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The Sweet Life - The South Magazine
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2/22/2008
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Valentine’s Day: The one day a year when love and devotion are measured in calories. In Savannah—a city that revels in sugary, buttery goodness all year round—sweethearts can choose from a widely-varied assemblage of candymen and women whose collective wares perpetuate the happiness of sweets-lovers and dentists alike. Two Savannah confectioners, River Street Sweets and?Savannah’s Candy Kitchen—separated by mere blocks on cobbled and crowded River Street—have established themselves as the go-to headquarters for homemade, uniquely Southern goodies. But what some people don’t know is that each shares history as rich as their pralines and ties as thick (and sticky) as the saltwater taffy stretching and twirling across River Street Sweets’ 80-year old pull. Through love, friendship and division, each institution has shared in the basic principle that good candy is not simply an indulgence, but an experience that stops just short of religious. For these confectioners, candy—like Valentine’s Day—is an affair of the heart.
For those in touch with their childhood sweet tooth, walking into Savannah's Candy Kitchen or River Street Sweets is like stepping into the finest kind of dream. Wrapped candies are piled high in bins and peek demurely through glass containers throughout each store. Twisted lollipops sprout out of stands like rainbow-colored tree branches. Palm sized chocolates, stacked on wax-papered shelves, are upstaged only by the sugary visage of both stores' best selling treat - pecan pralines - which are being made fresh and warm only a few feet away. The smells alone emanating from both stores are mouthwatering, and quite possibly fattening; only the samples generously doled out by the candymakers quiet that kid inside most of us, stomping its foot and begging for sweets. A visit to these nostalgic stores is an assault on all five senses. With every step, the customer sees, smells, feels, tastes and can virtually hear candy.
"Well, we watch Willy Wonka about once a week," says Stan Strickland, owner of Savannah's Candy Kitchen, when asked about the inspiration behind these candy kingdoms. And just like Roald Dahl's fictional factory, the experiences had in these stores call out even the best dieter's vices. "Not many people come in here and just look," says Pamela Strickland, co-owner of River Street Sweets. "They come in and eat."
Though Savannah's Candy Kitchen and River Street Sweets are two separate businesses, each with multiple stores outside of their River Street locations, the similar look and taste of these candy shops - and the owners' identical last name - is no coincidence. Savannah's homemade candy shop tradition began with one store, one family and one fudge kettle crammed into the corner of a gift shop.
In 1973, when River Street had grass growing through its sidewalks and Savannah's pending renaissance assured that the area was far from the tourist mecca it would eventually become, Georgia Nash, along with her daugher Pam Strickland and Pam's then-husband, Stan, purchased number 13 East River Street to fulfill their retail ambitions.
"When we opened, it was as a gift shop," Pam says of the store that would one day become River Street Sweets. "We sold cut glass, Christmas ornaments from Germany, that sort of thing. We thought we would have a little store that we could lock up in the middle of the day and go to lunch. And that's what we had, except that nobody was buying."
"We were about to starve," says Stan jokingly, as he remembers the early days of his family's endeavor. But fate intervened at a trade show in Atlanta in 1978 when Pam and Stan's son, Tim, stumbled upon the thing that would fill more than just the family's empty bellies.
"(Tim) saw a copper pot that made fudge," explains Stan. "He brought me to it and I said, 'let's try that.' So I bought it, brought it home and right away we saw that people liked candy."
The concept made perfect sense to the Stricklands. As native Southerners, candy making is a family tradition that spans generations. A shop devoted to the down-home, made-from-scratch sweets that they enjoyed as children seemed like a perfect fit for their River Street space. Shoved into one-third of the gift shop, the Stricklands first employed the copper kettle to make fudge, but quickly alternated its function to create their famous pralines.
"We went home one night and said, what is traditionally Southern?" says Pam. "We thought pralines...that's it. It has all the right ingredients to make you feel really sick and really wonderful - cream, butter, sugar and pecans."
A delicacy that dates back to 17th century France, the praline was a favorite of the French royals and eventually landed in the Creole cookbooks of colonial New Orleans. Pralines are now widely enjoyed across the world and its legacy is a s much Deep South as it is South of France.
