No thanks for sweets tasting like turkey dinner
IN THE annals of controversial American food one offering is staking a new claim for the most memorable – a Thanksgiving dinner in a bag of sweets.
Brach’s Turkey Dinner Candy Corn promises to deliver a “full course meal” with flavours including roasted turkey, green beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce, apple pie and coffee.
One dietician suggested its makers deserved a “special place in hell” and called it an “unrepentant violation of the Geneva Convention”.
My six-year-old son looked delighted as I gave him a packet of the pyramid-shaped candies for an early Thanksgiving dinner. But his joy soon turned to face-contorting disgust.
“Eeew, bad,” he exclaimed after trying a “roasted turkey” sweet, and giving it back half-chewed. After nibbling a rather putrid looking “green bean” candy he couldn’t even speak. Just a thumbs down.
I started with a “cranberry sauce” sweet, which tasted like hours-old bubblegum, and it went downhill from then on. Every sweet had a strange mushy texture – something to do with insect secretions being used in the mix apparently. And the “green bean” leaves a grassy after-taste that seems unlikely to go away until Christmas.
Still, someone must love them because the sweets are flying off the shelves. The first two shops I tried were out of stock – six weeks ahead of the holiday. “It sold out too fast,” said one shop assistant. The apparent popularity of the sweets is a mystery. They have received brutal reviews such as the one by Heather Martin, a Texas-based dietician, which was widely shared on Twitter this week.
She said the “stuffing” sweet tasted of “hate and sage” and that she had “met voodoo dolls with less evil intent”. The “green bean” was even worse, she added, because it tasted like a “dead leaf ” and was “unforgivable”. I’m inclined to agree.
Candy corn, which mainly consists of sugar and corn syrup, was first made in the 19th Century and editing it has long been a Halloween tradition, with around 35 million pounds consumed on Halloween in the US every year.
Brach’s makes enough of the non-thanksgiving variety annually to stretch seven times around the Earth.
But candy corn divides the nation almost as much as Donald Trump.
Some Americans believe it is the greatest sweet ever made, while the thought of it makes others feel sick.
A spokesman for Brach’s told US television: “As polarising as it is, Turkey Dinner Candy Corn flew off shelves as we had so many who were curious to try this flavour.”