Читать книгу Candymaking in Canada - David Carr - Страница 10

It is well documented that J.S. Fry & Sons marketed the world’s first edible chocolate, showcasing its gritty concoction to the delight of those attending a trade fair in Birmingham, England, in 1849. But who invented the world’s first mass-produced, mass-marketed, low-cost chocolate bar?

Tagged in North America as the five-cent bar, this particular wrapped tablet of chocolate would become a staple on candy store shelves until (in Canada at least) confectioners first tried to bury the product in 1947 under the burden of a 60 percent price increase. The bar would eventually become the victim of runaway inflation by the 1970s, when manufacturers also abandoned the practice of stamping the price on each candy wrapper before it left the factory.

As for who invented the five-cent chocolate bar, that depends on who is telling the story. The Hershey bar—that quintessential piece of modern day Americana, popularized in no small measure by American GIs in the Second World War—is commonly credited to be the first of what we today consider to be a milk chocolate bar. And with good cause. Still, history points to a Canadian connection.

Milton Hershey, philanthropist, candy enthusiast, and chocolate pioneer, was certainly a visionary. A successful caramel manufacturer from Pennsylvania, Hershey is reported to have realized the enormous potential of chocolate during a visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 (missing the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America by one year).

While in Chicago, Hershey became fascinated by the operation of German chocolate-making machinery, waiting until closing of the exposition to purchase the equipment. He originally wanted to manufacture a chocolate coating for his caramels.

One year later, Hershey sold his first milk chocolate bar. He continued producing small quantities of the chocolate while focusing on the bigger picture: a process to mass-produce a milk chocolate bar that would be consistent and have a shelf life of weeks, rather than the quick-to-spoil bar he was currently selling.

The stumbling block for Hershey, as it was for all pretenders and refiners of Henri Nestlé’s breakthrough, was a recipe that would blend a batch of milk with the other ingredients necessary to manufacture chocolate. At the same time that Hershey was trying to create the “great American chocolate bar,” Arthur Ganong, the fourth son and sixth child of Canadian candy pioneer James Ganong, was running the company he inherited from his father in 1888.

By the time Arthur Ganong took the reins, the company his father and uncle founded had grown from a struggling up-market grocery that outsourced the manufacture of its brand-name candy to a bustling candy factory churning out a wide variety of confections.

Like Hershey, the Ganongs had been selling bars of chocolate since before the turn of the century. An 1898 price list of Ganong products includes bars made with coconut and cream fillings.

courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.

A Ganong ad, 1893.

In 1910, Arthur and George Ensor, one of Ganong’s candymakers, began experimenting with their own brand of milk chocolate using fresh milk from Jersey cows grazing on Arthur’s property in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. The two developed a recipe for milk chocolate sprinkled with nuts and shaped into long, narrow pieces.

So pleased were Arthur and George with the finished product that they took the bars to snack on during fishing trips. Ganong began mass-producing and selling their first nickel bar that same year, and continued production until shortly after the breakout of the Second World War.

courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.

Wash drawing of the original Ganong candy factory in St. Stephen, New Brunswick.

For their part, Hershey Food neither agrees nor disputes whether Ganong has a legitimate claim. As author David Folster notes in his historical account of the Ganongs, a reporter for Canadian Press wrote that the American company “does not quarrel with the claim that the Ganong family of St. Stephen, N.B., invented the chocolate bar in 1910—in fact, it is unaware of it.”³

As recently as September 2000, Maclean’s magazine listed the chocolate bar alongside the zipper, frozen food, snow blower, and Fuller Brush as Canadian firsts. At the very least, Arthur and George should be credited with inventing the first chocolate bar mixed with nuts. But even this is in dispute by American writer Ray Broekel, who claims Squirrel Brand of Cambridge, Massachusetts, created the first nut bar in 1906.

Before there was Ganong candy available in New Brunswick, however, there was Moirs in neighbouring Nova Scotia.

In 1815, shortly after arriving in Nova Scotia from Scotland, Benjamin Moir began selling bread and other baked goods to Imperial troops from his modest home in Halifax. The troops were housed in the neighbouring Citadel, overlooking Halifax harbour. The Citadel had been built by the British sixty-six years earlier as one of four overseas naval stations.

Benjamin’s son William C. Moir inherited the bakery in 1845, first changing the name of the business to the Moir & Company Steam Bakery and Flour Mill, and later moving to a five-storey factory on Argyle Street, across from a site that would eventually become Halifax City Hall.

