bradley’s taffy was a popular treat along the Atlantic City boardwalk, and it was specific to the Atlantic City boardwalk. In this way, it was not unlike any other localized food tradition in America, from hot-sweets to green chiles. Bradley was content that business was good, and there is no record of him patenting the formula for his confection, or registering the name as a trademark. In part, this may have been because the word taffy, in the popular use of the day, referred to almost any candy; he may have thought that there was nothing particularly notable about his confection outside of the business it generated. Indeed, in local parlance, the confection was known interchangably as “salt water taffy,” “ocean wave taffy,” and “sea foam.”
The business person credited with recognizing the potential of salt water taffy beyond the vendor’s cart was Joseph Fralinger. Fralinger was a successful confectioner whose candy shop still does business on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Having noticed the traffic at Bradley’s taffy cart and, one extrapolates, discerned that Bradley had not sought to legally protect his invention, Fralinger began manufacturing the candy. He recognized the appeal of the candy as something one could only obtain in Atlantic City, and so he began boxing the candy and selling it as a souvenir. A third confectioner, Enoch James, got in on the action by refining the recipe to make it less sticky by mechanizing the pulling process. Finally, an individual did trademark the term “salt water taffy,” and then demanded royalties for usage of the name. He was countersued by candy concerns, and in 1925, the Supreme Court ruled that the name “salt water taffy” had been in popular usage too long for any individual to claim the right to royalties from it.
Both Fralinger’s and James’ shops offered window views of workers making the taffy. Taffy is cooked in copper kettles and cooled on chilled marble slabs. Once it can be safely handled, the taffy is moved from the slab to a large hook on the candy kitchen’s wall. The blob of taffy is pulled in a long loop that is then folded back onto the hook and then repulled. This continues for several pulls until the aerated taffy glistens. The pulled taffy is returned to the marble slap where it is rolled into a long rope and hand cut into bite-sized pieces. The pieces are wrapped in that selfsame waxed paper and twisted at both ends.
Today, outside of private candy-making kitchens, salt water taffy contains no salt water. It contains sugar, cornstarch, corn syrup, butter, water, salt, flavoring, coloring and glycerin. Small individual producers of salt water taffy have emerged, and localized versions of the candy have arisen in San Francisco and Salt Lake City. Still, home base for the confection remains the Jersey Shore. When John and I were living on the east coast, no overnighter in Atlantic City was ever complete without a visit to Fralinger and James to load up on those hand-cut pieces, still priced by the pound. My favorite flavors are orange, licorice and molasses; John’s, lemon and lime. In Los Angeles, the candy bins at Rocket Fizz and the candy stalls at the Farmers Market contain the western version of the taffy. It’s good, but perhaps for reasons as simple as sentiment, for me salt water taffy does and ever shall belong to the Jersey Shore. It’s born of the same resourcefulness from which the Middle Atlantic is rebuilding after another major storm washed ashore last autumn - making first contact in Atlantic City. Salt water taffy is an expression of both the work and the leisure of the Jersey Shore, and it exemplifies in the sweetest, saltiest, chewiest way possible the endangered American treasure of local color.
Each town developed a specialty or two to attract tourists. Some attractions, such as Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, were large scale. Some, such as the Home of Little League or the Artichoke Festival, were more modest. There were specialty playgrounds for adults (Las Vegas), spring breakers (Fort Lauderdale), even movie stars (Palm Springs). Some, such as the Ozarks and Indian Country, were specialized to local culture. Places had their own distinct character – a quality that in our largely homogenized contemporary society we have sacrificed – and that “local color” painted the portrait of America, in everything from slide shows and souvenirs to scrapbooks and great American novels.
If the true goal of vacation time was to See the USA in all of its expressions, it is not a stretch to state that Americans are particularly drawn to beaches. New England’s craggy shorelines offer lighthouse points from witchy Salem to seafaring Mystic. Southern shores range from the tidewater to the outer banks, from coral beaches to the gulf coast. Miami went up on a shoreline, as did other great American cities from New Orleans to San Francisco, Seattle to Anchorage, Chicago to Saint Louis. For the Great Lakes have shores, as do our mighty rivers. A highway dedicated to the Pacific coast travels alongside it from Mexican border to Canadian. Shoreline is so important to America that our fiftieth state is comprised of islands.
In the middle Atlantic, the shorelines gave us Baltimore, Boston, New York City. Coney Island became the playground for New York City, as those citizens who didn’t vacation on the Island or up the Hudson swelled city beaches to capacity. And along the legendary Jersey Shore, amid the painted ladies along boulevards and their more modest suitors along side streets, grew the grandest of American playgrounds: Atlantic City.
