Every year, the internet spews out a million lists of overrated and underrated things. This band isn’t as good as your brother thinks it is; this movie was tremendous, even though only four people saw it; this book may be a best seller, but it’s pretty lousy; nobody appreciates the greatness of slugs, and so on and so forth. These lists can be annoying, as some people tend to hate everything that is even remotely popular, but at times the lists can also be incredibly validating: sometimes it’s nice to see a popular-yet-stupid thing get ripped to shreds, and even nicer to see an underrated gem get its due.

It’s with this in mind that I tell you, Candy Addicts, that the Nestle Chunky bar is the most underrated candy bar of all time.

Let’s start with the basics: a Chunky bar, (which got its cringe-worthy name in the 1930s, after inventor Philip Silvershein decided to name the bar after his granddaughter, who apparently was also called “Chunky” – for obvious reasons), is a slab of creamy Nestle milk chocolate, raisins, and peanuts. It’s a bit like a giant Raisinet/Goober hybrid, as if someone left a box of Goobers and Raisinets to melt atop each other and then re-harden into a trapezoid of awesome.

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I was promenading the candy aisle at Ralph’s. You know, the one with those bulk candy tubs proclaiming No Sampling!, but it’s un-American not to try some. Having “sampled” this or that from about every tub, the one candy I hadn’t tried was Boston Baked Beans.

All I remember about them as a kid was that I didn’t like them, but I hadn’t tried them in maybe a decade. I hesitantly reached in to satisfy my curiosity and was surprised by what I tasted. These beans were… pleasant. I quickly grabbed a small box of the beans packed in the convenient snack-size most Ferrara-Pan candy is sold in for 25 cents.

Boston Baked Beans were released in the 1930s, and the name derives from a generic term for any sugarcoated peanut candy. Its recipe is simple. Essentially, this candy is comprised of sucrose, peanuts, and corn syrup, with various waxes and food colors thrown in for fun, which yields a rather simple flavor indicative of most candies from that era. You can even check out the virtual tour of how they are made.

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As a kid, gumballs were a staple of my candy diet. But they weren’t just any gumballs, like those generic ones you got out of candy machines for a quarter. They were Rain-Blo gumballs.

They came in that little cellophane tube, perfect for squeezing out one at a time into your mouth. Then, as now, they came in mini, regular and “Jum-Blo” sizes, and were available in several flavor varieties, including a fruit mix in which the gumballs were actually shaped like little fruits. This wasn’t as cool as it sounds, as most of the flavors had just been given a pebbled surface, with the exception of the green watermelon’s stylish stripes. There was also an uber-sour variety called Eye Poppers, upon which I blame my adult addiction to everything ridiculously sour.

Rain-Blo also makes jawbreakers with, naturally, a gum center. I guess when you have a spherical candy as your main product, the natural next step is to pan a few layers of hard candy around the outside of it and make a jawbreaker. I remember that no matter what the original color, they always ended up tasting like wintergreen, and every fifth one or so had a weird harsh chemical taste, but somehow I couldn’t get enough of them anyway. (Hey, I like wintergreen – so sue me!)

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Want to find candy from your childhood that’s still in production? Aside from Candy Addict links, try the very bottom shelf in the candy aisle at your supermarket. The bottom shelf usually has the less popular comestibles, or maybe it’s for the customers who know what they want and where to get it. Either way, that’s where I noticed a fun candy from my childhood: original Spree. (I said “fun,” not “delicious.”)

So, what’s so fun about Spree? Well, you have to know what these candies do when they get wet. That’s right: they bleed off their super bright colors like you’ve got your own personal dye factory. Apparently, some girls used them for makeup before they were allowed such stuff, but of course we boys had a much “better” idea. We systematically collected all the red ones and made fake gun-shot wounds on our white t-shirts. Obviously.

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What is old is new again, and this couldn’t be truer in regard to the recent resurrection of the classic candy Good & Fruity. Many of you may be familiar with this one already, and if you are, I’m very jealous! I’m too young to have enjoyed the original Good & Fruity (or Good ‘n Fruity as far as the original goes) back in its days of glory. I was hoping that the fact that Hershey’s was bringing it back would make me feel like a more “complete” candy lover; like how a modern gamer would feel finding an original Nintendo Entertainment System to play or a wine connoisseur discovering a long lost vintage. A chance to take a step back in time and taste something that “once was.”

Although, like Zombies brought back from the dead, things just aren’t as good the second time around. The original Good ‘n Fruity were pastilles with a bland jelly center and the actual fruit favoring came from the colored candy shells. As the legend goes, the formula was changed in 1988 to enhance the flavor by making the jelly centers fruity to match the candy coating. After that there’s no word on how Good ‘n Fruity slipped out of favor with the candy eating public and ended up discontinued.

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