Spice Drops

Hello, no audience at all except for the ultra-clever Chris,
One of my favorite candies is the spice drop. They should be rife with intense spicy goodness. Unfortunately some manufacturers mean "small gumdrops" when they call their product spice drops. They are usually pretty generic, too; you'll mostly find packages of spice drops under the aegis of the grocery store's private brand. It's a crap shoot as to what flavors will be in them.

If you want the REAL spice drop, Walgreens store brand has them. The orange ones are clove, the red are cinnamon, the green are spearmint, the white are peppermint, the purple/black ones are licorice and the yellow ones are, uh, sugar water? furniture polish? Not sure. Not lemon. If they are supposed to be lemon, they've failed. Maybe they're palate cleansers so you can taste the other spices. But in general, the Walgreens spice drops are authentic.

I like cherry gumdrops and lime ones and orange ones. But they aren't spice drops. Just sayin'. I don't know why the spicier candies seem to be disappearing. You can still get Hot Tamales. There's the spicy goodness of the clove-flavored Necco wafer. Americans seem to like their flavors sweet and not too intense. You don't see the unfortunately named horehound drops much, the C. Howards Violet pastilles are a curiosity and banana flavored things are now limited to ice cream, yogurt and cereals. The other day I bought root beer barrels (also at Walgreens, the last bastion of "older" candies) and I had forgotten how good they are. (Rootbeer, just as a sidebar here, is made with cardamon (that's the flavor you taste in graham crackers) and licorice. Most people in the U.S. don't know this but in other countries around the world these flavors seem obvious.)

I used to take care of the candy aisle at several Walgreens (Wags as the boys on Wall Street call them) and I admit a bit of prejudice in their favor (they were okay to work for but my fondness for them stems more from the fact that they carry items one used to get at the five and dime store of my youth- Rit dye, shoe polish, needles and thread, oil of clove for the toothache, sweet oil for the ear ache, ipecac for nausea (eww, don't try it though- it induces almost immediate vomiting), shoe laces, coloring books, single popsicles playing cards, poker chips, corn cob pipes, plastic ash trays, pipe cleaners etc etc). They are the last bastion of brick-and-mortar stores that sell genuine old candy.

For example, those pink and white peppermint/wintergreen thick pastilles that your grandma had in a candy dish in the living room? You can find them at Walgreens. Butterscotch discs? Yep. The classic red and white peppermint discs? Uh,huh. The almost pyramidal (and I don't believe I'M saying this) overly sweet chocolate (?) covered cream drops? Yeah. And they're as cloying as ever. My grandpa loved them. Walgreens still sells Clove gum and sometimes you can find Teaberry or Blackjack there, too. Their gum section is pretty complete.

In another world, I am selling penny candy, coffee and books/newspapers/magazines at a little store in a medium sized town. My store has the very old (turn of the century) candy dots on paper, peas and carrots (candy shaped like peas and little square carrot pieces), chocolate babies, roasted nuts (in a warm delicious smelling display roaster), white nougat jewel candy, iced gumdrop squares, French burnt peanuts (Wags has them), Boston baked beans (Wags again), Neapolitan squares- like the old Brach's displays used to have, chick-o-stix, french vanilla taffy, Ruth Hunt Blue Monday bars, the Australian delicacies of the Violet Crumble, the Banana Milky Way, the Strawberry Milky Way), Cherry Humps, Hay stack candy in chocolate and coconut, sour balls, sugar eggs with the picture inside, bridge mix (Wags again- although it's a bit different now), candy cigarettes, Callard and Bowser toffee and licorice, sherbet fountains, malted milk balls, candy sticks in all flavors and much more.

You want a copy of Der Spiegel? We got it. London Book Review? Yep. French Vogue? Mais, oui. The American Scholar? It's in that corner over there by the imported cigarettes, right where the Princeton Review is, see it? A copy of The Taming of the Shrew? Right by that display of Gerard Manly Hopkins' poetry books, see? Right there. Rod McKuen? Get the fuck out of my store, Bub.