If you're strolling through the food vendors at the Canfield Fair, odds are you've passed the Strouss Malt stand. It's a taste one man spent a long time trying to bring back.

Nick Lavanty knew the Strouss Malt stand would be a popular spot at the Canfield Fair because for that generation in Youngstown it was just a part of childhood.

"When I was a young kid we hung out down there. Boy, all our spare money, we blew it on malts," said Lavanty.

"My mom used to go shopping down at Strouss in downtown Youngstown and when she was tired of us, we got to go downstairs and enjoy one of these delicious malts," said Polly Hayes from Leetonia.

Strouss was one of the places to go in downtown Youngstown, once upon a time. They served the malts in the basement, many of them to kids who somehow managed to stay well-behaved to earn that treat.

"If you were a good boy or good girl, mommy would get you a malt," said Lavanty.

"Some parents were inadvertent pioneers in behavioral science because they used the malt as kind of a reward, or not having the malt was a punishment," said Tom Welsh, who co-authored a book about the store called "Strouss': Youngstown's Dependable Store."

Over the years, many have tried to duplicate the malt. One of the historians Welsh interviewed for his book, Richard Scarsella, said that because of modern regulations, nothing can be exactly the same.

"In the old days, raw egg whites were an essential ingredient of that malt," said Welsh.

Still, Nick Lavanty spent years trying to make it work. He actually owns the original machine, but for the fair he had to engineer something newer because that original, while it's authentic, isn't as young as it used to be.

"The old ones are close to 100 years old. Company went out of business in the late 30s," said Lavanty. "They're antiquated. I have to have parts made. I keep them together with luck and heaven."

Even with the newer machine, he's managed to capture something that, for a lot of people, was long gone but never forgotten.

"It's a combination of the texture and the taste," said Lavanty. "You just don't forget it."

"It's a little bite of heaven," said Hayes.

It's like a living history lesson. Even if you weren't around back when the Strouss Malt was actually in existence when you take a bite of this you're transported back in time.

"These young kids, mother will give them a bite off of a spoon and then they want it. So you're getting a new generation involved in it," said Lavanty.

Over the years, Nick's had a lot of people telling him they want to taste this more than one week out of the year and it's finally happening. He plans to open "Lavanty's Italian Eatery" in a month or so on route 224 in Boardman, serving, among other items, the Strouss Malt.