Quest for Confectionary Relic Is Unrequited

Last weekend, I called two Fort Lauderdale candy stores with unusual confections. I was searching for fairy floss, better known as cotton candy, a sweet memory of everyone’s childhood for the last 100 years.

Today, I tried the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, which may or may not be the biggest flea market in the world. It has been featured on a documentary about great American flea markets on the Travel Channel. One world traveler, a British gal working in the south Florida tabloids, once described it to me as "exotic as any North African souk."

The swap shop has some kiddie rides. It's hard to tell which are in a state of disassembly and which are still in use, until the ride starts, blaring Hispanic music. There used to have an indoor circus, but the aging owner had a family out with them. The Hanneford Family Circus was a unique and irreplaceable feature of this old Florida institution.

I fear the aging buildings will not be around much longer. Like the orange that were once such fun to visit in western Palm Beach country, the swap shop will be replaced by housing developments that are "all made out of tickey-tacky, and they all look the same," to quote Malvina Reynolds' Little Boxes.

One booth at the swap shop had cotton candy in plastic containers. That is so sad. Once, in desperation, I tried this pre-made, preserved stuff. Fairy filament is not meant to be trapped in a bottle. It must melt magically in the mouth.

Apparently, it is possible to make cotton candy at home. This process involves the use of a candy thermometer and enough dexterity to spin the sugar with a cut-off whisk. I tend to glue my fingers together, so that rules out homemade cotton candy making for me.

I've read that green apple cotton candy is served as dessert at the Tatu sushi restaurant in the Seminole Indians' Hard Rock Cafe and Casino south of here -- the one where Anna Nicole Smith died in her hotel room.

That one sentence sums up the jarring contradictions of contemporary culture. Cotton candy is as American as Ipods despite its apparent origin in medieval Italy. Sushi emblemizes ultra-global cuisine imported from that techie empire, Japan. The restaurant name, Tatu, sounds like the name of a comic French film star. Seminole Indians invoke the uniquely U.S. Wild West of days past; Hard Rock Cafes celebrate the semiotics of fleeting celebrity chic, embodied in the cartoon sexuality of poor Anna Nicole.

Green apple cotton candy is just wrong. Maybe I’ll take a ride down there soon and see if I can have some without eating raw fish in eel skin first.