William was anxious that his own “lean stripling” of a son, James, also learned the bakery business. James, who was already described as something of a renegade, went through the motions of learning the skills of a baker, but did not share his father or grandfather’s enthusiasm for the trade. Mom-and-pop candymakers like McCormick’s Limited in London, Ontario were springing up across Canada, and James struggled to convince his father that there was a future in chocolate and other confectionery.

Despite his father’s protestations, James continued to be consumed with the development of sugared almonds and popular candy sticks, often ignoring the day-to-day responsibilities of the family business. Finally, in 1873, a reluctant William Moir relented. “If you’re going to fool around with this candy business, you had better take a corner over there and get on with it,” he told his son.

Eighteen seventy-three was, indeed, an interesting year for the Canadian confectionery industry. Rather than a year of great hope, which would feed the appetite for such businesses, it was the start of a five-year depression spurred on by a financial panic in New York that September.

It was against this backdrop of collapsing prices, high unemployment, and depressed growth that two brothers opened a general store in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, an industrial town on the banks of the St. Croix River.

The two native New Brunswickers, James Ganong, who had left Canada and was a salesman for the Thurston & Hall Biscuit Co. of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, and Gilbert, who taught school outside of St. John, had hoped to attract custom by offering a better range of groceries than was currently available. The enterprise proved to be more difficult than either could have imagined.

courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.

Gilbert White Ganong, co-founder of the company.

courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.

James Harvey Ganong, co-founder of the company.

There was not much money in St. Stephen during those days, and local residents were suspicious of the strange new upstarts. Compounding the problem was the fact that millworkers who lived in neighbouring communities were either poorly paid or were provided with goods from the company store in exchange for their hard labour.

The pessimism in St. Stephen contrasted sharply with the optimism in Halifax, where James Moir was finally handed the opportunity to trade the flour and yeast of baking for the sugar, molasses, and cocoa of confectionery, full-time. By day he would experiment with different types of chocolate blends in a small corner in the Moirs factory, and by night he would sit on Citadel Hill, not far from where his grandfather first began supplying baked goods to British soldiers, tasting his experiments.

It was during these years that James developed the family XXX formula for what would later become the mainstay of Moirs chocolates.

As Halifax entered the last decade of the nineteenth century, William Moir decided it was time for his son to take over the business. In 1890, seventeen years after James had been given free rein to make candy rather than bake bread, he became president and general manager, immediately increasing the presence of candy in the company’s growing product line.

The history of Moirs was part of a pattern in early Canadian candymaking that concentrated the bulk of the new country’s confectionery industry in the east. But chocolate did not transport well in the nineteenth century and was in fact expensive to ship. This barrier alone gave rise to small mom-and-pop candymakers, producing small batches of candy suited to local and often neighbourhood tastes.

L.H. Belanger, which began manufacturing candies in Montreal in 1881, produced an elaborate soft toffee called St. Catherine, which has never sold well outside of Quebec despite the one-time popularity of a cheaper version of toffee-based candy chews called Halloween Kisses.

All major candymakers in Canada faced common challenges: importing expensive ingredients such as sugar and cocoa (essential to manufacturing chocolate and candies) and serving a small population narrowly spread out in concentrated pockets along the world’s longest border.

Feeding such a population base was difficult enough for confectioners in the east. The challenge was magnified west of the Ontario border. Western-based independents with aspirations to follow the pace set by the Moirs and Ganong families often found they could not gather the traction to break out of local markets.

It is for this reason that the multinational manufacturers based in the east today provide the bulk of confections to satisfy the sweet tooth of western Canadians. There are notable exceptions.

Charles W. Rogers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1854. Rogers was lured out west by the prospect of Klondike gold, but he never made it to the Klondike. He saw greater potential in Victoria selling provisions to the miners.

In 1885, Rogers and his wife, Leah, opened a small greengrocer on Victoria’s Government Street, a high-traffic thoroughfare that cut through the heart of the city up to the British Columbia legislature. The shop sold a variety of staple items, fresh fruits and vegetables, and a selection of quality candies imported from San Francisco. Candy was the most popular item on the Rogerses shelves, but delivery was hopelessly erratic, and the high tariffs contained in Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of 1878 made it unnecessarily expensive.

Rogers began experimenting with his own candy recipes in a small kitchen located at the back of his store. He would often rise at 4:00 A.M., dressed only in his red underwear, stirring his candy centres as they bubbled in a large copper kettle. Leah, who had previously worked as a printing typesetter with the Daily Colonist, looked after the retail trade and administration.

