In praise of Coffee Crisp, the great Canadian candy bar

The best candy bar in the world is (tragically) very hard to find in the U.K.

Whenever I am in Canada, the one thing I always make sure to bring back to the U.K. is a bunch of candy bars called Coffee Crisp, which is not available here. It’s no surprise that I am not alone in this.

The brilliant humorist Bruce McCall, brother of my long-ago Windsor Star colleague Walt McCall, is one of several Canadian ex-patriots asked by the New York Times to describe what they miss most about their homeland. With typical wit, McCall gets it exactly right. This is how his piece begins:

The gourmets say there isn’t a native Canadian food worth remembering after you’ve left the country. The gourmets have never bitten into a Coffee Crisp.

A Coffee Crisp tastes like Canada to anybody who grew up gnawing on that confection, a memorably crisp blend of coffee cream, cookie wafers and milk chocolate as wholesome and satisfying as the Canadian national anthem.

It was a square-edged rectangle, like a brick, wrapped in a yellow-going-to-gold paper that seemed to elevate its value above all rival confections. It was unlike other chocolate bars.

McCall’s comments are quite a way down in the story in The New York Times