April 6, 2006
Twinkies Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:50 PM EST Speaking of beloved brand-name junk foods (although I regard butterscotch pudding as spiritual health food), today is the 76th anniversary of the Twinkie.
The Twinkie is a classic example of capitalism at work. It was the invention of James A. Dewar, who started as a delivery boy for the Continental Baking Company in 1920 and by 1930 had worked his way up to manager at the company’s River Forest, Illinois, plant.
The plant produced small strawberry shortcakes as a snack food, but only during the strawberry season. The rest of the year, the shortcake pans sat on the shelf, an underperforming asset. Dewar filled the shortcakes (which are really sponge cake, of course—something like what the French call pâte à génoise—not shortcake at all, which, if you care, is pâte sablée in French) with a banana cream filling. He named the result after a sign he had seen in St. Louis for the Twinkle Toe Shoe Company and sent them forth into the marketplace. There they proved an instant hit with the public. When the outbreak of World War II caused a temporary banana shortage (German U-boats apparently sank a lot of banana boats in the Caribbean in early 1942), a vanilla cream was substituted and the modern Twinkie was born. In more recent years, a Brooklyn restaurateur named Christopher Sell is credited with gastronomic lily-gilding by having invented the fried Twinkie, which is a Twinkie plunged into hot fat to produce a crisp outside and a liquefied interior. The Twinkie is now so deeply embedded in our culture (about 500 million are consumed every year) that it has received the ultimate cultural compliment, the use of the term as a metaphor. “Twink” is gay slang for a very young and handsome man, and the “Twinkie defense” is a derogatory term for a legal argument for diminished responsibility due to some outside factor—such as sugar overload. While the Twinkie is perhaps the quintessential junk food, it might be pointed out that James Dewar claimed to have drunk a glass of milk and eaten at least three Twinkies (at 145 calories a pop) before bedtime every night. He lived to be 88.
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