Press: Eat This!

Eat This! : 1,001 Things to Eat Before You Diet
2007-July

"Ice Cream and Candy"

My Los Angeles tour guide, George Motz, suggested I visit the Edelweiss chocolate store in Beverly Hills if I got a chance. The store has been operating since 1942 and was owned for some of that period, up to 2000, by Shirley Jones of The Partridge Family fame. The store's walls and display cases were packed with chocolates in all forms, colorfully decorated. Much care is taken here to make sure everything's just so. I hemmed and hawed before I picked some small dark chocolate bars, Halloween balls, and a variety of individual chocolates: with prunes, with dates soaked in rum, with ginger, and with arancia (orange peel). I made sure to get a few chocolate turtles, my wife's favorite.

I got to chatting with the staff and soon was ushered behind the counter and in the back to have a look round. A series of rooms form the factory that makes the chocolates. In the first, a woman was dragging cashews one by one through a kettle of liquid milk chocolate. Against the wall were stacked a series of what looked like large shoe boxes but with odd labels: TEDDY BEAR LOLLIES, SITTING BABIES, BABIES BUGGIES, ASSORTED HEARTS, SAFETY PINS, PREGNANT LADIES. Within each box was a couple of days' inventory of the chocolate representation of the same.

Madlen Zahir, the owner, found me and graciously let me poke further around the store, showing me the old Rube Goldberg machines used in confectionery making. "Savage Bros. Co. Chicago," read one. "Pats. 1914, 1919." In the very back was a great sheet of nougat, with a beautiful pristine surface. I commented on how laborious it looked to make all these candies and chocolates manually, and Madlen agreed. The reason the chocolates are as expensive as they are is that they really are handmade. Making chocolates is one of the few activities where it helps if you have cold hands.

I thought I committed a faux pas when I mentioned Mondel Chocolates, in my neighborhood in New York. ( I buy Kara's favorite chocolate turtles from there, as well as gift boxes of truffles now and then.) Katharine Hepburn used to go there, I said, and Madlen said that Hepburn came to Edelweiss, too. Madlen started to tell me how the store ships chocolates all round the country when the phone rang and an order came through. Sure enough, the surname Madlen wrote down on the order was extremely well known.

The chocolates cam back to New York with me in an attractive red Edelweiss Box. Kara loved the turtles, the kids liked the Halloween chocolate, and I ate the fruit ones and savored the deep richness of the dark chocolate. The box stuck around the kitchen for a while, and I picked it up the day I was ready to write about Edelweiss. It was not empty! Inside, I found a small dark chocolate bar and two pieces of what turned out to be the dark-chocolate-coated ginger. I put the box back in the fridge and managed to resist for a good half hour.

Edelweiss: 1-888-615-8800 / www.edelweisschocolates.com

ICE CREAM AND CANDY SUMMARY

RUN, DON’T WALK, FOR…

Chocolate-covered ginger from…Edelweiss in Los Angeles.