Columbus author dips into the history of Ohio's famous buckeye candy with new book
There might be another topic to avoid during holiday gatherings.
Religion. The 2024 election. The 2020 election. Any election, really. And buckeyes.
Not the Buckeyes, although tread lightly there, too. But it seems Ohio’s favorite peanut butter-and-chocolate confection, while universally loved by everyone except those with peanut allergies, can engender some pretty intense feelings.
As Columbus writer Renee Casteel Cook toured the state this fall to promote her book, “Ohio Buckeye Candy: A Sweet History,” she’d get her audiences engaged by gauging opinions on some of the basics.
Do they use only specific brands of chocolate and peanut butter, or will any do? Do they leave the toothpick hole visible after dipping, or do they smooth it over? Do they eat the treats in one bite or two?
“At first I thought, isn’t a buckeye just a buckeye just a buckeye?” she said. “Then I started digging in and it was like, no, it’s really not.”
That leads us to this point of contention that Cook has uncovered more recently.
“I’ve been to multiple libraries this fall where someone has come up and said, ‘Have you ever had a buckeye from Toledo? Do you know what they put in their buckeyes?’”
It turns out some rebels in northwestern Ohio add Rice Krispies to the peanut butter mixture.
“This is apparently very polarizing,” Cook said. “Some people love this; they love the little bit of crunch. One of the people who told me about it was abhorred by the idea. She said it’s not a buckeye.”
The birth of the buckeye
Even the buckeye wasn’t originally a buckeye.
Cook tells the story in her book of Gail Tabor, whose mother brought some chocolate-covered — fully covered, mind you — peanut butter balls over for Christmas in 1964. Gail, a reporter for the Columbus Citizen-Journal who was married to an Ohio State University doctoral student, got the recipe and later made them herself.
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When she dipped the first peanut butter ball into the melted chocolate, she didn’t get it completely covered, though. “I held it up on the toothpick and said to then-husband, ‘Hey, it looks like a buckeye,’” she wrote in a 1983 column for The Arizona Republic, where she was working at the time.
“Thus it was christened,” Tabor wrote. “We gave batches away to friends, and they fell in love.”
Tabor never shared her recipe, although readers of The Dispatch were requesting and sharing recipes for “Buckeye Candy” as early as 1967 in the paper’s long-running Cook’s Corner column. They’re quite similar: peanut butter, butter and powdered sugar for the inside; chocolate chips and paraffin wax for the shell.
Tabor wrote that she gave her recipe to just one acquaintance before moving away in 1971. The recipient promised it would never be shared, but the promise wasn’t kept. She shared it with the OSU alumni magazine and allegedly took credit for it, too.
From the kitchen to retail shelves
Cook tells the stories of nearly two dozen buckeye-making Ohio bakeries and confectioners, which she found through crowdsourcing and the Miami County Visitors & Convention Bureau’s Ohio Buckeye Candy Trail, developed in 2020. Among them: Columbus-based Anthony Thomas Chocolates, which sells its buckeyes on QVC and at John Glenn International Airport.
She’s taken by the stories she hears, too, from home cooks who’ve made their own buckeyes for years for tailgate parties, holiday cookie trays, and school and church bake sales.
“It really was a homemade thing, and it continues to be a homemade thing,” Cook said.
Her mother-in-law, Jane Cook, is one of those home cooks whom she calls “a prolific buckeye producer.” Jane and others at St. Andrews Catholic Church in Upper Arlington would make 5,000 buckeyes for sales. They’d always sell out in one morning — sometimes within an hour.
Jane Cook has specific ways of making buckeyes, her daughter-in-law reports. She only uses Jif peanut butter and Nestle chocolate. She also insists on closing the toothpick hole. Some commercial producers, on the other hand, insist on leaving it visible. It’s a sign their buckeyes are made by hand.
