Licorice is different. Some people cringe from licorice. It is an acquired taste. An adult taste. Not a lot of 9-year-olds pine for licorice.
There's also a connoisseurship to licorice. While chocolate certainly has a range — from the best, L.A. Burdick, to the semi-best, See's, down through Fannie May, all the way down to Snickers. Like the barnyard denizens of "Animal Farm," some chocolate is better than others.
That said, I'll still shrug and eat a Hershey's bar. Any port in a storm....
That isn't true for licorice. Those strawberry whips? I'd rather eat the packaging. I not only want licorice, but I want really good licorice, and by really good licorice, I mean Kookaburra Australian licorice. Other types of black licorice aren't as strong, or as soft, or as fresh. They're also rans, not worth the effort of chewing.
Okay, that's not entirely true. In Copenhagen I made a point of visiting the Lakrids by Bulow outlet in the basement of the Magasin department store — samples of licorice, perfect spheres were handed out with a tongs by a pair of lovely shop clerks. The place resembled a jewelry store and the candy cost about as much. Salt licorice is a thing in Denmark, and we had to be careful, because some varieties tasted like congealed Morton salt. But we bought slabs that were so good they never made it out of the country.
Only that was about to change. Had I known what was coming, I'd have shipped a crate home. I've have cleaned the shelves of Kookaburra, disappeared from Sunset, replaced by lesser brands. I tried a few. Pheh. Plastic. Bland. Heck, I tried Good & Plenty. Like a man dying of thirst sucking on stones. I was that desperate. I bought a pack of Chuckles for the black piece.
The Kookaburra web site is there, the company based in Washington State. But it was out of licorice. Months went by. Out of stock. I sent them an inquiring email. I phoned. Nothing. Which is not surprising — during COVID, Coca Cola wouldn't tell me what happened to Fresca without weeks of hammering. Corporations can suck that way.
But persistence is my superpower. I circled back. Tried again. finally tracked down a Kookaburra employee. She said that the two owners of Kookaburra are fighting and the company has ground to a halt.
So it's in limbo?
"Very much in limbo," she replied, explaining that the two are nearing retirement, and questions of transition have hobbled them. "I don't know what's happening with them. I've tried to figure it out. In the meantime, we're just stopped."
While I had her on the phone, I had to ask: why is Kookaburra so much better than other licorices?
"It's batch cooking," she said.
"Like Graeter's ice cream?" I replied. "They make French pot ice cream in small batches."
"Like a brownie. Other stuff is cooked more continuously, and it gets rubbery."
I told her that I had been able to buy a tub of licorice that claimed to be Kookaburra at a high end supermarket in Boston in May, and she said that other companies use their factory, and directed me to Nuts.com. I hurried there, immediately ordered a pound of "Black Australian Licorice, made by the manufacturers of Kookaburra." I ordered some English All-Sorts while I was at it.
That was Thursday at noon. Within 24 hours, a box was sitting on our front stairs, its cheery, chatty branded packaging carrying over from the box to the bright blue bags inside.
That was Thursday at noon. Within 24 hours, a box was sitting on our front stairs, its cheery, chatty branded packaging carrying over from the box to the bright blue bags inside.
If the moral of this story doesn't leap out, I'll spell it out: we have these fantastic online commercial systems, these websites and delivery chains. But you sometimes need that ghost in the machine — the living Kookaburra employee — to birddog a solution.
A business only works as well as the people running it work, and it was a little heartbreaking to contrast the leaping efficiency of Nuts.com — which sold me a pound of Kookaburra-quality licorice for $8.99 — to the we're-so-conflicted-we-can't-operate collapse of Kookaburra itself. They should put something on their website. Licorice is important; how much would an explanation cost?
Thank you Nuts.com for picking up the dropped ball. As for the Kookaburra owners — c'mon guys, people are depending on you. Figure it out. Because otherwise the world will march on without you. At least put something on your website. Don't your customers deserve that respect?
I remembered a song from elementary school — an Australian nursery rhyme written in 1932 — and found it quite apt:
Kookaburra sits in the old gum treeI assume those are licorice gumdrops.
Eating all the gumdrops he can see
Stop, Kookaburra, Stop, Kookaburra
Leave some there for me.
I have gone nuts... as the company not so subtly encourages one to claim. Or maybe as a happy customer, I'm just reading into things. In any case, thanks for the story.
ReplyDeleteJerry Garcia once said that people who like the Grateful Dead are like people who like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.
ReplyDeleteI love chocolate Twizzlers. Not every store carries it & even then, they run out of it. I agree about the strawberry Twizzlers, Red Vines is much better.
ReplyDeleteBut that Aussie licorice is great.
For some unknown reason, Cleveland shoppers empty the shelves of black Twizzlers at Christmastime, and I go nuts looking for it, because it's my wife's favorite. She adores it. Strawberry won't do. Tried substituting the chocolate ones one year, and that didn't work out so well.
