Our Idiosyncratic Grocery Faves
Turns out we love an old-timey confection!
Dames Nation, this week: a gift basket. A cornucopia of treats, even. Are most of these things necessary for life? Debatable! Reasonable people can disagree, but surely we can all agree that a little something delicious — for not in celebration or in honor of anything in particular beyond our continued existence — is inherently good. Treat yourself, treat a friend, treat someone you haven’t seen in ages and whose day you’d love to brighten.
As ever, we’d love to know what treats float your boat, the more arcane, old-timey, or region-specific, the better! Sound off in the comments or sling us an email about it!
Dame Karen’s Essential Food Treats
I learned about nuts.com via a gift from my boyfriend’s mom and am now evangelical about them. Of course there’s their namesake--for me it’s always cashews, how ‘bout you?--but they also have a slew of candy from old-timey lemon drops to these violently adorable Nintendo mushroom sours to chocolate-covered everything (including an all-dark chocolate section for you Bitter Betties) not to mention a robust freeze-dried fruit section, make your own trail mix, and my personal favorite, the customizable snack trays! Sometimes I take a work break and just play around with possible snack tray combos, what a fun game.
The Vermont Country Store is the best catalog in the universe and therefore of course their snacks rule. Hits include Merriments, which are a pleasingly melty yet gritty (“crystal to cream”) childhood fav that I used to get from the aggressively quaint Ye Olde Goodie Shoppe in my hometown of Keene, New Hampshire. All cinnamon, please--thank you from me and your great-grandma. Speaking of old lady candy, imagine being fancy enough to just have these Daisy French Candy Creams around? Stick ‘em on a chocolate cupcake and look like a genius. The scope of food in this catalog is incredible. I’ve been considering trying the Senate Bean Soup for decades now, but enough people had the same impulse to “dish up a hefty helping of patriotism” and it’s sold out.
Did you know Alaska is often full of blueberries and “in a good berry year the otherwise green tundra actually has a blueish cast from so many berries”? I didn’t know until I had to go there for work ten years ago. Sometimes I pause and realize I saw bear cubs playing in Denali National Park – what the actual hell? – and then I go back to thinking about the main source of joy and amazement from the trip, the blueberry fudge from The Fudge Pot in Fairbanks.
Speaking of blueberry, if you find yourself in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (home of Dame Margaret herself!) you can go to Streetcar Wines, “the best little wine and beer store in the whole wide world” and in addition to wine, beer, tinned fish, and fancy potato chips, you can get wonderful sour blueberry Swedish fish, or Piggvar, from Kolsvart. My boyfriend Dave might sell them to you; he’s cute and nice, tell him I sent you. They also have raspberry, elderflower, and salted licorice flavors if you’re into that; online, the sour blueberry is currently sold out from the delightfully named Sweetish Candy but they’re available elsewhere. They’re also goofily expensive so maybe ask for them as a gift like I did.
Economy Candy is apparently a beloved New York landmark and I hope to visit some day. So far, I’m only familiar with their website and I’m a big fan of their Candy Care Packs which make excellent gifts especially if you or someone you love is in need of a Fuck It Bucket. You can also shop by color, decade, and theme AND they also have a huge selection of ‘70s-’90s trading cards!!! They used to have a combo candy/trading cards pack that seems to no longer exist but who’s to stop you from buying a few The Dark Crystal or ALF trading cards a la carte?
My friend Maria is really good at food AND gifts and once sent me a huge box of Delia’s Tamales. They freeze and reheat like a dream, are completely delicious, and you can add all the sauce and toppings you want and customize them. I am not a cook and it feels so good to have comforting, easy to prepare food on hand when I’m feeling peckish and overwhelmed. Another loving and spot-on food gift that came from my friend Martha was the Spoonful of Comfort Get Well Soon Gift Package that honestly saved me when I was in the first, surreal days of grief last year after my friend Alli died. Soup, cookies, and rolls were all I could deal with but I wasn’t in any state to know WHAT I needed and all I remain so grateful that people I love intuited that and FED ME. Feed your friends.
Dame Sophie’s Pick & Mix:
I come to you today, on the day of James Harden’s first game as a Sixer, with a very Philly pride song in my heart. Let’s talk about some of my favorite regional delicacies, and where you can find them, whether you’re local or far-flung!
First, I would rightly be run out of town for not starting with the gold standard candy of my childhood and today, Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. They’re delicious little bricks of very chewy caramel and chopped peanuts, enrobed in dark chocolate. (You can get them with a milk chocolate coating, but although I prefer milk chocolate in many applications, I feel strongly that the best way to go is the original). Today, I learned that these classic dangers to dental work the world over were created as a military ration bar for the US Army during World War I. Just Born, the company who brings you Marshmallow Peeps, bought Goldenberg’s in 2003, and continues to produce the chews in Philly. You can get them in grocery and convenience stores all over the Delaware Valley, and they’re also available via mail order from many emporia including Karen’s beloved Nuts.com.
