A Sugar Binge

Russell Sifers, who now runs the candy company started by his great-grandfather Samuel more than a century ago, tells me that his grandfather Harry often came up with the name for a new candy bar before his chief candymaker created the recipe to go along with it.

"My grandfather loved current events," Sifers says, "so when the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was uncovered on November 4, 1922, it was such a big news story that everything Egyptian was hot. My grandfather decided to sell a candy bar named after King Tut."

The Old King Tut was a nut roll (not unlike the Chicken Dinner, which was introduced in Milwaukee about the same time), though Russell Sifers says he never tasted one. He didn't get to sample a Subway Sadie, either, which Harry Sifers named after a popular 1926 silent movie of the same name. But Russell says he did find a roll of old paper wrappers for the defunct candies when he was a teenager sweeping up the fourth floor of the old Sifers building at 20th Street and Main (where the Hereford House restaurant's parking lot is today). "Those nickel candy bars didn't have a long life span," Sifers says. "A big flash, then they were gone."

On the Valomilk Web site, Russell graciously includes links to other sites that sell vintage candy, including California's Annabelle Candy Company, which still manufactures the hard-to-find Rocky Road candy bars and the suggestively named Big Hunk ("A long-lasting mouthful of chewy, honey-sweetened nougat," the company boasts) bars.

Not that I need to go online for a fix. All kinds of head-spinning sweets can be had right here in town, including the chocolate-enrobed Double Stuff Oreo cookies and chocolate-covered butter caramels at Panache Chocolatier and just about anything in the display cases at Andre's Confiserie Suisse. Nothing costs a penny, alas.

My snobbier friends are dismissive about the more pedestrian selections at Russell Stover stores, but I have great fondness for this 83-year-old local candy company (which purchased the iconic 94-year-old Whitman's Sampler brand in 1993) and its hefty boxes of old-fashioned dipped candies. Of the half-dozen Russell Stover retail shops in town, my favorite is the Candy Kitchen operation at 51st Street and Oak that stays open until the civilized hour of 10 p.m. on weekends during the summer (but only until 6 p.m. from September until April). This venue sells cookies, ice cream and caramel apples in addition to candy. Candy-craving cheapskates can buy generous boxes of "factory seconds," too. I practically went into a depression when the Russell Stover stores stopped giving out free samples of the boxed chocolates in favor of the wrapped miniatures. One of the employees told me, "It's more sanitary this way."

Don't tell them, but that chubby Italian lady behind the counter in my father's hometown, the one who threw penny candy into a bag with her bare fingers? In her other hand was a cigarette.