Anyone’s who’s played a game of Monopoly knows that the Boardwalk is the costliest piece of real estate in Atlantic City. It was the intersection of two other properties on that board – the railroads – that first brought vacationers to Atlantic City, but it was the beach that attracted them there. It was also the beach that provided Atlantic City with its signature attraction. The first boardwalk was built in Atlantic City in an effort to keep beach sand out of the hotel lobbies. Though it had been an important tourist destination since the mid-nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century, Atlantic City had become one of the most famous and priciest resort towns in America.
The boardwalk stretched for seven miles, and along it were to be found everything from costly hotels and casinos to penny arcades and, once Prohibition hit, speakeasies. There were also merchants of more genteel vices, from ice cream parlours to candy stores. It was in the latter that, as the story goes, salt water taffy was created. For if you can count on encountering recreation and renewal on a stroll along the boardwalk, you can also count on encountering sea spray and the occasional squall.
It was during the latter in 1883 that a candy shop along the boardwalk was flooded. The proprietor, David Bradley, was open for business even as he surveyed the damage. The traditional story is that a girl came in to buy some taffy. Bradley jokingly said that he had “salt water taffy,” referring to the supply of taffy that had been drenched during the storm. The girl tried some, and then bought a supply to take to her friends on the beach. Bradley’s mother was in the back of the shop during the transaction, and after the child left, she tried the “salt water taffy” and liked both the candy and the name. And so, at least popularly, was salt water taffy born.
No one particularly disputes the story and so Bradley, in partnership with the Atlantic Ocean, gets the credit for inventing salt water taffy. He sold his taffy from a stand on the boardwalk, wrapped in wax paper to make the sticky pieces of candy easy to dispense. Bradley’s taffy was a popular treat along the Atlantic City boardwalk, and it was specific to the Atlantic City boardwalk. In this way, it was not unlike any other localized food tradition in America, from hot-sweets to green chiles. Bradley was content that business was good, and there is no record of him patenting the formula for his confection, or registering the name as a trademark. In part, this may have been because the word taffy, in the popular use of the day, referred to almost any candy; he may have thought that there was nothing particularly notable about his confection outside of the business it generated. Indeed, in local parlance, the confection was known interchangably as “salt water taffy,” “ocean wave taffy,” and “sea foam.”
The business person credited with recognizing the potential of salt water taffy beyond the vendor’s cart was Joseph Fralinger. Fralinger was a successful confectioner whose candy shop still does business on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Having noticed the traffic at Bradley’s taffy cart and, one extrapolates, discerned that Bradley had not sought to legally protect his invention, Fralinger began manufacturing the candy. He recognized the appeal of the candy as something one could only obtain in Atlantic City, and so he began boxing the candy and selling it as a souvenir. A third confectioner, Enoch James, got in on the action by refining the recipe to make it less sticky by mechanizing the pulling process. Finally, an individual did trademark the term “salt water taffy,” and then demanded royalties for usage of the name. He was countersued by candy concerns, and in 1925, the Supreme Court ruled that the name “salt water taffy” had been in popular usage too long for any individual to claim the right to royalties from it.
Both Fralinger’s and James’ shops offered window views of workers making the taffy. Taffy is cooked in copper kettles and cooled on chilled marble slabs. Once it can be safely handled, the taffy is moved from the slab to a large hook on the candy kitchen’s wall. The blob of taffy is pulled in a long loop that is then folded back onto the hook and then repulled. This continues for several pulls until the aerated taffy glistens. The pulled taffy is returned to the marble slap where it is rolled into a long rope and hand cut into bite-sized pieces. The pieces are wrapped in that selfsame waxed paper and twisted at both ends.
Today, outside of private candy-making kitchens, salt water taffy contains no salt water. It contains sugar, cornstarch, corn syrup, butter, water, salt, flavoring, coloring and glycerin. Small individual producers of salt water taffy have emerged, and localized versions of the candy have arisen in San Francisco and Salt Lake City. Still, home base for the confection remains the Jersey Shore. When John and I were living on the east coast, no overnighter in Atlantic City was ever complete without a visit to Fralinger and James to load up on those hand-cut pieces, still priced by the pound. My favorite flavors are orange, licorice and molasses; John’s, lemon and lime. In Los Angeles, the candy bins at Rocket Fizz and the candy stalls at the Farmers Market contain the western version of the taffy. It’s good, but perhaps for reasons as simple as sentiment, for me salt water taffy does and ever shall belong to the Jersey Shore. It’s born of the same resourcefulness from which the Middle Atlantic is rebuilding after another major storm washed ashore last autumn - making first contact in Atlantic City. Salt water taffy is an expression of both the work and the leisure of the Jersey Shore, and it exemplifies in the sweetest, saltiest, chewiest way possible the endangered American treasure of local color.
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