Unfortunately, the family has since sold it to Bimbo, the Mexican conglomerate that also now owns Thomas', Arnold, Ball Park, Beefsteak, Boboli, Sara Lee, and a number of other American baking labels. Still, I shall always have a doughy-soft spot in my heart for Entenmann's.
I always liked their soft chocolate chip cookies. They made a good booze-free fruitcake, too, although not as good as Freihofer's. Now Bimbo owns both brands and nobody makes fruitcake.
I always considered Entenmann's a New York phenomenon, a product line that could be found in any store in the city but not known elsewhere. The show Seinfeld reinforced that local pride. In the Frogger episode, Elaine replaces a piece of frozen cake from Edward VIII's wedding with a slice of Entenmann's cake. In the Audrey episode, date-of-the-week Audrey is apparently known to keep Entenmann's doughnuts in her purse.
My dad would have sided with Audrey. He was a big fan of their chocolate glazed doughnuts. He would take a bite of one in the morning to get the stale cigarette taste out of his mouth. We could eat any sweets around the house, but Dad's Malomars, Hershey with Almonds, and Entenmann's doughnuts were off-limits.
My mom and my aunt were wild for the Entenmann's crumb coffee cake. If the cake got a little stale, they'd just cut the crumb topping off and eat that. Sometimes they wouldn't wait for the cake to get stale.
While my family was loading up with Charles Entenmann's sweets, he wasn't. According to his son, "He didn’t eat Entenmann’s cake … He just wasn’t a dessert guy." Well, maybe that's one reason Charles made it to 92. But as the obit makes clear, he was a man who treated his employees with respect, whatever their job; he was generous; and he had a great sense of humor. He may not have eaten sweets, but it seems like he was a sweetheart anyway. Rest in peace.
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