Something Very Sweet About San Diego
Every couple of weeks Dana Eacobellis drives sixty miles or so into town to buy the supplies she needs to keep her small business going. Top of her shopping list? Sugar. Lots of sugar. She recalls a person in the checkout line asking why so much sweet stuff? “I said, ‘Well, I have a small candy shop in the mountains.’” Another customer immediately spoke up, “That’s not Wisteria, is it?”
It most certainly is Wisteria Candy Cottage. Along Old Highway 80 in the town of Boulevard, for more than a century now, Wisteria has been a sweet stop for generations of travelers between San Diego and the Imperial Valley.
“People come in and tell me stories about my mom and my grandmother. They say, ‘This is the Candy Cottage we used to come to when we were little.’” Dana is the latest of her family to own Wisteria. On the day we visited, she and her son Joe were creating trays of hand-dipped delights in the kitchen, just like it has been done since 1921 in this old wooden cottage that once served as Boulevard’s first schoolhouse.
Chocolate turtles are a specialty. Pecans or macadamia nuts are blended with caramel and exquisitely coated in either milk or dark chocolate. “We probably make about sixty pounds of turtles a week,” Dana says. Customers snap them up.
Dana’s life here is a mix of quaint charm and up-in-the-morning-over-the-kettle hard work, making turtles, brittle, fudge, truffles, divinity, and seafoam. There are challenges like keeping the cottage cool on hot summer days and keeping up with mail orders from all over the country. But keeping up her spirits seems to come naturally. She does work in a candy shop, after all. And then there is the fact that she really does love chocolate. “We eat candy every day. We have to taste test it to make sure it tastes good.”
She also feels the sense of history. For decades and for countless passing motorists, a stop at Wisteria is essential. One man recently told her he had been coming by since the 1940s. “It’s a part of these people,” she says.
I am guessing there are worse jobs. Everybody who comes in is happy to see you. There is laughter and the high desert air is perfumed with the scent of real chocolate. There is also something irresistibly appealing about its sweet simplicity. In a corn syrup world of corporate supermarket and drug store candy, Wisteria remains one of those rarest of authentic spots where things are done as they always have been.
With love, and lots of the sweet stuff.
