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Twinkies
Eighty-Five Years of a Sweet Sensation
What makes Twinkies so special? Everyone has an answer.
If there were a lifetime achievement award for snack cakes, Twinkies would certainly set the gold standard—now more than ever.
Perhaps it’s the nostalgia. From comic strips to the silver screen, state fairs to science projects, legal legends to urban legends, artifacts to art exhibits, Howdy Doody to Archie Bunker—Twinkies have been baked into our national pop culture for generations. Who would have thought a simple confection of sponge cake and cream filling could become a national icon?
Of course, one wonders if a few persistent tall tales have had a little something to do with the timeless mystique. For the record, Twinkies don’t last forever. Nor are they made with a supersecret chemical compound that makes them indestructible. Contrary to what Homer may have been told in a memorable episode of The Simpsons, you can harm a Twinkie.
Maybe it’s old-fashioned national pride. As a vintage television spot declared, “Twinkies are American through and through.” President Clinton certainly must have thought so when he considered the Twinkie for the National Millennium Time Capsule as an “object of enduring American symbolism.”
But why overthink it? After all, we’re talking about Twinkies here. Have you tasted one lately? They’re incredibly good. If it’s been a while, your first bite undoubtedly will be even sweeter than you remembered. Diet mavens may balk, but at 135 calories per Twinkie, you could do a lot worse these days.
Whatever the root of their appeal, Twinkies sparkle with an undeniable magic—a star that seems to shine brighter with age. This is quite astonishing considering the snack cake’s inventor was just looking for a way to put idle shortcake pans to use when strawberries were out of season.
The remarkably colorful history of Twinkies dates back to early 1930. Hoovervilles were sprouting from state to state, the Chrysler Building neared completion in New York, and bakery manager James A. Dewar was embarking on the “best darn-tootin’ idea” he ever had.
Ten years after starting his career driving a horse-drawn pound cake wagon for the Continental Baking Company outside Chicago, Dewar was at the frontier of almost unimaginable fame. Continental was looking for a new, inexpensive product that would appeal to frugal consumers in the tight economy. Why not use the company’s stockpile of shortcake pans to create a treat that could be sold year-round? Dewar thought.
Blending a dry mix of necessity, practicality, and ingenuity, he whipped up the celebrated recipe by injecting smooth and creamy banana filling into the oblong golden finger cakes. Unlike strawberries, which were only in season for six weeks during the summer, bananas were readily available year-round.
As for the name, a St. Louis billboard advertising “Twinkle Toe Shoes” provided all the inspiration Dewar needed. He was quoted as saying he “shortened it to make it a little zippier for the kids.”
Dewar’s new two-for-a-nickel treat was an instant hit.
“To think [Continental] didn’t know if people would like them,” recalled Margaret Branco, one of the company’s original “Twinkie stuffers,” in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “We could hardly keep up with the demand. You’d think people had nothing to do but eat Twinkies. They sold like hotcakes.”
In the early days, every Twinkie had to be hand-filled using a specially created machine operated with a foot pedal. “You had to pump the pedal just right or too much filling would shoot out,” Branco explained. “If I oversquirted, the Twinkie would explode. Of course, that wasn’t so bad. I got to eat the crippled ones. I never lost my appetite for them. Not only that, I lost weight.
I was a butterball when I started. I got thinner on Twinkies.”
As Twinkies marched to snack cake superstardom, Dewar, like a proud parent, remained their number one fan, eating at least three a day for more than fifty years. (He admitted to having “sort of a sweet tooth.”)
Dewar’s grandchildren, in an interview with the Rochester (NY) Democrat & Chronicle, recalled how “Grandpa Twinkie” never tired of telling the Twinkie story and would regularly visit grocery stores to make sure the little cakes were always fresh. He kept his own stash in the fridge and freezer.
“Some people say Twinkies are the quintessential junk food, but I believe in the things,” Dewar once told United Press International. “I fed them to my four kids and they feed them to my fifteen grandchildren. Twinkies never hurt them.”
Though Twinkies became one of the most popular products in American history, Dewar reportedly never received any special compensation for his illustrious invention. He retired from Continental in 1972, having become a vice president. But no promotion could ever have topped his title as “Mr. Twinkie.”
After Dewar’s death in 1985 at age eighty-eight, a Shelbyville, Indiana, man emerged to stake claim to top Twinkie-eating honors. Lewis Browning, a retired milk truck driver who lived well into his nineties, ate at least one Twinkie a day, a custom he began in 1941. That’s right, more than twenty thousand Twinkies.
The baton awaits the next would-be Twinkie king, though Browning left considerable shoes to fill.
Not everyone has been so obliging when it comes to Twinkies. Take Twinkiegate: In the 1980s, a grand jury indicted a Minneapolis city council candidate for serving coffee, Kool-Aid, Twinkies, and other sweets to two senior citizen groups. The case led to the passage of the Minnesota Campaign Act, widely known as the Twinkie Law. The seventy-one-year-old candidate, George Belair, lost the election, but the charges against him were eventually dropped.
“How can anyone bribe someone with Twinkies?” he asked in a Los Angeles Times article.
Honorable intentions aside, Belair may have seriously underestimated what people would do for a Twinkie—or the raw emotions the little snack cake could evoke.
Just ask Rocky Mountain News columnist Mark Wolf. When Hostess experimented with fruit and creme Twinkies several years ago, Wolf fired off an irate headline: “Hey Hostess, here’s a tip: Don’t mess with my Twinkies.”
“To alter a Twinkie is to demean a national resource,” the self-described Twinkie-holic wrote. “How could anyone tinker with perfection?”
“Despite occasional attacks by misguided nutritionists and dentists, the original Twinkie reigns as the American snack food and arguably the greatest product of the Industrial Revolution.”
To be fair, Hostess thought consumers might appreciate a throwback to the shortcake’s roots, but ultimately decided to abandon the idea. No doubt to the comfort of legions of Twinkie purists, the fruit and creme effort was a rare occasion in Twinkie history when the classic cake was, well, “messed with.”
With the exception of a change to vanilla filling during World War II, driven by a banana shortage, and the introduction of a “light” variety in 1990, Twinkies have remained remarkably close to the original recipe. And that’s just the way people like it—to the tune of five hundred million Twinkies each year.
So let us raise a toast to an American original—the magical, mystifying, magnificent Twinkie.
The journey’s been quite a treat. Let the future be even sweeter.