The Strickland family's first experience in praline making was less than a piece of cake.
"The first batch I made in the store was in April during the Tour of Homes and there were a lot women in there," Stan says. "I was all excited. I dipped them out with an ice cream scooper on the table, and when I tried to get them up to sell them, they broke into pieces on the marble table! I didn't know enough to butter the table - that was how little I knew. But they bought them anyway. I knew then that we had something really good. From there, it's history."
While Pam, her mother Georgia and River Street Sweets continue to enjoy increasing prosperity as a business and Savannah's tourism industy swells, a bitter divorce between Pam and Stan Strickland in the early 1990s caused Stan to leave number 13 River Street. He stayed in the candy business, however, moving a couple blocks down to creat Savannah's Candy Kitchen, which now has locations in both City Market and up the coast in Charleston, South Carolina. Today, each shop individualizes itself through the owners' unique personalities, company structure and zeal f or the sweet stuff in life.
"We put most of our efforts in the mail order," Stan explains, as he shows me around the Candy Kitchen's expansive factory, where, during peak season, the staff ships to 4,000 customer per day in all fifty states. A fall years ago left him with a bad ankle, he tells me, as he climbs upon a two-wheeled Segway Personal Transporter.
"This is they way I travel; you all can walk," he says, laughing.
But no true candy-lover would mind taking his or sweet time walking through his palace of confection.
"Most Savannahians would be surprised to see what goes on in this place," he says as we weave through a maze of factory rooms. Mounted on his machine like a king on his horse, Stan zooms through the kitchen, where pecan pies, coconut cakes and a variety of other baked goods are made and piled on racks to cool before shipping. He leads me through packaging rooms where staff members place collections of the comapny's second best selling confection - a caramel, pecan and chocolate "gopher" - in bright red boxes. Abandoning his steed, Stan walks me through a long room with sugar boiling languidly over large heat sources to watch peanut brittle spill from its copper kettle. After the concction has been cooled and stretched into a gigantic, peanut laden sugar-sheet by the skillful candy makers, Stan reaches out and grabs a corner, shattering it against the table, and helps himself after handing me a hunk. "I think candy should be fun," he says, back on the Segway. "You know, Savannah's Candy Kitchen is very homespun. This is very family oriented, and we want you to have a good time."
The modern River Street Sweets similarly maintians a high-flow mail order business, but they also have seven retail stores in towns throughout Georgia and South Carolina to complement the original River Street location. Yet, despite the company's expansion, River Street Sweets is still very much a local, family business.
"My mother is a visionary," Pam Strickland says of her fellow co-owner who was the starting force behind the birth of the business. "She's in her eighties now and did the Christmas decorations for every one of our eight stores this year."
With the aid of Pam and Stan's grown children, Jennifer and Tim, Georgia and Pam build all River Street Sweets stores around the customer's experience and enjoyment of what they call "gourmet Southern candies."
"I think Savannah is a sophisticated lady and that's what we try to tie into our quality and our packaging," explains Pam as we sit in the candy-crowded store on River Street. "What we do here is really a community effort. We don't have just once face that is connected to the store. This store is everybody, playing such a key role."
Though River Street Sweets and Savannah's Candy Kitchen are separated by distance and by ownership, the motive and method of both Savannah institutions is nonetheless in the shared name of love. Love for their customers, for their staff, for the candy and for the Southern candy experience.
When i first met Pam Strickland, she immediately introduced me to one of her longest working employees, Emma Igou, who, wearing an apron and armed with an ice cream scoop, was spooning hot pralines onto a giant marble table near the door of the shop, luring passersby with the promise of mouth-watering, tongue-throbbing delight. Nearly everday at River Street Sweets, Pam explains, Emma makes pralines and other candy for all the customers to see and to smell, and has done so for years.
"So," I say to Emma, perhaps tactlessly. "You must be responsible for thousands of cavities!" "Perhaps," Pam interjects, quite unphased. "But she is responsible for even more happiness." It's a lesson wisely remembered by everyone trolling the candy shops for their beloved's gifts this Valentine season. Cavities and happiness: What every good Valentine's Day, and visit to River Street Sweets or Savannah's Candy Kitchen, should include.
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