Local inhabitants and visitors to Victoria travelled to Rogers’ shop to purchase assortments of chocolate-coated caramels, mint wafers, and chocolate almond brittle. As the candy side of the business grew, fruits and vegetables were getting in the way. Charles and Leah decided to discontinue the grocery side of the business and concentrate on candy.

“A pattern soon developed,” wrote camagazine. “Charles and Leah would make their chocolates early each day. The store on Government Street would open for a few hours in the afternoon, and, once the last chocolate was sold, the doors would close.”

On occasion, Charles and Leah were forced to ration boxes of their chocolates to one per customer.

In 1888, Rogers introduced his most unique and popular creation, cream centres covered with dark chocolate in a range of flavours, including vanilla, peppermint, chocolate nut, and strawberry.

It is interesting to note that a few years later, Frank Mars, an amateur candymaker, penny candy salesman, and father of Forrest Mars, founder of the multinational confectionery and food giant that bears his family name, was struggling to set up his own candy company in neighbouring Seattle.

It is not known whether Mars senior ever bit into a Rogers Victoria Cream, but the man who liked to experiment with his mother’s candy recipes began selling Victorian Butter Creams through the Woolworth five-and-ten store chain in the 1920s.

“Butter Creams were fairly common,” explains Jim Ralph, president of Rogers’ Chocolates. And there is a difference between the Butter Cream and Rogers’ Victoria Creams. “But it’s interesting that [Mars] would call his chocolates Victorian Butter Creams,” Ralph adds.

The origin of the Victoria Cream recipe remains a mystery. Most of Rogers’ work was trial and error, often conducted while hunched over a cauldron of chocolate. Victoria Creams were also the most expensive candies in the shop.

Rogers, the man who began making his own candy to spare the expense of importing confections from San Francisco, was later forced to admonish any young consumer fortunate enough to have ten cents to spend, but naive enough to think he could purchase a selection of Victoria Creams. “Ten cents buys you one chocolate,” he’d be told curtly.

Charles Rogers was notorious for his lack of patience with those who came into his shop. In addition to keeping odd hours—ignoring the lines outside the shop and only opening when he was ready—Rogers was often surly and rarely exchanged niceties or indulged in idle chatter.

Above all, Rogers appeared to cherish his privacy. This was confirmed in a historical retrospective published by the Victoria Times Colonist in 1951. Charles Rogers, the article reported, “seems to have succeeded fairly well in pulling a blind down around himself. Even when he married, in 1885, an ‘estimable young lady for many years a resident of Victoria’, the local papers were discreetly non-committed. For he was, at the time, according to the reports, a ‘worthy and energetic young man having established himself in a lucrative business.’ ”⁴

But the couple worked hard. On the coldest winter nights they would often stay in their shop to sleep only to get up before the sun to start working again. They also took few holiday trips, preferring instead to check into the St. Joseph’s hospital for a week whenever they felt they needed a respite.

In the 1890s, Frederick Barnes Wood moved from Nova Scotia to the British territory of Newfoundland. Upon arrival in St. John’s, Wood opened a fruit, confectionery, and flower shop. He too wanted to secure a steady supply of quality goods for his store and began manufacturing his own line of candies, alongside jellies, syrups, and marmalades.

In the early twentieth century Wood decided to transfer his shop to a magnificent new building on St. John’s fashionable Water Street. The Evening Telegram wrote about the new shop on January 11, 1902. “Woods new candy store is all but complete. A credit to all concerned.”

Certainly it was something that few residents of St. John’s had seen before: a candy shop, bakery, and soda fountain on the ground floor, beneath an elegant restaurant complete with starched white table linen and equally starched serving staff. The candy store and restaurant quickly became one of the most patronized locations in St. John’s.

The Water Street location would have a short run. Wood closed the shop in 1917 to concentrate exclusively on a second restaurant. In 1923, he retired completely, selling his business interests to W.R. Goodie, a local businessman who would transform Wood’s confectionery and soda pop interests into Purity Factories Ltd., the province’s largest confectioner and home to some of Newfoundland’s traditional favourites.

It was also during the nineteenth century that the story of what would become Canada’s largest chocolate company began. In the early 1800s, John Nilson, a weaver by trade, and his wife, Agnes, left the textile town of Paisley, Scotland, to seek new opportunities for themselves and their four children in the largely unsettled colony of Upper Canada.