Ebinger’s
* Ebinger’s.
Just received the following email from long time Jeff Eats’ reader CHARLES.
Have at it, with your “memories” about this iconic Brooklyn bakery chain from 1898-1972.
By the way, the Ebinger’s photo above-is the exact store that Jeff Eats’ mother shopped in.
*****
Suggestion –
Everyone who grew up in Brooklyn has fond memories of Ebingers – I still miss their blackout cake – CHARLES
Jeff
Its blackout cake was amazing.
The company was anti Semitic and anti Black. Big protests in the early 60s.
Ebinger’s made great cakes.
The Company got done in when Entenmann’s started to supply baked goods to super markets and grocery stores.
From The New York Times in 1990.
To the Editor:
Margery Wilson has it wrong in her tribute to the original Loehmann’s department store ”Heaven on Bedford Avenue” (Op-Ed, Dec. 25). To any self-respecting young Brooklyn male, a summons to Loehmann’s was not a summons to paradise. Imagine spending two or three humiliating hours on the stairs at Loehmann’s, with your head buried in a comic book, while hordes of stampeding, half-dressed women, whipped into a clothes-buying frenzy by an announcement that the goods on the $15 rack had been marked down to $5, charged by.
Not that Ms. Wilson’s heart isn’t in the right place, but it was not the loss of Loehmann’s that left Brooklynites feeling ”abandoned and deprived.” It was the loss of Ebinger’s!
Ebinger’s was a chain of retail bake shops. You bought only cake at Ebinger’s. And you went willingly, enthusiastically to buy it, even if that meant accompanying your mother or sister. Three Ebinger’s cakes stir the fondest recollections of my contemporaries, regardless of gender:
(1) Chocolate hard-icing cake, a simple, two-layer vanilla cake, with hard, bittersweet chocolate icing and nearly a half-inch of chocolate butter cream separating the two layers.
(2) Butter-cream cake, with two layers of yellow cake separated by the same glorious butter cream as in the hard-icing cake, covered with soft chocolate butter cream and decorated with three small pistachio nuts in the center of the top.
(3) Finally, of course, chocolate blackout cake, with its two layers of moist chocolate cake, soft chocolate cream separating the layers, soft creamy chocolate icing, sprinkled over with crumbs of the chocolate cake itself.
All deserve a place in the cake hall of fame, and were often used to induce otherwise unwilling males to consent to a visit to Loehmann’s.
Former Brooklynites are united in the belief that their lives were impoverished when Ebinger’s closed its doors for the last time, the victim of supermarkets and calorie counting. (We kept an Ebinger’s hard-icing cake in our freezer for a year after the last Ebinger’s store closed. We finally ate it, feeling as if we were drinking our last bottle of 1929 Lafite.) And listen, if you have a minute, let me also tell you about this place in Sheepshead Bay called Lundy’s. Talk about loss!
Leonard S. Elman
Even this Bronx boy frequented Lundy’s
Ebinger’s blackout cake was phenomenal.
Too bad there aren’t any really good bakeries here in s Florida. Publix, Doris, The Boys just aren’t the same as the stand alone bakeries America use to have.
There was nothing even close to the heavenly sensation of a thick piece of Ebinger’s blackout chocolate cake and a cold glass of milk. Childhood (and early adulthood) memories are so soothing.
You are invited: https://www.facebook.com/groups/76604837866/10152628151192867/?notif_t=like
Thanks for the memories. My family loved Ebinger’s cakes and all the cookies, pastries etc. Shopped on Lincoln Place & Franklin Ave. Also, coincidentally, as a young boy I delivered groceries to Mrs Loehmann who resided above her fashionable store on the corner of Sterling Pl. & Bedford Ave. She treated me generously and I was always grateful. Had a great childhood in that neighborhood and for that I’ll also always be grateful.