Twinkies are snack cake royalty in America. Invented in 1930, this simple cream-filled cake has appeared on supermarket shelves across the country and has been featured in famous movies like “Ghostbusters” and “Zombieland.” It even played a role in a high-profile 1970s murder trial during which the defense tried to argue Twinkies were, in part, to blame for what happened. Even after Hostess declared bankruptcy in 2012, fans wouldn’t let Twinkies die. The snack cakes made a comeback and are currently being produced at a rate of 400 million per year. That’s pretty impressive for a treat that was originally created just to keep cake pans in use during the off-season of another beloved American dessert, strawberry shortcake.
James A. Dewar, the inventor of the Twinkie, was a plant manager for the Continental Baking Company in 1930. He was worried about the company’s future. It was early in the Great Depression, and he didn’t think the company could thrive by producing Little Short Cake Fingers for only six weeks a year, when strawberries were in season. The rest of the time, that equipment was just sitting unused. So he thought they could just make a different kind of filling that didn’t rely on such a seasonal crop.
The Twinkie’s flavor originally tasted much different, as Dewar’s first attempt was a banana-filled cake — bananas were imported from the tropics, so they fit the bill for a multiseasonal replacement. The last piece of the puzzle was the name, which came via a St. Louis billboard for the Twinkle Toes Shoe Factory. But the Second World War, which broke out nine years later, brought banana imports to a halt. Vanilla was Dewar’s next flavor, creating the Twinkie as we know it today.
Read more: 14 Once-Popular Desserts From The 1970s
Twinkies soon grew into a snack food juggernaut
Workers operating on Twinkie assembly line – Tim Boyle/Getty Images
When Hostess went bankrupt in 2012, many Twinkie fans feared the worst. People started panic-buying the Hostess snack cakes as fear spread that Twinkies would be gone for good. Some price gouging was reported, and some fans even petitioned President Barack Obama to step in and nationalize the production of Twinkies. The company was saved when it was purchased by an investment group for $185 million. Soon after, Twinkies returned to shelves. Hostess was sold again four years later for a massive profit, with the company being valued at $2.3 billion. The company was sold yet again, this time to the jam and peanut butter barons at J.M. Smucker, in 2023, a deal worth a staggering $5.6 billion.
It’s hard to put your finger on why Twinkies are so popular. There’s a line in “Die Hard” in which Reginald VelJohnson’s character lists the ingredients as: “Sugar, enriched flour, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, polysorbate 60, and yellow dye number five.” He’s mostly correct, too, although Twinkies use beef tallow and not vegetable oil these days amongst the 30-plus ingredients that go into each cake.
The creamy center of a Twinkie is not made of real cream, of course. It’s a mixture of sugar, fats, and stabilizers. When you think about it in purely academic terms, it almost doesn’t make sense. Why would this artificial snack cake be so beloved? Some of it’s just because sugar and fat taste good. Some of it’s because we remember it from childhood and there’s tons of baked-in nostalgia. After almost a century, everyone alive today likely has some memory of a Twinkie, and that’s pretty powerful stuff. Six weeks of strawberry shortcake per year could never do that.
Read the original article on Tasting Table.
