Lust in the time of Mallomars

MY HANDS ARE clammy. My mouth is dry. I am ticking off the final days to the first week of October, when everything changes, and Mallomars are once again in my life.

I cannot eat another odious Oreo that clogs the spaces between my teeth with chocolate grout, nor can I convince myself that Nabisco’s Marshmallow Twirls, those odd Mallomar wannabes, will finally wean me off my favorite cookie, like some confectionary methadone cure.

Behold the Mallomar! It is a near-perfect creation, the most pleasing marriage of texture and taste in the annals of junk food. A Graham cracker (I suspect some slight iteration of the Nilla Wafer) topped with a small fluffy cloud of marshmallow, the whole thing then shrouded in a thin layer of piquant milk chocolate. It is my dark mistress, my refined sugar temptress. But, alas, the Mallomar is only available from October to mid-March.

Why does Nabisco play such a taunting game of hide and seek with junkies like me? I suspect it is following the same approach that Gypsy Rose Lee used to get big tips: Withhold your best assets, keep them wanting more. According to the company, it has something to do with the unstable nature of the chocolate, which tends to melt in big delivery trucks during the summer. I suppose Nabisco is doing us a service; enforcing calorie counting on all us Mallomar freaks, our greedy fingers sticky with marshmallow, attempting to cinch ourselves into those size 32 jeans that really did fit a scant year ago.

For most Mallomar lovers, the habit starts early, usually during adolescence, a time when the palette is not yet mature enough to reject marshmallow -- a foodstuff that really should be reserved for campfires and county fairs -- as a dietary staple. For kids, that gooey substrate, combined with the aforementioned chocolate and Graham cracker, is everything they ever loved about sweets in one sublime cookie.

It is an insidious addiction, sort of like those sugar-intensive umbrella-decorated concoctions I drank in college that went down a little too easily. When I was younger, I could consume a single box of Mallomars in one short, after-school TV-watching session -- say, two Monty Pythons and a Benny Hill. Then I’d have to create some pretense -- a need for kitty litter, usually -- to borrow money from my folks and make another grocery-store run.

Thus, there is a strong element of misty-mouthed nostalgia attached to Mallomar love, sort of like the Proustian madeleine effect. Mallomars transport me back to the rumpus room with the black-light posters and the football-shaped throw pillows. Even the package, albeit with some minor variations, takes me back decades, with that tantalizing pyrogenic flow of chocolate hitting the marshmallow, enveloping it with goodness.

But it’s just a cookie, right? Mallomars, after all, aren’t like Harry Potter books -- the masses won’t be waiting in long lines in front of their grocery stores the night before they hit the shelves again. It’s a conundrum worthy of the great thinkers: Is desire for Mallomars a function of their scarcity? I think I speak for Mallomar lovers everywhere when I say that absence just makes the heart grow fonder; that year-round Mallomars would be too much of a very good thing. Or then again, maybe not.