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'This Is A Taste of Home': Key West Candy Girls Bring Lost Tradition Back To Island

Members of the Key West candy girls pull peppermint candy as it cools
Nancy Klingener
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Screenshot from Zoom
Traditionally, you pulled candy from a hook in the kitchen wall — Rosa Nafrere, left, and Dazmine Jenkins are using a cymbal stand that's been adapted to allow them to handle the hot candy.

When Lynne Casamayor was growing up in Key West, there were lots of ladies in the island's Black neighborhood who would make homemade candy.

"You could go knock on their door and say, can I get some peppermint candy or glass candy?" she said.

But the tradition did not continue.

"By the time that I moved back to Key West in 2015, there was nobody making that candy," she said.

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Casamayor is the youth director at her church and hung out with teens on Saturdays. They'd make cupcakes, or make beach bags out of pillow cases.

"We got the idea, why don't we try to make glass candy?" she said. "And then we thought, well let's really be adventurous and try the old-fashioned pull candy."

The Saturday youth activity became an enterprise: Candy Girls Key West. Now they convene in Casamayor's kitchen.

Both glass candy and the pulled candy have similar ingredients — sugar and corn syrup — and they're heated to 300 degrees. But with the pulled candy, you have to handle the candy while it's right off the stove. You literally pull a sticky blob to get air into the candy.

"In the old days they had a hook on the walls of their kitchen and of course we don't want to put a nail in our kitchen so we started just pulling it by hand — candy that's 300 degrees," Casamayor said. "We'd have on what I call church lady gloves, the old white gloves, and then we'd put the food safety gloves on top of those but it was still hot."

Lynne's husband Ray — who keeps track of supplies and makes local deliveries for the Candy Girls — came up with a solution.

"My husband saw us struggling with that and my youngest son is a drummer so he had an old cymbal stand here," Casamayor said. "So my husband took the old cymbal stand and made a device so we can now pull the candy on this cymbal stand."

Instead of a cymbal, the stand supports a rod that they drape the taffy-like candy over while they pull it.

Re-creating Ma Vera's lost recipe

Besides glass candy and pulled candy, Casamayor has brought back another local favorite she thought was lost forever.

Her great-grandmother Vera Butler, known as Ma Vera, made delicious fudge. But when she died at 107, the recipe was lost.

"We didn't know how she did it," Casamayor said. She tried the recipe from the family cookbook, but that didn't taste right. She she started trying different ingredients.

"I just kept playing with the recipe, playing with it until it was the taste that I remembered and then I took it to my cousin Pat and she agreed, yep, you finally figured it out," she said.

The high school girls handle the glass candy and pulled candy production — under Casamayor's supervision. But she does the fudge herself.

"Because the fudge is so temperamental that it's like a baby — I baby it and I take care of it and I stay at that stove and I make sure that I'm stirring it because I want to make sure that it's perfect," she said. "Maybe about six months ago, five batches in a row, I had to throw out — because I didn't pay attention or I did something wrong."

A candy girl prepares labels for the packages of candy
Lynne Casamayor
Dazmine Jenkins makes labels for the Candy Girls packages — they take care of every step of the process.

Now that she's got the recipe down, she shares the fudge with family and friends — and sells it on the Key West Candy Girls website. The Key West High School cheerleaders ordered it to sell for their fundraiser this year, rather than buying fudge from out of town.

Casamayor's sister Judy Leggett has also returned to live in their hometown. She said tasting Ma Vera's fudge again "was a surreal moment" that returned her to a Key West she remembers but thought was gone forever.

"When I was growing up, family was all around. It was great-uncles and great-aunts and grandparents. But our generation, after we graduated from high school, we all kind of left in our different areas," she said.

Tasting the fudge brings that old feeling of family back.

"It's a loving comforting feeling," Leggett said.

Casamayor says most of their orders are from out of town — from the Conch diaspora.

"We've had orders from California, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Tampa, Miami — we've sent candy everywhere," she said. "When I see the name on who it is, I'm like 'Oh wow, that's so-and-so that used to live here.' Some have never come back, they've been gone like 30, 40 years. But for them now, this is a taste of home."

The proceeds from the Candy Girls sales go to a scholarship fund at the church where they met and started making candy together.

Nancy Klingener was WLRN's Florida Keys reporter until July 2022.
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