No family-friendly seaside resort is without purveyors of salt water taffy, the bite-size pastel bonbon that evokes good times in waves and sunshine. Despite the name and its association with the ocean, it contains no salt water. According to Joseph Marini of Marini’s candy store on the Santa Cruz, California, boardwalk, the confection was named in 1907, after a shoreline fire was extinguished using seawater pumped up from a fireboat. Finding his taffy spritzed, Joseph’s great-grandfather, Victor Marini, staged a “salt water taffy” sale on the boardwalk . . . and the name stuck. “He used to tell kids that every morning he walked to the end of the wharf to fill five-gallon buckets of salt water to make the candy,” Joseph remembers. “In fact, we use no salt at all in our taffy.”
The East Coast story of conception goes back to 1880 and the Atlantic City boardwalk. Built above sea level to keep sand from creeping into hotel lobbies, the broad wooden walkway featured a taffy stand at St. James Place run by candy man David Bradley. One night, strong winds and a high tide sent ocean foam all over Bradley’s supply of just-made taffy. Extremely grumpy that his stock had been dampened, he sarcastically corrected a little girl who stepped up the next morning and asked for taffy. “You mean salt water taffy!” he sneered. The child nodded yes; he sold her some; and later that day her boasts of buying salt water taffy were overheard by Bradley’s mother. A bulb illuminated above Mom’s head, and the next summer when Bradley opened his candy store, he printed signs that advertised a unique—or more precisely, a uniquely named—product.