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At
92, Veronica Dollard of Bissinger's Candies
remains the prime virtuoso of confections. For candy maker, perfection with chocolate is sacred trust By Florence Shinkle - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - 11/19/01 |
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(NOTE:
This story has nothing to do with Italians, strictly St. Louis' and the
best chocolate in the world. Sorry, Perugina. Miscellanea.)
It's all in the fingers. Hers are blue-webbed, delicate and precise. Today they are building milk-chocolate almond clusters, glossy pendants, two chocolate-covered almonds aligned side by side, crowned by another almond placed just so. The work may look commonplace, but one wrong move, and there's a lumpish blob where an exquisite confection was supposed to be. "I'm the only one can dip these," Veronica Dollard says. "The other girls can't manage it. At least that's what they tell me. You've got to handle the pieces a certain way. I don't do as good work as I used to, but I'm getting by." Veronica Dollard, 92, is the premier chocolate dipper at Bissinger's Candy, the city's venerable house of chocolates. If you have heard Lauren Bacall's voice - rich, smooth, kind of chocolatey-sounding - promoting Bissinger's chocolate-covered caramels as one of "life's sweet indulgences," those are Veronica's handiwork. If you happened to read the September New York Times article about Bissinger's hand-dipped chocolate-covered blackberries - Veronica again. She got her first job in a candy plant when she was 16. It was not Bissinger's. It was a competing firm. "I was an orphan; my aunt and uncle raised me." She completes another chocolate pyramid while she talks. "After my second year in high school, I got a summer job in a candy kitchen. I told my aunt, 'I'm not going back to school. I'm making $13.50 a week, and I like the work.'" She's perched on a stool in a room that's kept a chilly 50 degrees. She wears a sweater, the mandatory hairnet, but no gloves. Can Van Cliburn wear gloves when he plays Tchaikovsky? In front of her is a puddle of milk chocolate on waxed paper. This celestial goo she ladles from a big pan of the stuff in the middle of the table. The chocolate in the pan is held at 104 degrees. The chocolate puddle in front of Veronica must cool to exactly 89 degrees, no more, no less, for perfect dipping. Chocolate outside that temperature point will streak and get a grayish tinge as it hardens. No gray dullness in Veronica Dollard's clusters! They glow! "And I guarantee you," says Ken Kellerhals, president of Bissinger's, "if you stuck a thermometer in the chocolate Veronica is working with, it would register exactly 89 degrees." Kellerhals has hung a picture of Veronica Dollard dipping chocolates on the wall in the executive board room. Bissinger's, which arrived in St. Louis in 1927, is one of the few candy makers across the nation that still hand dip fruits and nuts. Most companies now extrude the chocolate from a machine into a mold, and as the chocolate sets up, the filling is injected into it. Kellerhals maintains that "to use machines you have to change the recipe, and Bissinger's is about not changing recipes. Our recipes are the ones Karl Bissinger brought over from France. Our chief candy maker, Marley Otto, is the son of Floyd Otto, who was taught how to make these candies by Karl Bissinger himself." Bissinger's still sells candy out of Bissinger French Confections, the first shop Karl Bissinger opened at 4742 McPherson Avenue in the Central West End. In this sacred tradition, Veronica Dollard's job takes on symbolic importance. And Veronica is treated like royalty, brought to work in a taxi, fluttered over, a woman who has hand-dipped her way through the comings and goings of wars, swatch watches, Web sites and a national appetite for Milky Ways. Only once in 76 years did she venture away from the sweet shape of her life. "I tried hat-making once, but that didn't work out. Lucky for me it didn't, because people quit wearing hats." She concentrates for a moment on a dark hillock of nuts. "And there were a couple of times when the children were young that I didn't work. But I always came back to the candy." Triumphantly, she crowns a pair of almonds with a third. "You're holding up production," she tells a visitor pertly. She swishes the chocolate in front of her, takes some from the warming pan and adds it to her working pool, swishes again, nods to herself: Just right! She reaches for an almond. Reporter Florence Shinkle:
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