The Hostess Company is committing hara kiri rather than come to any agreement with its striking bakers. The right is cheering this corporate suicide while the unions (including the Teamsters) are crying foul.
Hostess has been around in one form or another since 1930. For many years, their HQ stood on Armour Boulevard in Kansas City, MO. They made Twinkies, Cupcakes, Ho hos, Ding Dongs, Snowballs, and Wonder Bread.
Hostess fell on hard times a long time ago as the national taste for junk food either waned, or became more discriminating and sophisticated. Hostess over the last 30 years went through a series of mergers and acquisitions. I can remember when they were owned by AT&T for awhile.
I know a lot of us over 50 are once again keening over the demise of yet one more part of our childhoods, but before we rend our garments and tear our hair, let's ask ourselves, how good were these cream filled cakes after all? Being the life long connoisseur of white trash food that I am, I think the junk cakes went way down hill in quality over the past 30 years. Let's not be too hasty to judge our vegan offspring when they greet the Twinkie's demise with a shrug of indifference.
There's enough preservatives in a Twinkie to embalm a Pharaoh. It used to be a common joke that the 2 survivors of all out nuclear war would be roaches and Twinkies. I think I can speculate safely that the chemical preservatives, and the flavor in these cakes were manufactured in refineries in New Jersey.
Those of us with an excessive taste for flour, butter, and sugar can console ourselves by going back to classics tried and proven by the passage of time. For me, the ultimate comfort food feast is the lowly Boston Cream Pie. You can go all out and make it from scratch spending hours in the kitchen making the custard filling. Or, you can throw it together from mixes: 2 boxes of cheap yellow cake mix plus Jell-O vanilla pudding mix for the filling, plus a dark chocolate frosting mix with a little extra water mixed in. Either way, you get a feast for the soul and an ordeal for the arteries.
And of course there is another consolation as we grieve over the death of the Ding Dong, the chocolate meringue pie made with Hershey's Cocoa in true Texas fashion.
I should point out that I haven't had either of these desserts in years, and in the case of the chocolate meringue pie, it's been decades.
I think both of them are better for you than twinkies. Think of the eggs!
ReplyDeleteOh, and I never thought of the Boston Cream Pie as lowly! It was made so infrequently in our house that it was special!!!
ReplyDeleteJCF, you didn't miss much. You were much better off at Baskin and Robins.
ReplyDeleteAshburns was the local ice cream franchise where I grew up. I'm sure it doesn't exist anymore, but Carvell here on the east coast still thrives.
I never liked Twinkies or much from Hostess to be honest. Way too sweet for me.
ReplyDeleteI grew up with Entenmann's, so my first experience of Hostess was - rather yeeuch! actually. Once you've had the (regrettably discontinued) Entenmann's almond square, no store-bought dessert will ever fully satisfy, again.
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