And then we would have 32 people ask for a lick. “You ate it on the street but not where there were kids on bicycles or skates who might knock you down,” he said. Levenson remembered that it was a “take‐out item.” “When he saw me near the case, he hollered, ‘Don't touch!'” “The man in the store knew I couldn't afford it,” said Sam Levenson, the Brooklyn observer whose humor has made eternal verities of the customs of bygone days. They re, member the candy store with the cups lined up in a glass case fitted with a door that they opened to pick the Charlotte Russe they wanted. The Pakulas, who make all sorts of traditional as well as contemporary goodies, find that the Charlotte Busse is a good seller to older people and even to young ones who are discovering it for the first time.īut for most people the Charlotte Russo is a mere memory. They start making them in the fall, according to custom, and sell them for 59 cents each. The only change is in the cup, which is now Styrofoam and fixed. Up in Spring Valley, Bennett and Loretta Pakula who came out of the Bronx to found Pakula's Bake Shop at 108 Nortll Main Street, also sell the Charlotte Busse with fresh whipped cream and freshly cooked strawberry filling and maraschino cherries. The customers are past the bloom of youth and their Charlotte Busse is a short trip back to the days when the stomach was strong. He puts out a couple of dozen every day, with fruit and pineapple included, it costs 45 cents. Out in the Glen Oaks neighborhood of Queens, Murray Beberman sells it in the old‐style cups at the Garden Bake Shop, 265‐03 Union Turnpike. It has disappeared from the modern candy store, which today is either a luncheonette or a dry‐goods card shop, but there are still bakeries here and there with a sense of tradition that still turn out the Charlotte Busse. And it was always eaten in the street it was not a dessert but a snack. You bought it in candy stores, bakeries and sometimes in fiveand‐dime stores. It cost a nickel at most and came in a partitioned round white cup with a moveable bottom that you could push up as you made your way through the whipped cream. Sometimes with fruit, sometimes with sprinkles, but these were optional. Basically, it was a piece of sponge cake topped by a heap of whipped cream with a cherry at its pinnacle. The Charlotte Russe was a street delicacy that, as a perishable, came out in autumn and disappeared, mostly, when the weather turned hot.