Necco Wafers

Photo from Spangler Candy Company

Every roll of Necco wafers is a broken clock. The wax paper is a seal insulating its contents from the ravages of time, while the wafers within are porcelain steles, immortal but brittle, each stamped with the same unexplained inscription: “Necco.”

These sugary time capsules have remained nearly unchanged since 1847. Before suffrage, Necco. Before they struck gold in California, Necco. Before Lincoln, before Coca Cola, before the civil war, these unadorned rolls marked time. They transcend the bounds of generational identities and taste, the immutable constant of the American snack shelf. They were here before us and they will be here after us. Their inscription is a mantra, expanding to include every moment in every mouth across the history of our people. You, me, and all our grandparents, all is Necco.

For all it contains, most of all Necco is the name of this candy. As if a name was needed. As if the accidental marks on the back, slumpy defects from the production process, weren’t already old acquaintances. As if the dust, the lack of pretense, the inexplicable inclusion of awful flavors didn’t already announce themselves like the annoying punch in the arm only a younger sibling gets away with, even in old age. Though the name signifies the candy, the candy has been constantly singing the song of itself since the day of its birth. It is seen, heard, and felt more deeply than its name. But it deserves a name. Read it as you tear it apart.

When you peel back the paper and you take ownership of the clock. Its pace is now up to you. But without that wax seal, time accelerates. Eternity collapses into a fragile array of wafer candy. Previously ageless and untouched, they are now vulnerable and exposed: the slightest moisture or handling weathers away the protective dust on each wafer, exposing the sugary chips within.

Those chips come in eight flavors, eight lenses into time. Lemon, lime, and orange yield a familiar citric bite, fraternal slices conspiring to keep you here in the present. White is cinnamon, but tastes more like peppermint. Together with green Spearmint, Necco provides twin mint perspectives rarely seen together, one leafy, one refined. Licorice bears the coarseness of earth, permanently out of vogue; its champions are passionate and unique in a world of ever-sweetening preferences, and you too could be one. Chocolate is its more popular sister, the unadorned baked cocoa of American confection as remembered from a different time, but held at arms length in the dusty, brittle matrix of the wafer. Eating it is like listening to a wax cylinder of popular singer.

These seven flavors, though strange in presentation and combination, are knowable. They make sense. But there is one more flavor, one that is out of step not just with modern candy but also has no place in candy nostalgia. The eighth flavor is clove.

Its color is unrecognizable. It is gray, slate blue, black, and purple all at the same time, obscured by the same white powder as all the rest. Its taste, like its color, feels familiar but elides definition. It is not candy. Herbal intensity cuts through the aftertaste of the other flavors, dispersing its stringency to every part of the mouth. It evokes the accumulated scent of dust, leather, and expensive aperitifs from an elderly relative’s den where they have sat and read in silence for decades, all distilled and infused into a sugar syrup and trapped for posterity in an edible wafer. Clove changes the other seven flavors, adding depth and mystery to their motley assortment.

But even clove is mostly sugar. Take one, and within minutes the sweet little kick will dissolve through your body and be expended. Eat another and another. Though each tastes different, they all feel the same: they snap, they pulverize, and they dissolve, all summing together on the burdensome ledger of blood sugar, the balance of which must be eventually be paid in sluggish malaise. Each wafer eaten kicks the can, buying you time.

Feel the predictable letdown, all that spare insulin wandering through your veins with nothing to hold. Feel your tongue, swollen with sugar, too large in your mouth to speak. Your throat is dry, your eyelids heavy, even just one third of the way through the roll. Think how you felt when you made it one third of the way through your life, and compare. Think as you stare at the stamped mantra.

It will not reply. To these wafers, you are irrelevant. They don’t need you or your approval. They never change, and they have all the time in the world. They demand you to ask yourself, in what way are you brittle and unchanging? What parts of you endure beyond all expectation, but snap under pressure? Are those parts as varied, humble, and infinite in supply as these wafers? In you there are signs that only a mother can read, gestures and expressions that persist from infancy to old age: the shape of your smile, a fidgety foot, the color of laughter or groaning. These signs, unconscious as they are, carry your identity into the future like a fingerprint. They go unnoticed by all except those who love and know you best. Our words will outlive us, our photos, our stories and friends. But the way we mumble when we sleep will die the day we die. You cannot hope to know all these signs in yourself, your deeply inscribed mantra. But god willing, you may live to know and recognize that mantra in another.

What we cannot see in ourselves, we can see and feel in Necco. The name-mantra Necco is stamped into wafer upon wafer. The wax paper roll is your lifetime, each thin wafer a year slipping by. No matter how carefully you savor the years, none leave you satisfied. The sugar burns too quickly. You race through the pack, and each disc that shatters in your teeth is a moment felt, a moment gone. There is no order or plan to the flavor of these moments, but you notice them start to repeat. This isn’t the first time you’ve fallen in love, moved from city to city, adopted a dog to replace your last one. The pack gets lighter as you eat. There's only so many of these moments left. Through the translucent wax paper you can kind of tell what’s coming, how it will feel, but you feel it’s best not to look too closely. Better to tear the paper away bit by bit, spill out whatever is next, and take it head on.

The second, third, and fourth time you encounter a familiar flavor, it always makes you think of the first time. And when the pack is done, maybe you’ll see the bigger picture. In the end, the differences didn’t matter. It was all cut from the same sheet. You were there, you felt it, you knew it. And the next little boy to open a pack for the first time, take his first bite into love, work, or failure, it’ll be different for him, but it will also be the same strange and wistful flavor you had, the same flavor we’ve all tasted since 1847. In the moment he eats that clove wafer, you are that boy. Your father and your grandfather too.

At the beginning, you can't help but anticipate your favorite flavors, while dreading or even spitting out the ones you hate. But here at the end of the pack, facing that last candy disc, the flavor doesn't matter anymore. No matter its color, that final wafer has your lifetime behind it, inspiring and enlarging it. It is a quiet finale: a reprise of every moment and every flavor you've eaten. It's only now, with the whole pack behind you, that you have the experience to see the connections, recognize what the texture suggests. Even if it's licorice, don't throw it away. Place it on your tongue and see.

Your final Necco wafer, dusty and sweet, is a map of the universe.

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