Cape May, New Jersey has no difficulty being nostalgic. It’s all mini golf and cruiser bikes and pastel Victorian houses. Even as a child, spending late summers there with my family felt somehow like being jettisoned into the past, where I’d be trusted to ride my bike to the general store for milk and the morning paper, treating myself to a Chinese finger trap or a copy of MAD Magazine with the change, before my cousins and I ran a lemonade stand next to the beach. It was all so aggressively quaint.
It didn’t help that every store in town may as well have said “Ye Olde” on the sign. Like any beach town, Cape May is full of shops for things nobody needs — baskets full of dried sand dollars and essential oils. And of course, somewhere on the town’s main drag, was the greatest attraction for me. Something so mesmerizing I could watch it all day and never miss the other things a beach town offered. On some level, summer will always be for watching the salt water taffy machine.
If you’ve ever been to a beach town you’ve probably seen one, its gargantuan metal arms knitting confections in a front window while a summer job teen hands out cubes of fudge. It felt ancient and futuristic at once, a 3D optical illusion where parts would disappear and reappear, juggling the candy into a satin sheen. For the sake of present-day research I found that saltwater taffy was invented in the U.S. around the 1880s, and in 1901, there were six patents pending for a taffy pulling machine, which could pull 2.5 tons of candy a day (a single person could do about 300 pounds).
But truly, who cares: I just want to watch the machine move. There are videos from vacation spots around the country, Catalina Island and the Oregon coast and Ocean City, of taffy machines doing their work in full view of customers, luring them in with mechanical grace. It was like watching a ballet, trying to follow one loop or bubble and watching it get lost in the swirling show. After minutes (hours? lifetimes?) of watching the machine, someone in my family would usually cave and buy a box of taffy or fudge, which I would eat but never crave. As much as I appreciate the end product now, the joy was all in the making.
Taffy is an inherently nostalgic candy. The allure is that the taffy machine creates a candy that was exciting when “candy” was new. When you can get neon Nerds clusters and layered chocolate bars at every corner store, how novel to buy a box of stretched molasses flavored with salt and licorice. Beach towns trade on this — the whole point is experiencing a break from the modern, the plain physics of wave upon shore, pedal to turn wheel, metal to pull sugar.
I could spin up some reason why we will pay for an imagined past or search for meaning in relative simplicity. But ultimately I’m not really sure why I, a seven year old with no problems, stood at the taffy machine. Perhaps it was just the essence of vacation, feeling even then the peace of having nothing to do but watch something so unnecessary as a confection be made. Or maybe it just looked cool. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. Nothing does.
