CC Brown to Close

CC Brown’s, a favorite Hollywood Blvd. ice cream and candy shop for 68 years, will serve its last hot fudge sundae Saturday.

Clarence Clifton Brown opened the shop in 1906 at 7th and Hill Sts. and moved it to Hollywood in 1928. A chemist named John Schumacher, shown at right with his giant whipped cream piping bag, acquired the business from the Brown heirs in 1963 and prided himself on making no changes in the original formula; he died in 1994.

Though the ice cream shop will be closed, the Schumacher family will continue to make and sell CC Brown sauces, starting with the famous hot fudge sauce, through specialty stores, by mail and through the Internet.

Clarity Is Not All

Clearly Canadian Beverage, the New Age water company, is preparing to launch a non-clear teen-oriented drink called Orbitz, “texturally enhanced” by scores of “flavored gel spheres” floating in the bottle. Another New Age drink company, Mistic Brands, launched a similar drink last year, but the gel spheres in Jumpin’ Gems were heavier than water, so you had to shake it to get the lava lamp effect. Orbitz brags that its globules float.

A Non-Silly Web Site

The American Dietetic Assn.’s home page on the World Wide Web offers information of interest to the public--food and nutrition information, a good nutrition reading list and the operating hours of the ADA’s consumer nutrition (phone) hotline--as well as professional information for the group’s 68,000 dietitian members. The address is: https://www.eatright.org

Eskimo Pie Goes Diamond

This year is the 75th anniversary of the invention of the Eskimo Pie. The Smithsonian Institution will feature an exhibit about the epoch-making invention this summer.

The idea of covering a bar of ice cream with chocolate was hatched by Christian Nelson, the town eccentric of Onawa, Iowa, in 1921. On July 13 that year, he formed a company to sell the I-Scream-Bar (that name was scrapped pretty quickly).

The new confection, marketed in a wrapper made of the recently developed miracle product aluminum foil, quickly became so popular that the Eskimo Pie Co. was the biggest customer US Foil Co. had. In fact, in 1924, US Foil (now known as Reynolds Metals) bought Eskimo Pie and ran it for the next 68 years. (Bet you didn’t know that.)

Nelson, a lifelong experimenter in ice cream making, died in 1992, just a few days short of his 99th birthday. Nutritionists, take note.