National Caramel Apple Day arrives on Halloween, the night a whole apple gets to count as candy. Dip a batch at home, or find a candy shop that still coats its own and eat it on the walk back.
No founder, sponsoring body, or establishing record has been identified for National Caramel Apple Day. The day is named in the 2005 volume of Creative Forecasting, a Colorado Springs monthly for activity professionals catalogued under activity programs in American retirement communities, and in that magazine's July to December volume every year through 2008.
A caramel apple has three components. Neither the fruit nor the caramel should support Listeria monocytogenes on its own. The third is a wooden stick, and the stick is what changed the answer.
Food scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison worked that out after the fact. Pushing a stick through an apple's core squeezes juice up the channel it opens, and the damp layer that collects under the caramel suits Listeria monocytogenes in a way neither ingredient does alone. On apples with a stick, populations rose an average of 3.6 log10 in three days at room temperature, against 0.3 on apples without one.
That finding did not stay in a laboratory. Minnesota now treats a caramel apple with a stick in it as a potentially hazardous food, so a cottage food producer there may sell caramel coated apples plain and may not sell them on a stick.
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National Caramel Apple Day ran on October 31 without a tracked deal. Browse past offers from previous years.
The story that travels with the caramel apple is a tidy one. In it, a Kraft Foods employee, left with wrapped caramels after Halloween around 1950, melts a batch down and dips an apple into it.
The newspapers do not cooperate. In November 1923 the Naperville Ice Cream Parlor in Illinois was already advertising taffy and caramel apples as two separate items on one bill.
The following October a Daily Illini homecoming advertisement offered delicious caramel apples beside butter creams and peanut brittle. An Aurora shop priced them in 1926 with a sprinkling of fresh nuts. A Urbana advertisement offered large juicy caramel apples for a nickel in 1931.
The name was not settled either. Illinois papers of the first half of the century print taffy apples 284 times against 36 for caramel apples. California papers of the same span run 149 against 42.
In the last week of October 1940 a syndicated feature told readers to make caramel apples with funny faces and promised the children would adore them. It ran in the Daily Calumet in Illinois on 21 October and in two California papers later that week.
A Los Angeles Halloween page in 1948 printed a recipe calling for 15 to 20 small Jonathan apples. The following September a Whittier grocery advertised fresh caramel apples for sale.
The observance is much younger than the sweet, and much harder to follow. Its earliest known appearance in print is the 2005 volume of Creative Forecasting, a Colorado Springs monthly published for activity professionals and catalogued under activity programs in retirement communities. The magazine's July to December volumes for 2000 through 2004 are digitised too, and none of them lists it.
No founder or sponsoring body has been identified for the day itself. What the record does hold is a sweet that was already on candy shop price lists, under more than one name, long before anyone gave it a date.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Twenty-eight of the thirty-one people interviewed had eaten prepackaged caramel apples.
A 2014 outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes linked to commercially produced, prepackaged caramel apples reached 35 people in 12 states. Thirty-four were hospitalised, and of the seven deaths reported, listeriosis contributed to at least three.
Until the 2014 cases, intact apples had not been implicated in a foodborne disease outbreak, with a single exception whose cause was never identified. The laboratory work that explained the outbreak was published in October 2015.
In October 2017 three men in Illinois, Iowa and Michigan were hospitalised with a matching strain, and all three had eaten prepackaged caramel apples. The outbreak strain was never recovered from the product or the plant, so the report calls caramel apples the suspected vehicle rather than the proven one.
BY THE NUMBERS
Food producers should consider interfaces between components within foods as potential niches for pathogen growth.
GOOD TO KNOW
Wooden sticks pretreated with a 40 percent potassium sorbate solution cut Listeria by 3.1 log10 per apple over 216 hours at 25 C, in work by the Food and Drug Administration and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Caramel apples without sticks held at 7 C showed no Listeria growth across four weeks of storage. Apples with sticks at the same temperature took two weeks to start moving.
Bidart Bros. of Bakersfield pulled every Granny Smith and Gala apple shipped from its Shafter packing facility in 2014, and whole genome sequencing tied the plant's Listeria isolates to the outbreak strains.
Happy Apple Company of Missouri recalled on 24 December 2014, California Snack Foods on 27 December, and Merb's Candies of St. Louis on 29 December.
An Illinois grocery advertisement of 1 April 1948 lists Kraft caramels at 31 cents a pound, beside catsup and flour.
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No. It is an unofficial observance, so offices, banks and schools keep normal hours, and the Federal Register carries no document under the name.
COLOPHON
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National Candy Corn Day makes room for the white, orange and yellow kernels that appear in bowls every autumn and divide every table they land on. Take a handful and eat yours the way you insist is right.
