Candy Filler

No especially notable candy news to report today. Yesterday I hosted a chocolate tasting in my residential college, but my notes from that won’t be ready for publication until at least next week. I shall also, at some point, post a guide to planning, hosting, and leading a chocolate tasting. For now, I have a couple of random tidbits.

I’m taking a food history class (Food and Cuisine in Europe and the U.S.), where my professor explained to me that all sugary candies started out as medicines to which sugar was added to make them more palatable. The hard candies, marzipans, nougats, caramels, halvahs, etc. of today all started out as lozenges and foul concoctions of herbs and spices and the like. Pretty cool, no?

And more on the history of chocolate from my chocolate calendar: “In France, chocolate was initially met with skepticism and was considered a barbarous, noxious drug. The French court accepted chocolate after the Paris faculty of medicine gave its approval.” As my food history professor explained, lots of unfamiliar foods that were beneath one’s standing were dismissed as being what Barbarians ate, so the crossover between class and candy calendar was neat to come across.

Finally, an early happy Leap Day to you all! Use it to eat lots and lots of candy. Because it’s a day that doesn’t usually exist, calories consumed on the Leap Day don’t really count. Or, at least, they shouldn’t.