{"id":492385,"date":"2026-10-11T07:28:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T07:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/492385\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T07:28:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T07:28:11","slug":"mission-city-voices-childhood-sweet-eats-in-santa-clara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/492385\/","title":{"rendered":"Mission City Voices: Childhood Sweet Eats in Santa Clara\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up on the last block of Benton Street in Santa Clara \u2013 right where it dead-ended at Calabazas Creek. On the other side of the creek was the Napredak Yugo Slav Social Club Hall, on Lawrence Station Road.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During my formative years I attended Saturday catechism classes at St. Justin\u2019s Catholic Church on Homestead Road, right next to the City Main Library. After class a group of us would rush across the street to spend our weekly allowance at Stan\u2019s Donuts. Everybody\u2019s favorite was the large, raised, glazed donuts \u2013 still warm from the fry. With the first bite came that wonderful yeasty aroma. Stan\u2019s was at one end of the Mariposa Shopping Center. For variety we would visit the Safeway grocery store at the opposite end of the Center.<\/p>\n

Safeway had a good selection of candy including one of my favorites: Rollo caramel and chocolate chews. Rollo\u2019s were shaped in a tapered cylinder with a depressed top containing three concentric circles. Another favorite was the Hershey\u2019s Semi-Sweet chocolate bar. It was made of dark chocolate and had a bitter taste that piqued my interest and enjoyment. I liked the way that it could be broken into six rectangular pieces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They say the twig doesn\u2019t fall far from the tree, and I wasn\u2019t the first one in the family to have a sweet tooth. My mother\u2019s sweet of choice was Rocky Road from See\u2019s Candy. I bought her some for every Mother\u2019s Day. My father favored two candy bars: Milky Way with its chewy, chocolaty center topped by caramel and surrounded by milk chocolate; and Three Musketeers, chewy, whipped chocolaty center with a darker chocolate outer coating. He liked to store them in the freezer. After dinner he would cut one into pieces and share it all around. My dad expected to conclude every dinner with dessert \u2013 even if dessert amounted to a single bite from a candy bar.<\/p>\n

SPONSORED<\/p>\n

\"Devid\"Devid<\/a><\/p>\n

On cold, rainy nights we might have another treat \u2013 hot Ovaltine. Hot chocolate is nice, but I loved Ovaltine\u2019s malt flavor. In those days Ovaltine came in the form of granules not powder. Most of the granules would dissolve in milk, but there always remained a few undissolved granules floating atop the milk. It was a treat to slurp the granules into my mouth and crunch them to get a burst of malt flavor. Commercially available products weren\u2019t our only treats.<\/p>\n

One year, in June, we all piled into the family station wagon and drove the three miles to my Aunt Jean\u2019s house on Homestead Road in Cupertino. There, we filled several paper grocery bags with ripe apricots picked from the orchard that surrounded her home. Using those apricots, my mother made thirty apricot pies! She put the unbaked pies in the full-size stand-up freezer that we kept in the garage. Her practice was to put a frozen pie in the oven as we sat down to dinner. By the time that we were finished eating the main meal the steaming pie would be ready to be served for dessert. We feasted on apricot pie \u2013 one slice each \u2013 two or three times each week for two months.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I was a bit older, I\u2019d meet up with a schoolmate to ride our bikes from his house near Curtis Middle School on Pomeroy Ave. to the Swenson\u2019s Ice Cream Parlor at Franklin Mall. I remember still the thrill of eating their Thin Mint ice cream.<\/p>\n

SPONSORED<\/p>\n

\"Kevin\"Kevin<\/a><\/p>\n

And those summer days at Napredak Hall? We feasted on my great-grandmother\u2019s Povatica (Potica) \u2013 thin pastry dough rolled up with butter, cinnamon, sugar, finely chopped walnuts, and raisins. There was also apple strudel; Orenacha (similar to Povatica, but with a chocolate and honey filling); and cream puffs (Krofi).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those were idyllic times feasting on ambrosia as we grew up in Santa Clara.<\/p>\n

Mission City Voices: Do you have a\u00a0personal essay<\/a>\u00a0that you\u2019d like to submit for consideration? Email\u00a0Editor@SvVoice.com;\u00a0subject line: Mission City Voices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I grew up on the last block of Benton Street in Santa Clara \u2013 right where it dead-ended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[6036,191816,88,90,89,197,2921,2922],"class_list":["post-492385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-bay-area-news","tag-franklin-mall","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara","tag-santa-clara-weekly","tag-silicon-valley-voice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}