Today’s Zippy takes us to the Hostess Snack Forest, where we can stand in awe of the giant chocolate cylinders filled with white creamy delight:
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Let’s just register the impressive phallicity of the Hostess Ho Ho and move on to other things.
From Wikipedia:
Ho Hos are small, cylindrical, frosted, cream-filled [in the U.S., creme-filled] chocolate snack cakes with a pinwheel design based on the Swiss roll. Made by Hostess Brands, they are similar to Yodels by Drake’s and Swiss Rolls by Little Debbie.
Sold two or three per package, they contain about 120 calories per roll.
The product is also produced in Canada by Vachon Inc., which holds its Canadian rights.
A San Francisco bakery created the first Ho Hos in 1920.
“Happy Ho Ho” was created in the 1970s and was the original cartoon mascot for Ho Hos. The mascot appeared on the boxes, ads, and television commercials for many years before he was discontinued. The character wore an outfit similar to that of Robin Hood, including a feathered cap.
The foodstuff in its near-immortal splendor (it keeps almost forever on grocery story shelves):
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And Happy Ho Ho cavorting (forest not pictured):
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A note on cream and creme. In the US generally, and in certain dairy states quite stringently, foodstuffs cannot be advertised as containing cream unless they actually have significant amounts of real dairy cream. There is no such stricture most other places, which is how we get to British salad cream (so called), which never had any cream in it; the name is entirely metaphorical. From Wikipedia:
Salad cream is a creamy, pale yellow condiment based on an emulsion of about 25–50 percent oil in water, emulsified by egg yolk and acidulated by spirit vinegar. It may include other ingredients such as sugar, mustard, salt, thickener, spices, flavouring and colouring. It was introduced in the United Kingdom in the 1920s, where it is used as a salad dressing and a sandwich spread. Due to the higher cost of ingredients during periods of rationing in the United Kingdom a flavour similar to mayonnaise was achieved in the creation of salad cream.
Various companies (including Heinz) market salad cream under that name in the U.S., so the restrictions on the word cream seem not to extend to the salad dressing.
Salad cream is made not with olive oil (as in mayonnaise), but some cheaper, less flavorful oil, like canola, and in my brief, appalled, experience with the stuff in Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales), is distressingly sweet, salty, and thick with gluey corn starch. It gets its creamy color from a bit of mustard.