Speaking of nuts, I am a big fan of a local chain called Nuts To You. Shopping in their stores is a delightfully chaotic deli-style experience, highly recommended. Their online store gives you time to peruse such delights as dark chocolate-covered orange peel (a staple of Passover treats, though for observant Dames Nationals, these particular ones don’t appear to be kosher for Passover), coconut date rolls, unusual nut butters (love the pistachio, gotta get my hands on some cappuccino peanut butter STAT), and more varieties of oats than I previously knew existed. Many of their products are available at modest discounts if you purchase them on Nuts To You’s subscribe-and-save option.
I was well into my 30s before I learned that Shane Confectionery’s iconic Irish Potatoes are not a nationally-beloved seasonal treat, but a regional delicacy insufficiently appreciated outside of our neck of the woods. They’re a coconut cream cheese filling rolled in cinnamon and are an essential part of enjoying the St. Patrick’s Day season. Shane’s caramel quail eggs give me “they’re plover’s eggs; Mummy sends them down every year from Brideshead” energy. I don’t love fruit slices (give me a chewier and more sour version anytime), but I do like that Shane offers a vegan version of these classics. They also sell a candy bar called White Chocolate With Gin Botanicals, which can only be described as “sounds SO weird but I can’t deny I’m intrigued!”
Meanwhile, across the Delaware River in Merchantville, NJ, Aunt Charlotte’s Candies has been making their own scrumptious candies in the same location for decades. The shop itself is a little slice of Heaven, the kind of place that makes you think that magic truly exists in the modest forms of caramels, ribbon candy, and marzipan. Their website only features a small sample of all the delicious things they make and doesn’t have online shopping capability, but they are lovely to order from by phone, should you feel so inclined. I’m a big fan of their assortments, especially the hard-and-chewy and meltaway options. Their chocolate eggs for Easter – some hollow so you can put candy inside your candy before you eat your candy, and some filled with coconut cream – are a feast for the eyes, as well. Finally, in their life cycle events section, I note that they sell large chocolates in the form of items such as needle-nose pliers, chocolate rose boxes, and of course, a chocolate camera.
My last recommendation is for a (not-local-to-me company) you will already know about if you follow Deb Perelman (aka smittenkitchen) on Instagram, Rincon Tropics. They’re a farm in Carpenteria, CA selling all manner of mouth-wateringly delicious fruits, mostly citrus at this time of year. Deb has been raving about them for months, and I decided to splash out a little bit to beat the January blahs by ordering one of their seasonal mixed fruit boxes. Because I live on the East Coast, and shipping was going to cost about $15 whether I bought a medium or large box, I went big, and regret nothing. I turned the passion fruit pulp into a delicious, tart syrup that I mix into yogurt and add a few drops of to my seltzer, the intensely sour-and-sweet bearss limes found their way into some yogurt-citrus loaf cakes (rapturously devoured by test subjects from 4-74), and the lemons are going to become lemon bars. (I also received some tiny, sweet mandarins that lasted about 15 minutes.) New Jersey is the Garden State, and I will hear no criticism of our summer produce, but as a citrus lover, Rincon’s flavorful bounty has been a revelatory experience. I can’t wait to see what they’re offering this spring.
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Ohhhh Economy Candy! It was how I won over one of my husband’s best friends when we were dating; he came in from out of town and I insisted that we pay a visit. “Kid in a candy store” has nothing on “6’6” grown ass man in a candy store,” it turns out. The highlight was picking up some 20-year-old baseball cards which came with gum; our friend insisted that even 20-year-old gum would stick to itself once you started chewing. Cut to: all three of us standing around a corner trash can spitting out pink powder and laughing until we cried. But everything else in the store is edible and it is a glorious mess. Highly recommend.
My partner is devastatingly allergic to nuts, yet harbours a sweet tooth. It's tragic how many wonderful treats are effectively barred from our household! But for regional nut-free sweets, I'll get stuff from Kerr's -- my favourites from them vary depending on my whims, from caramels to fruit chews to hard candy, and I will readily admit that I can put myself outside a truly inadvisable amount of Hallowe'en molasses kisses (hated 'em as a kid, inexplicably love 'em as an adult).
But for when I'm traveling solo and not worried about contaminating my partner with nut residue, I absolutely adore Roger's Victoria creams. They're the perfect size to feel like a real indulgence, but small enough that you won't feel overfull after indulging (assuming you limit yourself to one, which I, uh, seldom do). I'll very happily eat any of the flavours, but the Dark Empress Square is my go-to.