Today is May 23rd and on this day in history, we celebrate National Taffy Day. Not the signing of treaties or the birth of presidents, but the stretching and pulling of sugar into long, elastic ribbons that stick to your teeth and childhood memories with equal tenacity.
The thing about taffy is the pull. You heat sugar and corn syrup until it becomes molten amber, then you work it—stretching it over and over until the molecular structure changes, trapping air bubbles that transform dense candy into something light and chewy. The process requires patience, rhythm, and just the right temperature. Too hot and it burns. Too cool and it won’t stretch. The candy maker becomes part chemist, part choreographer.
Walking past a taffy shop on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1883, you might have watched Joseph Fralinger perfect his salt water taffy recipe, turning what was once a accidental flood-damaged candy into an empire. The story goes that his shop flooded during a storm, soaking his taffy in seawater. A young girl asked for some “salt water taffy” as a joke, and Fralinger kept the name. Sometimes the best discoveries happen when everything goes wrong.
The rhythm of taffy pulling mirrors something fundamental about human persistence. You take raw materials—sugar, water, heat—and through repetitive motion, transform them into something entirely different. It’s alchemy disguised as candy making. The same way a potter’s wheel shapes clay, or a blacksmith’s hammer shapes iron, the taffy puller’s hands shape sweetness itself.
Kids don’t think about molecular structure when they bite into a piece of taffy at the county fair. They just know it takes forever to chew, makes funny faces inevitable, and somehow tastes like summer afternoons stretched thin. The candy holds time in its fibers—the time it took to pull, the time it takes to eat, the time it preserves in memory.
Maybe that’s why we set aside a day for taffy. Not because it changed the world, but because it reminds us that transformation happens slowly, through repetition, through the willingness to keep working something until it becomes what it’s meant to be. In a world obsessed with instant everything, taffy demands patience. It teaches us that some of the sweetest things in life can’t be rushed—they have to be pulled, slowly and deliberately, until they’re ready to be shared.
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