OKI Wanna Know is our feature giving you the chance to ask a question without an easy answer. This week, WVXU's Bill Rinehart jumps into the history of a sugary Easter treat.
Jeff Frauenknecht of Pleasant Ridge wants to know about opera creams.
"We always got an opera cream egg at Easter time when I was a kid. And recently somebody said 'You know that's a local thing; it's not a nationwide confection.' I'd never heard that and I wondered if that was true."
Are opera creams unique to Cincinnati? Well, yes and no. You can find some small confectionary companies online in places like Utah and North Carolina that sell opera creams, and there are some makers across Ohio and in Kentucky, but the big companies, like Brach's and Hershey's, don't list opera creams in their repertoire.
If you're not familiar with an opera cream, food historian and blogger Dann Woellert says they're covered in chocolate. "Dark chocolate as well as milk chocolate. You've got white chocolate versions. The only thing it hasn't been dipped in yet because it's kind of new is this ruby chocolate, the pink chocolate that you're starting to see at confectioners around the country."
But it's what's inside the chocolate that counts.
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"It's a cream filling that consists of heavy cream, sugar, vanilla and what's called a frapp, which is it's kind of like marshmallow — it's a cream that's been whipped." He says opera creams don't contain butter, like bon-bons do.
Who made the first opera cream?
Woellert says unequivocally, opera cream were invented in Cincinnati, although two candy makers argued over who made them first.
"The Robert H. Putman Company and the Bissenger Company, both of which are no longer around," he says. "But we have proof from a 1920s — I think it was a 1922 Cincinnati Enquirer ad — which is the first that shows an image of the opera cream and says 'invented by the Putman Candy Company.' "
Woellert says when it comes to food, there's more of an evolution than an invention.
"I mean, if you look at Cincinnati chili, the three-way didn't come first; it was called chili spaghetti; it didn't have cheese in 1922 when it was first introduced. Then in the early '30s, a Cincinnati customer said 'Hey, I love cheddar cheese, could you put some cheddar cheese on it?' and that became a three-way."
Woellert says Papas Candies, which bought out the Putman Company, may have invented the opera cream egg.
"Every Easter, you see Papas cream-filled Easter eggs all over Cincinnati, particularly in Krogers, CVS and Walgreens and places like that. And that's their thing. They've owned that for a very, very long time."
Woellert says any candy maker in the area worth their sugar makes an opera cream, and the candy has found its way into other foods.
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"The BonBonerie makes one of the best cakes, the opera cream cake, which has the opera cream as the icing and the filling. A lot of bakeries do an opera cream icing, and opera cream cupcake. There's opera cream coffee drinks at various local coffee shops. We've really owned that flavor."
Woellert says that's something he loves about Cincinnati: the city has embraced its individuality when it comes to food and cooking. He says at the 513 Food Fight competition last month, one chef served up a three-way encased in aspic gelatin. Woellert says that shows the three-way is here to stay.
"Same thing with goetta. Same thing with LaRosa's pizza and Graeter's ice cream. We embrace it and when people nay-say — especially against Cincinnati chili — those are fighting words. We really take that seriously and we defend our weirdness in the regional culinary genres of American food."
How did the candy in question come to be called opera creams? Woellert says the story is they were handed out during intermissions at Music Hall, but there's no written proof.
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