Candy

Audiences loved the romanticized fantasy version of Paris to be found in the movie Amelie. It was saturated with color, filled with quirky personality and a timelessness that made it seem charmingly old-fashioned and modern all at once. If Amelie was a candy shop, it would be Miette Confiserie.

Imagine a shop with large apothecary jars filled with old time candies you might remember from your childhood like cinnamon red hots, sanded lemon drops, and Swedish fish. Added to the bulk candies are those little tins of foil-wrapped chocolate sardines, chocolate bars, lollipops, even packages of pop rocks.

Looking for something more deluxe? There are handmade caramels, a good selection of foil-wrapped chocolates and chocolate bars and imported marzipan in addition to packages of freshly made cookies from the Miette bakery. There is also a lot of licorice if that's your vice.

Wednesday was a special day in my house when I was a child.  My father was (and still is) a pharmacist.  To help make ends meet, he worked a second job on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons at a local drug store instead of his usual 9-5 gig at the area hospital. Thirty years ago being a pharmacist didn’t bring in the big bucks it does today and with four kids, he had his hands full. He was never home until long after dinner on Wednesdays and we were always excited for his return, partly because he brought with him our weekly chocolate treat – plain M&Ms.

I love chocolate.  I have always loved chocolate.  I have lived my life by the principle,  So much chocolate, so little time.  The expansiveness of my love of chocolate is such that it would be impossible for me to name a favorite – it would be like asking me to pick a favorite among my children. (Or maybe not exactly like that; after all, I only have one child). 

On the other hand, if you asked me to name three of my favorite chocolate moments: Life begins with Hershey's kisses and chocolate bars, in my case, Nestle's Crunch, Three Musketeers, Milky Way, Cup-O-Gold (a chocolate shell with embedded cocoanut, filled with a gooey white cream that was supposedly marshmallow but tasted like the residue of some lab experiment gone terribly wrong) and, most significantly, the Mounds Bar. 

Candy has been a bond between me and my pal Joy since we first became best friends in sixth grade at Beverly Vista Elementary School in Beverly Hills, California.   Sure, there’s been humor, loyalty, shared heart-throbs, and tears…but from the get-go, there were shared Nestle Crunch candy bars filled with crinkly chocolate that we bought every day as we walked home from school together.  It became a ritual, peeling off the blue and white wrapper, then the foil, and eating the crunchy bar while hysterically laughing over some inside joke that was funny only to ourselves.  But it was better that way.