Nougat

What makes a candy bar? First, there is the bread and wine of the candy world: chocolate. Chocolate is king, both master and servant of Candy Bar Land. Good chocolate will make a candy bar precious and powerful — bad chocolate will make it Hershey's.

But chocolate's supporting players are key, particularly in the more downmarket bars that clutter up our short, brutish lives. First there are the nuts. With crunchy impact and mild flavor, they keep our interest, and entertain us with their texture. There are many nuts, but only a few dominate the world of candy. The humble peanut. The haughty almond. The avuncular and dominant pecan, with its unstoppable super-power: clustering.

Then there are edgier ingredients: strings of seductive, teeth-clogging coconut. Manly peanut butter. And, finally, the Emo Philips of booster ingredients: nougat.

What the hell is it? It's certainly chewy, that's for sure. And it's sweet, and generally sort of whitish. The word itself is French, with an assumed derivation from the Vulgar Latin "nuca," which relates back to the origin of the word "nuts." A Sicilian recipe page says traditional vanilla nougat contains egg white, sugar, honey, almond, pistachio, vanilla and cocoa. Everyday American candy bar nougat is something a lot more artificial — it's chewier, sweeter, and less intensely almond-flavored. Regardless, millions of Americans say it's just plain delicious.

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Nougat does double duty. First of all, it's a taste sensation. Have you ever frozen a vanilla Charleston Chew bar, smashed it into pieces with a hammer, and eaten the resulting bits? No?

You haven't lived.

Second of all, nougat is one of comedy's primary driving engines. Lacking the intellectual flash of "gubernatorial," the sophomoric shock value of "boner" or the brute star power of "monkey," nougat plays a subtle but crucial role as one of the understudies of written humor.

I cite as my primary evidence a quote from Woody Allen's "Conversations with Helmholtz," a short bit collected in "Getting Even." Woody Allen was (and probably still is) a master writer of short humor pieces. Were he young today, he'd be writing for The Simpsons.

Note the placement of nougat in the following passage:

The "conversations" were held over a period of several months between Helmholtz and his student and disciple, Fears Hoffnung, whom Helmholtz loathes beyond description but tolerates because he brings him nougat.

If "nougat" was not a funny word, would it show up in such a key position? The whole sentence is straight-faced and serious, reading like an elegant but workaday building block of a scholarly biography. What gives it comedic punch? Nougat! It's a funny word.

David Letterman seems to agree. Note the following lists, a small sampling of that turned up by a Google search:

Top Ten Ways the Army is Trying to Boost Recruiting
4. Make it so every hand grenade has a creamy nougat center.

Things That Sound Creepy When Said by John Malkovich
5. "Nougat!"

Cool Things About Being the Richest Man in the World
5. Your yearly budget includes $15 million for nougat

Signs You'd Make a Bad CIA Director
5. The last piece of "intelligence" you acquired was that nougat is chewy.

The fact that "nougat" is always at the center of any list it appears in may actually be an inside joke, but that can't be definitively corroborated.

In summation: eat nougat at every meal. Say "nougat" at the end of every sentence. On your knees, you undeserving bastards, and thank God for every blessed breath you take! And: the chewy taste of nougat.