Chocolate Boxes, from Fastidious to Romantic
Last week I asked: Do you decline restaurant surcharges when you see them on menus or your bill? 67% of you said no you do not decline them, you pay the surcharges — and the rest are split between always declining the charges and sometimes declining them. Pretty good odds for the restaurateurs!
This week on the podcast my guest Elle Simone Scott of America’s Test Kitchen talked about gifts of food, and the history of boxes of chocolate. Whitman’s was the first to make commercial food gifts at a large scale in the U.S., with its sugar plum boxes that debuted in 1854.
What I have just learned is that “sugar plum” does not been sugared, dried, fruit, as I had always imagined; it was just the phrase used for round boiled candy.
Pretty much as soon as chocolate bonbons could be made by machinery, they became the candy gift of choice for Americans. “A bad boy but a good judge” was an early Whitman’s slogan.
In 1908, the “Fussy Package” became the center of Whitman’s marketing. The sticker on the boxes read “A fussy package for fastidious folks.” (That candy store ad is so aggressive!)
This ad from 1954 is the latest I could find for the Fussy Package - they’ve added “Fresh” but taken away “fastidious.”
“A woman never forgets a man who remembers.” Starting around WWII, chocolate shifted from an always-appropriate gift to something mostly for men to give women.
What’s your favorite chocolate box purveyor? Mine’s See’s.
Food Gifts with Elle Simone Scott
The resident food stylist at America's Test Kitchen on the history of boxes of chocolate ... and where she might find Lupin.
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See's is the best!
Mind blown on the sugarplums! I also thought they were dried fruits.
See’s is also my favorite, Nuts & Chews specifically. None of that fruit nonsense, thank you.