Orcasional Musings |What else is missing?

— Orcasional Musings by Steve Henigson —

When Crow Valley Pottery closed in 2016, it took yet another pleasure away from our island. Michael and Jeffri were partial to NECCO Wafers, and they sold them to the rest of us Orcasians from the front desk of the old cabin on the west side of Horseshoe Highway. They weren’t available anywhere else on the island, or, for that matter, elsewhere in all of San Juan County, so Michael and Jeffri bought them directly from the manufacturer to feed their own addiction, and they also offered them for sale to fellow cognoscenti.

NECCO Wafers were possibly the world’s oldest, continuously manufactured candy. They had been made from the same formula, and on the same machinery, since 1847. NECCO Wafers comforted Union Army troops during the Civil War, the United States Cavalry through the Indian Wars, the Army and the Navy in the Spanish-American War, and were there for the duration of every other war fought by United States troops, including World Wars One and Two. NECCO Wafers were soldier-friendly because they were almost indestructible, remaining unaffected by heat, cold, and even moisture, until acted upon by human saliva.

NECCO Wafers came into your hands in a waxed-paper roll, much like a roll of thin coins which one might get from a bank. There were eight different flavors in a roll, each a separate color, but the colors didn’t always coordinate well with the flavors that they were supposed to represent. While there were the expected lemon yellow, lime green, orange orange, licorice black, and chocolate brown, purple wasn’t grape but rather clove, cinnamon was white instead of ochre, and pink wasn’t strawberry but wintergreen. So instead, if it were your preference, you could avoid all confusion by buying a roll containing only pale brown, reliably-chocolate-flavored disks.

In any case, flipping a wafer onto your tongue and letting it melt was an addictive process which required quite a bit of self-control. The wafer’s texture invitingly made it much easier to quickly chew it up, and then to immediately flip in another one. And people bought a heck of a lot of NECCO Wafers because of this effect.

While NECCO Wafers contained sugar, the other ingredients in them were not particularly fattening, so, as candy goes, they were a pretty safe treat…if you could exercise enough will power to limit your intake. It is interesting that, from their very beginning, they were also gluten-free, in case that had been a concern to the 19th-century consumer.

NECCO stood for the New England Confectionary Company. They were the original manufacturer of the wafers, all the way from 1847 through 2018. The Chase brothers opened the business in Boston, designing and building the required wafer-producing machinery. Then, with the quick success of their product, they bought the assets of other nearby candy makers. In 1927, the company moved to Cambridge, to the largest candy factory in the world, and NECCO dominated the candy business through most of the 20th century. But then, in 2018, after a series of bad managers had brought revenues disastrously down, the flow of candy stopped.

After a run of 171 years, there were no more NECCO Wafers. The newest owners announced that production would resume in 2019, but nothing has happened as yet. NECCO Wafers, like Crow Valley Pottery where once we could buy them, seem to have left us forever.