DeleteThe orange Twizzlers, which are fairly recent and have the white goo inside, are very good...rather like a candied Creamsicle (a trademarked brand name), which is vanilla ice cream coated with orange sherbet. Not the same as the vastly inferior Dreamsicle...which merely uses ice milk, and can be other flavors, not just that wonderful orange.
The orange cream filled Twizzlers are wickedly good. Bought a pack and planned to spread them out over a week and ate them all at once.
DeleteYes, the black Chuckle! Mom and I would split it, kind of like pulling a wishbone. She logically got the yellow and orange Chuckles. I always want green and am happy to take red, too. But black? We have to share!
ReplyDeleteChuckles were the first candy I remember eating. My mother bought them at the A & P near Madison and Homan...so long ago that the store had squeaky turnstiles at the entrance, wooden checkout counters without conveyer belts, and prices stamped in purple ink. I would devour the black piece first and mostly ignore the red and the yellow.
DeleteLater on, I discovered the orange Chuckle, and forgot all about the black. Finally, I fell for the green one, and was hooked. And when I got older, my mother would buy those bags of green spearmint candies, shaped like leaves. They were heavenly. Haven't seen them in ages.
My all-time favorite candy was the Clark Bar, made in Pittsburgh, at a plant along the riverfront near PNC Park, which had a huge orange Clark Bar on the roof. They were eventually absorbed by the NECCO folks in Massachusetts, but that outfit has gone out of business. Clark Bars are once again being made in western PA, but they are very hard to find, even in nearby Ohio, and the demand for them far exceeds their extremely limited supply.
Cleveland has one of the biggest retail candy stores in the country, and they have been forced to ration Clark Bars, and keep them hidden under the counter. Otherwise, they would be routinely cleaned out. I kid you not. Best candy bar on the planet.
The only verse i remember from that song is
ReplyDelete"Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree,
Merry merry king of the bush is he.
Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra,
Gay your life must be!"
The question for EGD readers is, do kids still sing this song in school?
That's the version I learned and it was sung as a "round" with the class divided into three sections.
DeleteProbably not, but anyone that has heard "Down Under" by Men at Work is familiar with its flute riff, from which it cribbed.
DeleteBe careful about eating too much though.
ReplyDelete"Eaten in large amounts, black licorice can lower the body's potassium levels – significantly."
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/10/28/black-licorice-is-a-candy-that-should-inspire-caution
"An unknown 54-year-old man from Massachusetts died in 2019 after eating a bag and a half of black licorice every day for a few weeks, which caused such low potassium levels in his body that his heart stopped. Licorice contains glycyrrhizin acid, which interferes with the body's ability to retain potassium by mimicking the hormone aldosterone, resulting in excessive excretion of the nutrient in cases of overconsumption, a condition referred to as pseudo hyperaldosteronism." [Wikipedia, "List of Unusual Deaths"]
DeleteOn car trips, at snack time, my father always got stuck with the black Chuckle. Actually, I think he liked it.
ReplyDeleteI’m a strawberry Twizzler person by far. It’s the White chocolate to chocolate lovers. White chocolate is just a lie. But I have rediscovered Good and Plenty.
ReplyDeleteI am also a fan of Nuts.com. I even found a variety of tea there that I couldn't find locally. Life is so much more complicated than it once was, and I have become contradictory. I'm all for the importance of shopping locally, yet I also like to support outstanding online businesses like Nuts.com and a few others.
ReplyDeleteAs for licorice, I worked with a Dutch colleague who gifted us with licorice from Holland every holiday. He was disdainful of every brand of licorice made in the US. I grow Anise hyssop (also called Lavender Hyssop) in my garden and make a pound cake using the flower's blossoms every summer. It tastes like.... black licorice!
Looks like someone at the ST doesn't like you Neil. They published a letter today with this line in it: "At first, I thought it was a joke, like a silly Neil Steinberg piece."
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that's true — I imagine many don't. But the letter you cite isn't evidence of that. First, I completely agree with the writer — that piece should never have run. Second, I do sometimes take a tiny event and blow it out of proportion for humorous effect. Your observations remind me of the punchline to Lincoln's joke about the confused farmboy reporting his sister's actions in the hayloft: "You've got your facts straight, son, but you're drawing the wrong conclusion."
Delete"Licorice is the liver of candy."
ReplyDelete--Michael O'Donoghue
You probably meant Fannie May not Fannie Farmer!
ReplyDeleteNuts.vom got me through the first half of Covid. Spice drops and Spanish peanuts! Orange slices! And fresh candy corn...yes, at my big age.
ReplyDelete“Heck, I tried Good & Plenty. Like a man dying of thirst sucking on stones. I was that desperate. I bought a pack of Chuckles for the black piece.”
ReplyDeleteOne of those lines that make you laugh out loud and your spouse says, what’s funny? Then you both laugh.