Candymaking in Canada. David Carr

giant that bears his family name, was struggling to set up his own candy company in neighbouring Seattle.

      It is not known whether Mars senior ever bit into a Rogers Victoria Cream, but the man who liked to experiment with his mother’s candy recipes began selling Victorian Butter Creams through the Woolworth five-and-ten store chain in the 1920s.

      “Butter Creams were fairly common,” explains Jim Ralph, president of Rogers’ Chocolates. And there is a difference between the Butter Cream and Rogers’ Victoria Creams. “But it’s interesting that [Mars] would call his chocolates Victorian Butter Creams,” Ralph adds.

      The origin of the Victoria Cream recipe remains a mystery. Most of Rogers’ work was trial and error, often conducted while hunched over a cauldron of chocolate. Victoria Creams were also the most expensive candies in the shop.

      Rogers, the man who began making his own candy to spare the expense of importing confections from San Francisco, was later forced to admonish any young consumer fortunate enough to have ten cents to spend, but naive enough to think he could purchase a selection of Victoria Creams. “Ten cents buys you one chocolate,” he’d be told curtly.

      Charles Rogers was notorious for his lack of patience with those who came into his shop. In addition to keeping odd hours—ignoring the lines outside the shop and only opening when he was ready—Rogers was often surly and rarely exchanged niceties or indulged in idle chatter.

      Above all, Rogers appeared to cherish his privacy. This was confirmed in a historical retrospective published by the Victoria Times Colonist in 1951. Charles Rogers, the article reported, “seems to have succeeded fairly well in pulling a blind down around himself. Even when he married, in 1885, an ‘estimable young lady for many years a resident of Victoria’, the local papers were discreetly non-committed. For he was, at the time, according to the reports, a ‘worthy and energetic young man having established himself in a lucrative business.’ ”⁴

      But the couple worked hard. On the coldest winter nights they would often stay in their shop to sleep only to get up before the sun to start working again. They also took few holiday trips, preferring instead to check into the St. Joseph’s hospital for a week whenever they felt they needed a respite.

      In the 1890s, Frederick Barnes Wood moved from Nova Scotia to the British territory of Newfoundland. Upon arrival in St. John’s, Wood opened a fruit, confectionery, and flower shop. He too wanted to secure a steady supply of quality goods for his store and began manufacturing his own line of candies, alongside jellies, syrups, and marmalades.

      In the early twentieth century Wood decided to transfer his shop to a magnificent new building on St. John’s fashionable Water Street. The Evening Telegram wrote about the new shop on January 11, 1902. “Woods new candy store is all but complete. A credit to all concerned.”

      Certainly it was something that few residents of St. John’s had seen before: a candy shop, bakery, and soda fountain on the ground floor, beneath an elegant restaurant complete with starched white table linen and equally starched serving staff. The candy store and restaurant quickly became one of the most patronized locations in St. John’s.

      The Water Street location would have a short run. Wood closed the shop in 1917 to concentrate exclusively on a second restaurant. In 1923, he retired completely, selling his business interests to W.R. Goodie, a local businessman who would transform Wood’s confectionery and soda pop interests into Purity Factories Ltd., the province’s largest confectioner and home to some of Newfoundland’s traditional favourites.

      It was also during the nineteenth century that the story of what would become Canada’s largest chocolate company began. In the early 1800s, John Nilson, a weaver by trade, and his wife, Agnes, left the textile town of Paisley, Scotland, to seek new opportunities for themselves and their four children in the largely unsettled colony of Upper Canada.