Zipf’s Candies: A retro candy haven

Posted 10/31/19

Nick Brady, an assistant at Zipf's Candies Chestnut Hill, with a pile of the store’s selection of retro candy.[/caption] by April Lisante When I was a kid, my mother used to take us each morning to …

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Zipf’s Candies: A retro candy haven

Posted

Nick Brady, an assistant at Zipf's Candies Chestnut Hill, with a pile of the store’s selection of retro candy.[/caption]

by April Lisante

When I was a kid, my mother used to take us each morning to a little store in town where she would buy her daily newspaper.

My brother and I loved this last stop before school because the store was called the Rock Sweet Shop.

It was an old-time New York-style shop that carried newspapers, magazines, lottery tickets and all of my favorite childhood candies. Shelf after shelf of candies.

This was the mid-'80s, so as you can imagine, we were hooked on everything from Fruit Stripes gum to Charms hard candies, Pixie Sticks and of course, Reese’s Pieces, thanks to the movie “E.T.”

And there was something about the smell of the shop. The subtle undertones of the newspaper print were pretty much overpowered by a combination of chocolate, powdered sugar and wax packaging.

Last week, I had the ultimate flashback when I walked into Zipf’s Candies in Chestnut Hill. Tucked in the alley behind the Delphine Gallery for more than five decades, I wanted to pay tribute to Halloween candy with a visit to this happy little place.

I wasn’t prepared to have so many childhood memories come flooding back. The smell was identical. And then I saw the candy. All of my childhood candy. Just seeing some of the packaging hurtled me to 1983.

Owner Paula Fingerut recognized the look on my face immediately.

“There’s always a history with candy,” she laughed. “I hear so many stories from so many different people about a candy they knew as a kid, or a candy their grandmother used to have. It’s amazing.”

It turns out kids aren’t the only customers at Zipf’s looking for a sugar fix. Just as many adults, even septuagenarians, are regular customers looking for their retro candies.

So Fingerut, who bought the beloved Zipf’s last year after spending decades in the high-end food retail business, proudly advertises her retro candy stock on a placard outside, and gives the candies a significant portion of her shop space. She carries an extensive selection of individual chocolates, popular at the holidays, bagged bulk candies and seasonal favorites like rare German Santa Claus foil chocolates, but her retro candy has proven hugely popular with Hill adults.

“They come in and test me to see if I have things,” laughed Fingerut. “One guy came in and said, ‘OK, do you have Bonomo?’ And yes, I had it. It’s Turkish taffy.”

This was a new one for me. The Bonomo Turkish Taffy bar looked inedible to me. But apparently, older Philadelphians remember the chocolate, vanilla and strawberry bars quite fondly.

“That’s because you have to freeze it, then they would slam them on the asphalt and they would shatter into a million pieces that you could eat,” Fingerut said.

Another favorite is Necco wafers, those chalky discs wrapped in wax rolls. When the company that had been making the wafers since 1847 went out of business last year, Fingerut grabbed a ton of wafers from the remaining stock.

Now, customers basically freak out when they see she has them.

“I had a woman come and buy two big bags of them recently,” Fingerut said.

And who can forget Nik-L-Nips, the little wax bottles filled with an unidentified simple syrup of some sort? A sheer childhood joy was biting the wax in just the right way so the bottle neck would remain open enough to pour the blue or red sugar juice down your throat. Fingerut sells a ton of them.

If you’re a child of the '70s or '80s, you must remember Whistle Pops. Where kids today have little pops shaped like baby bottles, we had a lollipop that had the added bonus of whistling while mom was trying to drive the car.

Or how about all those candies that promoted smoking in our wee years? Like La Pipette, the licorice pipe, and the bubble gum cigarettes wrapped in white paper that blow powdered sugar “smoke.”

For some of the older customers, Fingerut keeps an impressive stash of retro gums, like Beemans, Clove and Blackjack. She also sells a surprising amount of Choward’s Violet hard candies. This was another new one for me. I tried it, and felt like I had eaten a plant.

“It tastes like a flower, yes,” Fingerut said.

A better alternative, in my opinion, are the Charms fruit-flavored hard candies I remember hiding in my school desk and popping in class.

Another popular item among the adult set are the candy buttons, those dabs of hard sugar attached to a paper roll.

“The joke is that you get pieces of fiber with every bite,” laughed Fingerut. “You can’t eat them without some of the paper coming off.”

“Candy just spreads joy,” she said. “No matter what age you are, no matter what mood you’re in.”

Happy Halloween!

food-for-thought