A buckeye flavor boom
These days, the term buckeye has become shorthand — in Ohio, at least — for any dessert that includes chocolate and peanut butter. Pinterest has recipes for Buckeye Brownies, Buckeye Bars, Buckeye Bundt Cake, Buckeye Cheesecake and Buckeye Dip. Cook chronicles others, such as Buckeye Pizza (buckeyes on a chocolate crust) from Sweetie’s Chocolates at Grandpa’s Cheese Barn in Ashland and the Aggie Pie from Little Ladies Soft Serve in Polaris. The latter has an Oreo crust, peanut butter and vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, peanut-butter sauce, buckeyes, chocolate chips and chocolate whipped cream.
She pointed out that Columbus-based Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams used to call its chocolate-and-peanut-butter flavor The Buckeye State before going national. It’s now Salted Peanut Butter With Chocolate Flecks, although one of founder Jeni Britton’s 2023 holiday flavors is Buckeye Frenzy. It’s based on a friend’s grandmother’s buckeye recipe that would be popular in Toledo. It includes Rice Krispies.
And as the buckeye name has become synonymous with its two basic flavors, buckeyes themselves are growing more varied.
Alicia Hindman makes about 80 flavors of buckeyes throughout the year at The Buckeye Lady, the shop she opened last year at 4493 N. High St. in Clintonville. The former school counselor started making and selling buckeyes during the pandemic to raise money for friends who had lost their jobs.
It was her mom’s idea to pop some M&Ms into the peanut butter batter, and the 79 other flavors followed. Salted Caramel Pretzel, Puppy Chow, Bourbon and M&M are the most popular. The most unusual, Hindman said, were Everything Bagel and Pickle, neither of which are currently on the menu.
“I mean, people eat peanut butter and pickle sandwiches,” Hindman said.
Most of The Buckeye Lady’s buckeyes are stuffed — the Cold Brew has a center of cold-brew coffee buttercream, for instance — and Hindman has trademarked the Stuffed Buckeye. Holiday flavors include Gingerbread, Snickerdoodle Cookie Dough, and several takes on candy canes and peppermint.
All but one still look like buckeyes, and all but one still include chocolate and peanut butter. The exception: White Chocolate Raspberry, which includes peanut butter but no dark chocolate.
Back to the basics
Chances are, you have a buckeye recipe that evolved from the one used originally by Gail Tabor, who passed away in 2012.
“As one matures, one grows out of childish shortcomings like selfishness, so here is my original buckeye ball recipe, for all the world to see,” she wrote in 1983. “But if you think I’m going to share my secret recipe for West Virginia Christmas pickles, you’re crazy.”
Here is Tabor’s recipe:
Buckeye Balls
4 pounds powdered sugar
1 pound butter
6 or more tablespoons peanut butter
2 teaspoons vanilla
12 ounces chocolate chips
1 block canning wax
Combine first four ingredients, adding a bit of milk, if necessary. Roll into small balls. Melt chocolate chips and canning wax in top of double boiler. Make sure chocolate and wax are mixed well so wax doesn’t rise to the top. With toothpick, dip the balls into the chocolate, but do not cover completely. Chill in refrigerator. After chocolate is hardened, store candy in plastic bags in freezer.
Renee Casteel Cook’s mother-in-law thinks there’s too much sugar in the original, though. Jane Cook gave her daughter-in-law permission to share her buckeye recipe, too.
Buckeyes
2 pounds Jif creamy peanut butter
1 pound butter
3 pounds powdered sugar
2 packages Nestle semisweet chocolate chips
1/3 block paraffin wax
Mix together peanut butter, butter and powdered sugar. Chill the peanut butter mixture, then form mixture into balls roughly a tablespoon in size. Melt chocolate and wax together in a double boiler. Using a toothpick, dip each ball three-quarters of the way in chocolate, leaving top exposed. Smooth over the toothpick hole and allow chocolate to set.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: How buckeye candy became Ohio's iconic treat
