You can run—but you can’t hide—from this holiday confection that has become an obsession for fans
By Andrew Z. Galarneau /
NEWS FOOD WRITER
Carlene Deacy walked up to her sister’s front door for Easter dinner, put a sugary yellow marshmallow chick into the mailbox and rang the bell.
Thus began what Deacy family history refers to as the Peep Incident of 1999. Working feverishly out of the sight of their host, Deacy and her daughters found homes for more than 50 candy chicks in Catherine Lebron’s Town of Tonawanda home.
“In her underwear drawer, the back of her closet behind shoes, under her pillow that night,” recalled Deacy, a registered nurse who lives in Lockport. Peeps popped up past Christmas.
“You know what we discovered?” offered Deacy, who maintains that she is the less fanatic sister when it comes to Peeps, even in the face of polite scoffing. “Six-month-old Peeps on the corner of a closet floor? Still edible. And they do not attract ants!”
The classic yellow Peep has taken wing in popular culture, bland and lovable enough to absorb anything its fans can dream.
The confections have inspired Web sites full of Peep-centric research and Peep-based art. Annual Peeps diorama contests compete with animated Peeps theater for Peeps-loving audiences. Last week, when the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative held its show of edible books, Peeps starred in a recasting of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”
What makes candy more than sugar and marshmallow? A delectable coating of childhood Easter basket memories adds calorie-free richness to many Peeps lovers’ experiences. The flavor’s on the tongue, but their sweetness touches hearts too.
Popculture icon
Some 700 million Peeps flock out of the Bethlehem, Pa., plant of candy-maker New Born each year. It’s the most popular nonchocolate candy in
America, the company claims.
The marshmallow chicks have been produced in the United States since the early 1950s, and started as a handmade confection laboriously piped out of a pastry bag.
Now it takes six minutes for a Peep to go from birth to a cellophane-wrapped box, the company says.
The classic yellow chicks have been joined by bunnies that now come in five colors. Chocolate mousse bunnies are new this spring.
The classic Peep has joined the pantheon of food items that have successfully made the transition to American popular culture icon, said Amy White, Planned Parenthood’s director of communications.
“As a marketing professional, I find Peeps is a pretty savvy brand, a mass marketing phenomenon,” said White, citing Christmas snowmen and St. Patrick’s Day shamrocks. “That nostalgia you apply to Easter? Now you can apply it to other areas.”
Fresh or chewy?
Just because White can cooly dissect what the Peeps marketers are up to doesn’t render her impervious to their charms. On a recent Saturday, in front of a roaring crowd inside the Broadway Market, White, a sober, professional 38-year-old, took second place in a Peeps eating contest.
In 60 seconds, White downed 10 Peeps, which she admits isn’t a threat to break the world record for Peep snarfing. (Eightyeight in 30 minutes.)
“I wasn’t stuffing two and three in my mouth at a time, but I wasn’t really trying,” White said, more by way of explanation than defensiveness. She was so jazzed that she had photographs of the Peeps-eating tourney up on her Facebook account in two hours.
The contest Peeps were fresh, which White prefers. Leaving the marshmallow candies exposed to air stiffens them in a day or two, and they get chewier as they dry out. Lots of Peeps freaks like the chewier version, but White was diplomatic.
“There’s room in the Peep community for differences of opinion,” she allowed. It’s also a pretty decent calorie if you’re looking for something sugary, 32 calories each, the company says, and no fat, per se.
“Whether you like Peeps or not, seeing Peeps in your grocery store, having a carton of Peeps on your countertop at Easter time, just brings a level of nostalgia back,” said White.
“That’s a neat thing that food can bring to people, bringing you back to a place where maybe you were a little more innocent and you remember these sort of traditions in your life.”
Family traditions
For Deacy and Lebron, Peeps love runs deep.
“A lot of people know my family is relatively obsessed with Peeps,” Deacy said, owning up to an outsized love for the marshmallow critters. “We don’t keep it a secret.”
You might say it’s in her blood.
“I credit my dad with being the first one to discover taking the Peeps out of the package and, putting them in the Easter basket, that they tasted better after they had gotten harder,” said Deacy.
Maybe having to wait to raid the Easter basket made them taste better, but there’s no doubt the memories have stuck. “We’d play with the peeps and make them talk, and laugh, then eat them,” Deacy said. “Just pop them in our mouths.”
Please take note, Deacy said: Peeps etiquette is crystal clear on decapitation. “No ripping the head off,” she said. “There’s only one way to eat a Peep — pop ’em in your mouth, one bite.”
Peep perfection
Now it’s all the rage to prefer your Peeps al dente. You can send someone a Peeps greeting on Facebook, how newfangled is that? But the bandwagoners are welcome, Deacy said. “We’ve been eating Peeps our entire lives.”
Such a deep relationship has its pitfalls. You ever met a coffee snob?
“We’re Peeps snobs in my family,” Deacy sighs. “No Peeps with crooked eyes. Their eyes must be straight.”
And if they’re not? “We discard them.”
On Easter, after a glass of wine with her sister, Deacy said, “we’ll swear they are peeping at us.” (She also takes pains to point out that being a nurse in a surgical center is kind of stressful, and she does silly stuff a lot to blow off steam.)
Anything else your Peeps pro is going to notice that might slip by a rookie? “They’re much better if they have a little of that plastic grass stuck to them,” Deacy said. “That gives it a little extra flavor.”
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Power to the Peeps
!
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