Christmas Past doesn't always come in the form of a Dickens ghost, clanking its chains and moaning. Sometimes it's a bit of Baltimore frozen in time, when things were simpler and the season seemed brighter. Jeppi Nut and Candy Distributors (everyone calls it the Jeppi Nut Co.) is one of those magical places.
It doesn't look magical - and that's assuming you can even find it, hidden away behind the Fayette Street post office. If you use a computer map-search Web site for directions, you're guaranteed to get lost. This is Christmas Past, remember?
It's a little like Brigadoon, the mystical village that appears once every 100 years, only Jeppi appears when you need freshly roasted hazelnuts to make fruitcake or one of those fat 5-cent peppermint sticks you used to get in your stocking. (They now cost 75 cents.)
If you finally get there, you may wonder at first what all the fuss is about. Jeppi is in a dingy old building at 312 N. High St. - almost a warehouse. The inside is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit grim. Boxes are stacked everywhere, and in back, mysterious cast-iron machines revolve ponderously.
Then you take a deep breath. The warm, seductive smell of roasting peanuts acts like magic pixie dust to transform everything. The mysterious machines turn out to be ancient nut roasters. How charming! Christmas music is playing on the radio, and you notice the well-worn and surely well-loved holiday decorations - probably the same ones that have been brought out every year since Jeppi moved to its current home in 1974. A large American flag hangs over it all.
Those boxes are filled with the candies that delighted you as a child: Mike & Ikes, lemon heads, French burnt peanuts. Shelves are lined with vanilla, lemon and orange extracts for baking, glazed fruit, crystallized ginger, whole Turkish figs, blocks of chocolate and even a few modern additions like Jeppi's own granola and trail mixes.
Most of all, there are nuts: shelled Brazil nuts; two kinds of pignolias, Chinese and the sweeter Portuguese (which local Spanish restaurants like Tio Pepe buy from Jeppi to make their pine-nut rolls); almonds sliced, slivered, whole and blanched; and pounds and pounds of still-hot peanuts in their shells.
J.J., the good-natured elf - er, John Jordan, the man in charge of the roasters - estimates he roasts about 2,000 pounds of peanuts a day. In the 11 years J.J. has worked at Jeppi he hasn't gotten sick of their warm fragrance, but "I don't eat 'em anymore," he says.
