Steinhauer - Treat yourself: 70 classic snacks you loved as a kid (and still love today)

Copyright 2014 by Jennifer Steinhauer
Photographs copyright 2014 by James Ransom

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steinhauer, Jennifer.
Treat yourself : 70 classic snacks you loved as a kid (and still love today) / Jennifer Steinhauer ; photographs by James Ransom. First edition.
p. cm
Includes index.
1. Desserts. 2. Snack foods. I. Title.
TX773.S838 2014
641.86dc23 2013032509

ISBN 978-0-385-34520-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34521-7

Cover design by Rae Ann Spitzenberger
Cover photographs by James Ransom

v3.1

For Americans of a certain age, memory lane is paved with Ho Hos. This coiled snack cake was my gateway commercial confection in the 1970s, tucked into my lunch next to a wax paperwrapped peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich and some immediately discarded green grapes.

I would eat my Ho Hos with some slightly warm milk, courtesy of the unsmiling lunch lady, whom I would run into later in life in an unsavory darts bar in my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Sometimes I traded my Ho Hos for Ding Dongs, the hockey puckshaped treats that struck me as an acceptable alternative to my workingmans tiny bche de Nol.

I moved on to Twinkies, purchased by my dad at the 7-Eleven with a Mad magazine (mine) and a pack of Merit Lights (his). I sat in the car, listening to Olivia Newton-John on the radio, singing along and waiting for him to return and toss me my bounty. As we made our way down Kilgore Road, the car would slowly fill with a cloud of smoke as I pulled at the cellophane wrapper and began to flip through my magazine, absentmindedly singing along to Olivia.

The Twinkie was later followed by the Suzy Q, a monstrosity of cream-stuffed devils food cake that was forever tainted after Dad used one to conceal a giant bolus of penicillin. By high school, I was a junk food connoisseur, carefully putting together midday meals curated largely by Hostess. In between the scarfed snack cakes, there were plenty of other confections, of course: Oreos eaten sandwich cream first; Thin Mints that we waited for all year, sold door-to-door and by actual Girl Scouts (not by parents at the office, as is so often the case these days); chocolate-covered marshmallows that my mother hid for herself. And Windmill cookies. But who really liked those? Well, Dad did.

If there was even the seed of a notion in my parents heads that chemically stabilized, highly caloric snack foods were perhaps a suboptimal regular addition to our diets, it was never expressed. But a midwestern childhood in the 1980s was largely absent parental dietary laws. When in grade school, we rode our bikes wherever we wanted until the sun began to fade and it seemed wise to get home, or until someone fell and needed a Band-Aid. After school, we watched Guiding Light or The Brady Bunch and then mulled over doing homework that no parent would review. We ate Honey Buns at will.

I grew up, and Twinkies slowly disappeared from my life, along with sloe gin and takeout hamburgers and French fries dipped in mayonnaise. Adults did not, in my view, lick the center out of a cupcake in public. Still, my passions remained under the surface, a fire I could not put out!

When I learned that Hostess had filed for bankruptcy protection, signaling the potential demise of my former lunchtime treats, I began to wonder if I could emulate Hostess snack cakes, as well as a variety of other much-loved junk food from my pastfrom Twinkies to Honey Buns to Fritos to Junior Mintsright in my own kitchen. I began with the classic Twinkie, and I purchased the truly extraneous baking closet item, the canoe pan, which conveniently comes with a handy cream injector. I was stunned and tickled to realize it was possible to re-create this snack treat almost to perfection with very few steps.

The next project was the cupcakes, Hostesss most popular snack cake, one that finds its chocolate base in cocoa and ends with a boiled chocolate ganache that, once cooled and applied, will not quite peel back like plastic, as does the original, but will rather slither onto the tongue in a bittersweet jig. I also tried my hand at homemade Oreos, as well as another childhood favorite, Fritos, which my husband, who is from Texas, spent his childhood eating in their most delightful form: in the bag with chili poured on topthe Frito pie, preferably eaten in the stands at a Little League game.

I would chronicle this culinary adventure in the New York Times , where I have been a reporter for almost two decades, and was astounded by reader response, both in the elegiac musings about snack foods past and in the surprising enthusiasm for making such treats at home. I suspect much of the avidity stemmed from the general nostalgia sparked by foods from our youth, and from a bit of regional pride. The sugary film of fruit pie frosting transports me to my friend Carolyns house, where I would chow down while doing geometry homework and catching peeks at her hot older brother, who was recently, and excitingly in my view, expelled from school. I would learn from readers about the potato chips that made track meets bearable, the candy bars eaten only at the movies, the Funyuns that were devoured only at a boyfriends house because they were not permitted at home.

Snack foods, of course, have always given Americans pleasure, or at least since the late nineteenth century, when Cracker Jack got its start; through the 1930s, when potato chips hit the scene; and on through World War II, when commercial packaging advances turned local treats into regional and, eventually, national sensations. Still, specific traditions endured. The South had its MoonPies. The people of Philadelphia alone could claim Tastykakes, and Hydrox cookies were the kosher choice over Oreos at one time. Snack foods are cultural totems that place their consumer in regions and time frames, in memories good and difficult.

I have worked at the New York Times my entire journalism career. I began as a copy girl in college, then became a news clerk in a reporting training program, and in 1995 graduated to full-time reporter, eventually covering Capitol Hill. In most of these positions, I often snuck my love of food into my day job, writing regularly for the food section and the New York Times Magazine about restaurants, ingredients, food trends, and dining culture.