A taste-test of some chocolate delicacies and curiosities with Bob Wallace: from the CBS 2 Vault
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Blommer Chocolate announced Friday that it is closing its factory in the Fulton River District – known by many for lending a chocolatey aroma to streets nearby and even across the river.
This story from the CBS 2 Vault does not have anything specifically to do with Blommer Chocolate, and the late CBS 2 reporter Bob Wallace would likely have been quite disappointed if he had been sent out on a story where he did nothing but smell chocolate in the air the whole time.
But in this report from May 11, 1982, Wallace instead tasted all kinds of chocolate for Chocolate Month at Stop & Shop in the Loop. This was not the Stop & Shop supermarket chain that serves New England and the New York Metro/Tri-State Area – it was a vestige of old-time Chicago dating back to the 1920s at 16 W. Washington St. on Block 37, almost exactly where the CBS 2 Broadcast Center is located today.
As Urban Remains owner Eric Nordstrom wrote in a 2016 article, Stop & Shop Grocery was founded by businessman Aaron Younker in 1916, and later purchased by the Stern family. It found its way to the ground floor of the building at 16 W. Washington St. in the Loop by 1928, and became famous for offering high-end and imported products.
During their Chocolate Month that May coming up on 42 years ago, Stop & Shop was offering an assortment of the finest chocolate products in the world. Some were tasty, but rather commonplace in today's world – like chocolate-covered strawberries. Some were liable to get make one tipsy upon eating too many, like the rum or cognac cordials with their liquid centers.
Meanwhile, Wallace apparently was not wild about the chocolate cheddar cheese on display on top of a case full of fancy cheeses like Pont-l'Évêque from Normandy, France, and some sort of cheese with grape seeds.
And there were even cans of chocolate-covered ants, and chocolate-covered bees – which, for anyone wondering, are literally what they sound like.
In far more recent years, a Maryland candy shop offered chocolate-covered cicadas when a brood of the insects emerged there in 2021. Whether any Chicago confectioner will do the same with the 17-year cicadas of Brood XIII returning this year remains to be seen.