Le Mallomaraise

New Yorkers enjoy really screwy “delicacies” (think egg creams), including winter-only Mallomars:

“My mother used to buy them on special occasions, and I used to sneak down to the kitchen and steal them,” said Mr. Boxer, who grew up to be an owner of Rare Bar & Grill, a restaurant in the Shelburne Murray Hill Hotel at 303 Lexington Avenue, near 37th Street. “And then she’d say, ‘Somebody last night had three Mallomars. Wonder who it was?'”

That question comes up at this time of year, for like Beaujolais nouveau, Mallomars are not a year-round delicacy, not even in the New York area, where 70 percent of Mallomars are sold. Mallomars return to supermarket shelves in the fall after a warm-weather break. But Mallomars connoisseurs do not celebrate by holding tastings of the new batch or by calling friends to announce “les Mallomars sont arrivés.”

(Sheesh — only in the Times can you get away with comparing Mallomars to Beaujolais Nouveau — and still make it seem halfway funny.)

Obviously playing hard-to-get (like Peeps?) helps increase their desirability, but the question remains why — in this super-advanced society in which we’re living — Mallomars must be seasonal:

So now is as good a time as any to investigate this New York-area phenomenon, the arrival of the beloved Mallomars, and to plumb some of their mysteries: Why do they melt in hot weather when science has come up with ways to keep pretty much anything from melting? Does the answer, whatever it is, have anything to do with the fact that this cookie, born in New Jersey, is now made in Canada? And what about the Whippet, a Canadian cookie that is about the same size and shape, but packs more calories, more carbohydrates and more sugar?

. . .

Mallomars’ origins are in New Jersey. Kraft, whose Nabisco division markets Mallomars, says the first buyer was a grocer in West Hoboken, which was consolidated to form Union City in 1925. Their New York-area roots are the reason Mallomars sales are so heavily concentrated in the Northeast, said Laurie Guzzinati, a spokeswoman for Kraft.

But they are made 350 miles away, in Toronto, the home territory of Whippets, which arouse the kind of passion among Canadians that Mallomars arouse among New Yorkers.

. . .

To keep Mallomars from going soft in warm weather, the factory halts production in March and resumes in September, but it takes time for them to make it to store shelves. There are those who wax poetic about Mallomars during the off-season, and those who say the seasonal schedule is behind the times.

Or maybe the problem is the pure chocolate. “If they can produce chocolate that can survive in Saudi Arabia, why don’t they do that with Mallomars?” asked Richard J. S. Gutman, the director of the Culinary Archives & Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I. (For her part, Ms. Guzzinati of Kraft said the company is “looking at ways for them to be available year-round,” though not in 2006.)