From the New York Times...
Kit Kiefer, Feb. 8, 2008Oaks Candy Corner in Oshkosh is a chocolate mirage. Its gingerbread exterior yields to an interior that in winter is as sugary warm as the inside of a circus peanut and in summer is as refreshing as a wax Coke bottle. It’s the shop just around the corner in an unremittingly blue-collar part of an unremittingly blue-collar town. It shouldn’t still be there, but there it is.
If Oaks Candy is a mirage, then the
Hughes Homaid Chocolate Shop, less than half a mile away,
is a figment of Wisconsin’s imagination. An 80-year-old bungalow two blocks from Lake Winnebago, it has only a small neon sign to state its trade and a full-blown candy-making operation in its basement.
But Oshkosh isn’t the only caretaker of these unlikely sweet dreams. There’s
Beerntsen’s in Manitowoc, with its plate lunches and ice cream sodas;
Wilmar Chocolates in Appleton, with its old-time awnings and row of state-fair prizes on the south wall;
Kaap’s in Green Bay, with its jar of jawbreakers on the counter;
Seroogy’s in De Pere, with its magical whipped-chocolate-filled “meltaways”; and more, much more.
None of these places should exist in the 21st century, doing what they’re doing. But in eastern Wisconsin, when it comes to chocolates, creamy reality trumps bitter logic.And the truth is that you can drive the 150-mile perimeter of a rough triangle — think of it as the Wisconsin Candy Delta — formed by Green Bay, Manitowoc and Oshkosh and spend at least a whole day slowly sampling candy sure to thrill anybody’s valentine. These sweets are made from 100-year-old recipes and sold in 50-year-old mom-and-pop bastions — heirloom chocolates fresh from the source. Make that sources, as in a whole herd.
“Our cream and butter come from a creamery outside of town,” said Liz Garvey, an owner of Appleton's
Wilmar Chocolates. And, Ms. Garvey’s brother Paul, another owner, said,
“You can tell what the cows have been eating just by tasting the cream.” He looked for all the world like Jeff Daniels in a hairnet as he drizzled a quart of local butterfat into a kettle sizzling with boiling caramel.
A good place to start the candy delta tour is with some dense, rich dark-chocolate creams at
Beerntsen’s (pronounced BEAR-ent-sens), which has been a part of Green Bay’s red-brick, west side shopping district since 1925. From
Beerntsen’s, it’s 40 minutes of Packer-themed sprawl on Route 41 to Appleton, where Vande Walle’s dispenses real-deal caramels and ethereal angel-food candy in the shadow of the huge Fox River Mall, the largest shopping mall in the state.
Vande Walle’s Candies is the least traditional of these sweets stops. It opened in 1974 as a bakery in Shawano, northwest of Green Bay, and it offers as many baked temptations as it does cooked-and-dipped ones. Still, the recipe for its signature caramel goes back more than 100 years, to a long-gone rural candy maker.
Appleton is the most worldly city in the region, and the 51-year-old
Wilmar Chocolates, with its New Age music, India-spice truffles and Belgian chocolate chips, plays it cool and upscale. But the smell of chocolate emanating from the back is still old-school aromatherapy, and Wilmar’s signature candies are decidedly proletarian. Its Wilmarvels are turtles done right; its caramel nut logs are a toothsome version of the last candy left in the box; and its chocolate-covered cherries deliver a dollop that neatly balances the tartness of a real cherry with the sweetness of its surroundings.
“When you’re around our candy all day you get a little more discriminating,” Ms. Garvey said. “I was out last night and someone said,
‘Hey, did you try that new Snickers?’ I said,
‘Sorry.’ ”
