It’s not hard to have a sweet-tooth in Baltimore.
Between snowballs, gourmet ice cream shops, a plethora of cake and cupcake bakeries (including a travelling cupcake truck and the Ace of Cakes) and more than a handful of home-grown candy companies (such as Naron, Mary Sue, Rhebs and Wockenfuss) there’s enough sugar here to kill a village of diabetics. Today, feeling kind of like a trip to the mall for a birthday ensemble, my mother and I decided to hit up Wockenfuss Candies for a post-work day sugar fix. We split a caramel apple (which was deliciously sour and sweet with soft, gooey caramel) and got some exotic looking, gourmet dessert truffles for later. The sugar has obviously kept me up very late.
The Wockenfuss family immigrated to the United States from Germany in the late 19th century and quickly set up shop (a candy shop) in the early 20th century. From what I can gather, the family had previous experience and skill as chocolatiers and found a market and a booming economy in the growing port city of Baltimore, as well as a hungry and demanding customer base. The company is still owned by the family, specifically Paul Wockenfuss, and now has eight separate locations all over the Baltimore area including White Marsh, Bel Air, Columbia and Ocean City. Not much information can be garnered about the history of Wockenfuss, but it has become one of those popular Maryland companies that almost everyone knows and loves.
With their local reputation, familiar product, decent prices ($3 for a caramel apple is less than I pay at the Arbutus Carnival… go figure) it’s no wonder than Wockenfuss has become a part of the culture around Baltimore. In fact, the store has made such a cultural impact to Maryland residents, it has been featured in a legitimate cultural artifact: a children’s book (look here!) by Denise Blum, “The Plot of the Perilous Pirate: Captain Smitty Takes Ocean City.”
This is a short blog entry, no doubt. Sometimes it’s hard to find out the history of a store, its customer demographic or company statistics; many successful businesses don’t bother to publish that sort of stuff if no immediate gain can be made from its release. Obviously, people of Maryland aren’t particularly bothered by this. Wockenfuss Candy is popular enough to have eight locations and ship candy all over the country, which is a lot to be said for a chocolate company started in Baltimore by German immigrants a century ago. The history of this company is a long, successful one but I’ll leave this blog short and sweet. If you want to see how popular the chocolate is, go to the Mall in Columbia, stand in the perpetual line, buy some chocolate (if you’re lucky, from Katie Savin-Murphy will ring you up) and get lost in a bit of Baltimore bliss.
( On a side note, I also helped promote the spread of culture today by introducing my mother to bubble-tea. She loved it. The wonders of a Western shopping mall and its abilities for cultural assimilation…)
Terms:
artifact: an object made by humans, usually for a specific function or purpose
cultural assimilation: a social response to a multi-ethnicity demographic that promotes the absorbtion of many cultures into a single one
References:
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