Candy of the Day - Baby Ruth

In the 40’s Curtis Candies jumped on the dextrose bandwagon, touting the fact their product contained processed corn syrup as a good thing. If you’ve seen my earlier post regarding the 40’s and 50’s push to rehab the image of dextrose you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s possible to argue that knowledge about processed foods has grown over the years and this Curtis ad is a lot less harmful than the cigarette ads of the era that sighted smoking as healthy. What’s not so easy is to excuse the blatant mistake in claiming grapes contain dextrose (I checked, they contain glucose, fructose, and sucrose).

The Baby Ruth bar came into being in 1920 when Chicago native Otto Young Schnering developed a new addition to his Curtis Candy Company line. This new bar was an adaptation of another Curtis product called the Kandy Kake which had a pastry center topped with nuts and coated with chocolate. The newly dubbed Baby Ruth bar was introduced in 1921 and it eventually replaced the Kandy Kake bar. Baseball enthusiasts like to argue that the Ruth got its name from legendary player George Herman Ruth, better known as Babe Ruth. To me Otto Schnering, the man at Curtis, puts this argument to rest. He stated that the Baby Ruth was named after the daughter of President Grover Cleveland, Ruth Cleveland and not Babe Ruth. Yes, I know there are Wall Street Journal articles which seem to link the athlete and the candy bar, but I’d point out that the first image of Babe Ruth associated with the Baby Ruth bar came from Nestle in 1995. The source material and facts don’t support a link.

I can remember getting Baby Ruth bars as a part of my Halloween haul every year. They were an old fashioned candy, usually handed out by a grandmotherly woman in her upper sixties who partially bought the bars out of nostalgia. For my brother and me, they fell somewhere below Three Musketeers in the candy pecking order, but were popular none the less. Baby Ruth bars also produced one of my favorite comedy moments (warning, brief nudity):