Topic Last Updated on 12-07-2024
The Birth of Sweet Treats
We don’t know exactly where cotton candy first came onto the scene. Similar delicacies were widespread in the Persian city of Yazd (in present-day Iran), where pashmak was a common treat, made from threads of flour and powdered sugar with pistachios mixed in. In Turkey, this sweet is called pişmaniye. Its name comes from the Persian word for “wool.” Similarly, in China, there is a traditional treat called Dragon’s Beard Candy that is prepared by boiling syrup from a mixture of white and malt sugar.
According to legend, Dragon’s Beard Candy was invented during the Han Dynasty. The chef at the Imperial Palace introduced the preparation of the new dessert as a form of entertainment for the emperor. He mixed rice flour and honey into a kind of dough and then stretched it into long, thin threads.
The ruler compared the concoction to a dragon’s beard, the symbol of the Chinese Emperor. Over time, the production of the complex treat grew into a rare, sometimes even secret, practice. Later, with the development of the tourism industry, Dragon’s Beard began to pop up regularly, especially at street festivals.
Its Korean counterpart, ggultarae or “honey tangle,” is based on the same recipe. The syrupy threads are prepared from honey and starch. In India, sugar threads are pressed into a dense mass together with flour, ghee, and cardamom — creating the dessert soan papdi.
Pişmaniye
Dragon’s Beard Candy
Soan papdi
The idea to pull sweet threads into a dessert appeared independently among many different people in various countries. Thus, cotton candy has cousins all over the world. Tim Richardson, a writer and researcher on the history of confectionery, found evidence that Italian chefs created sculptures from sugar and made threads out of syrup for decoration in the 15th century. In the recipes of European and American confectioners of the mid-18th century, there are descriptions of the manufacturing of sugar threads used to decorate Easter sweets or for the presentation of desserts.
Among such decorations were “sugar nests made of gold and silver threads”— the color depended on whether brown or white sugar was used. Small pieces were broken off of large, compressed sugar blocks and then crushed into powder. This powder was mixed with water before being boiled into syrup from which the threads were made. This was all done by hand, meaning the process was laborious and the treats were expensive. Only wealthy people could afford such a delicacy.
The cookbook The Experienced English Housekeeper by Elizabeth Raffald (1769) contains recipes for decorating desserts with sugar webs. To do so, a sugar syrup had to be quickly and carefully beaten into a special form made with butter and an inverted bowl. From the resulting mass, thin threads were pulled off with the tip of a knife.
The Fairy and Her Threads
In 1897, William Morrison, a dentist better known as an inventor, and a pastry chef from Tennessee named John C. Wharton created the world’s first electric cotton candy machine. The device consisted of an engine and two bowls, placed one inside the other. Sugar crystals were poured into a small rotating bowl that was then heated, and the sugar melted and was pushed by centrifugal force into the larger bowl via tiny holes. This caused sweet threads to form around the edges of the large bowl, which were then wound on a stick and collected in a box. The principle of cotton candy making has not changed since, but the device itself was later improved.
Mass-produced cotton candy was first introduced to the public at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. There were plenty of sweet tooths at the show: over 184 days, 68,655 serving-sized boxes of cotton candy were sold for 25 cents each. In 1900, $1 corresponded to $26.40 at today’s rates, so the price of the sweet was equal to half of an entrance ticket to the exhibition itself. In those days, cotton candy was called “Fairy Floss.”
Unveiling the Fair’s Scientific Bounty
The St. Louis World’s Fair was famous not just for its revolutionary mass-produced cotton candy. At the exhibition, hamburgers, hot dogs, iced tea, and waffle ice cream cones were presented to the public for the first time. The fair was also rich in scientific achievements — here, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the first X-ray machine, and an incubator for premature infants were introduced, along with many other inventions.
The first cotton candy machine was heavy, loud, and unreliable, and it broke down frequently. Various inventors tried to improve the device, but the issue was only solved in 1949, thanks to an innovation from Gold Medal Products company in Cincinnati, Ohio.
They added springs to the machine’s base, which allowed for greater stability and shock absorption. In 1951, Gold Medal Products created a machine that rolled sheets of paper together with the sweet treat into a perfect cone shape. To this day, the company remains the leading manufacturer of sweet-making equipment.
How to make cotton candy?
1. Pour the sugar into the spinner head.
2. Turn on the machine.
3. The sugar turns into threads.
