"Sherm Edwards" doesn't sound like a chocolatier's name. It doesn't have the elegant sound of "Godiva's" or "Bissinger's." Sherm sounds more like the name of an offensive tackle.

So I wasn't expecting much when my wife handed me the box of chocolates on Valentine's Day. I'm not exactly a connoisseur. A Snickers or a Hershey bar is about my speed.

Seeing that the candies were made in Trafford, though, I was surprised I'd never heard of them. I tasted one and became a fan at first bite.

In a way, it was dumb luck that I became a Shermster. (That's not a word yet, but I offer it to the company as my gift.) I'd given my wife Bissinger's because Kerry Kennedy, our friendly neighborhood florist, had told me it was the chocolate that Napoleon gave Josephine after coming back from one of his wars. That's the kind of hokum a husband needs to drive up the old sensitivity meter at crunch time.

My wife went into the same shop, and Mr. Kennedy told her she probably didn't want to get Bissinger's. So she went for a small box of Sherm Edwards. When my birthday arrived the next month, she brought me Sherm's chocolate truffles. I was hopelessly hooked.

On a Saturday not long after, I took my wife and daughters on a pilgrimage to the Trafford store, just above its factory in a converted movie theater. We had a great lunch a block away at Parente's, one of those old-fashioned Italian restaurants where, a day after you eat, you're hungry again. Then we walked to the candy store and went a bit nuts.

Sherm Edwards has a post-Easter deal: Buy the boxed candies, get a second box at half price. I went for that plus some blackberry cordials and, well, it gets hazy after that. I do know I left with a half-pound of chocolate-covered pickles.

Yeah. That's right. That tradition goes back to the days when Sherm Edwards, who died in 1999, had a candy shop on East Ohio Street on the North Side. Workers from the H.J. Heinz factory just down the road brought in some sweet gherkins one day and the rest is Western Pennsylvania history.

I've lived for most of the past two decades less than a mile from the scene of that culinary crime, yet had never heard about it. In my defense, Mr. Edwards retreated to Trafford in 1978, a dozen years before I reached the North Side, but a computer search showed the story of the chocolate pickles had been in the PG more than once. I'd simply missed it.

How do they taste? They taste funny, and I don't mean strange. I mean funny, old-sitcom funny. Bite into one and it's as if you're channeling the ghost of Lucy Ricardo during one of her cravings while carrying Little Ricky. Or something.

I called the Trafford store and was put in touch with David Golembeski, stepson of the late Mr. Edwards and owner of the company. It sells 125,000 pounds of candy a year, most of that in Western Pennsylvania, but he bore me no ill will for taking my own sweet time in finding a box.

His company buys its cream from Kerber's Dairy in North Huntingdon and he uses a darker milk chocolate, "a heavier hit,'' than most of his competitors. But he was careful not to knock any other product. Sherm Edwards is, of course, only one of many chocolate companies in Western Pennsylvania.

Maybe you prefer some other brand. I'm happy that in this increasingly chained American culture, Sherm Edwards and other independent chocolatiers are not merely surviving but are making exceptional stuff.

The other night, after dinner, I opened a box at the kitchen table and the four of us dove in. The medley of flavors was so good I wondered how it could be legal. I half-expected Drug Enforcement Administration agents to rappel through the window.

Only the pickles would I give up without a fight.

By the way, Mr. Golembeski is turning 50 tomorrow, so I asked if anyone would buy him chocolate.

"I hope I get beer,'' he said.