On this day in 1857, in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, Milton Hershey was born into a life that would smell permanently of hot sugar. He is remembered for the chocolate, but the road there was paved with failed candy shops — one venture, then another, both closed before he was thirty. Anyone who has pulled a tray out too late knows that feeling: you did the work, the batch went dark, you scrape the pan and start again on Tuesday.

What finally held was caramel. Caramel is unforgiving — sugar, milk, butter, and a temperature window about as wide as a thumbnail — and he learned milk on that stove. When he turned to milk chocolate, the hard part was never the cocoa, it was getting fresh milk to keep company with it without spoiling. His answer was his own condensing method, and it left a faint sour edge, a whisper of tang under the sweetness.

That tang is the good part. A whole country grew up tasting it and deciding, quite reasonably, that this was simply what chocolate was — the flavor of a bar carried in a warm pocket, of a campfire square gone soft. Not a flaw anyone fixed. A house style, born of a dairy problem, and then a town built around the factory that made it.