The original Twinkie wasn’t ‘plain,’ but a surprising flavor

(NEXSTAR) – The Twinkie — one of America’s quintessential junk foods — wasn’t always so junky.

It wasn’t health food either, but its original recipe boasted more natural ingredients than the current one, including a somewhat surprising fruit.

The inspiration for the Twinkie came about in 1930, when an employee of the Continental Baking Company (the then-owner of the Hostess brand) was seeking a way to boost productivity at a Chicago-area plant. At the time, the company’s signature product was a long sponge cake filled with strawberries and cream, but strawberries — being seasonal — weren’t readily available year-round, meaning some of the bakery’s equipment was going unused for months, Hostess once explained.

Bakery manager James Dewar, seeing an opportunity to introduce a new item during less-fruitful times, reportedly turned his attention to the banana, which was plentiful year-round.

Dewar oversaw the first batches of the new banana-cream-filled cakes. He called them Twinkies, settling on the name after seeing a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes.

”I shortened it to make it a little zippier for the kids,” Dewar once explained, according to a 1985 obituary published in the Chicago Tribune.

The spongey cakes were priced at a nickel (for a two-pack) and soon became a hit.

The recipe remained unchanged for a little over a decade. But in the 1940s, Hostess says it was forced to swap bananas for vanilla-flavored crème due to WWII rationing efforts. (It’s likely that wartime rationing impacted the transportation of certain foods due to limitations on gas or shipping materials, rather than limitations on fresh fruit itself, the National World War II Museum explained.)

Thanks to the new recipe, Twinkies remained on shelves and carved out a following. Banana-flavored Twinkies eventually returned to add additional variety to the Twinkie lineup from time to time — albeit made with different, less-pronounceable ingredients than the original recipe, as CBS News noted.

Upon the release of the “King Kong” remake in 2005, a promotional run of banana-flavored Twinkies proved so popular that sales spiked 20%, according to The New York Times, prompting Hostess to make them a permanent offering — at least until the company declared bankruptcy in 2012 and operations were suspended at all Hostess bakeries.

The Hostess brand eventually changed hands, but Twinkies are still a staple in the snack-cake aisle. The banana-flavor is currently also a permanent offering at the official Hostess site.

The ingredients of today’s banana-flavored Twinkies, however, don’t share much of a resemblance with those from the original recipe. Over the years, much of the dairy-based ingredients were swapped out to increase shelf-life, and other ingredients were added for color, texture or taste, according to Steve Ettlinger, the author of “Twinkies, Deconstructed,” whose work has been cited by MIT and the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Banana Twinkies, meanwhile, still contain a small percentage of banana.

But whether they’re made with real bananas, real dairy, or only a tiny bit of either, the Twinkie’s changing recipes and flavors seemingly had no effect on its creator’s affections.

“Twinkies were the best darn tootin’ idea I ever had,” James Dewar once said of the Twinkie in a 1980 interview, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. “I still eat at least three of them a day.”