250pp; 155 x 220 mm; b & w illustrations; 
paperback

ISBN 1-903018-285 £15.00 

Four chapters are available for viewing

Who has not wondered how they got the marbling into humbugs and the fantastic patterns into Just William’s gobstoppers? The byways of knowledge that are illuminated make this so rewarding. Did you know how they got the letters into rock? How they twisted barley sugar? The difference between fudge and tablet? The connection between humbugs and an Arab sweet from 13th-century Spain (where it was borrowed it from the Persians)?

There have been quite a number of studies of modern-day sweeties and their immediate antecedents. This goes further back than that, tracing development from sugar’s first appearance in Britain in the late Middle Ages. As much a history of sweets, it is also a study of sugar and its place in our early diet. This is good history, that you can suck; and is illustrated throughout with contemporary prints and drawings.

Laura Mason is also the author of Traditional Foods of Britain (Prospect) and many other studies in food history, published in journals such as 'Gastronomica' and 'Petits Propos Culinaires'. 

France may have its patisseries, Italy its ice cream parlours, Switzerland its chocolate boutiques but nowhere in the world is there a rival to the British sweetshop based on our passionate love affair with sugar in all its forms. Every time we go to visit our daughter, who now lives in the US, she asks us to bring her a bag of aniseed balls. They remind her, she says, of her childhood; their taste is poignant.

What l didn't know was that they were once valued as digestifs. Like many another sugary confection they have their sticky roots in medieval medicine and alchemy. Humbugs developed from ancient cold cures and liquorice strings were originally prescribed for those suffering from troublesome coughs. l owe my new-found knowledge to food historian Laura Mason who has written a nostalgic account of what they call in Scotland sweeties.

Her book, Sugar Plums and Sherbet, centres on the small confectioner-tobacconist-newsagents where a penny could bring instant satisfaction and the almost certain promise of dental caries. The contents of a sweetshop, she writes, "are an edible archive of social custom and technical expertise recorded in sugar."

As Laura Mason recalls, sugary sweets reached their apotheosis in seaside towns like Margate, Blackpool and Bridlington. Here, whole windows were given over to displays of rock with the name of the resort cunningly wrought inside. Multi-coloured lollipops and sweets mimicking bacon and eggs or sugar false teeth abounded: 'Stacked high in surreal profusion, the contents of seafront shops appeared little more than several hundredweight of sugar, combined with dye and flavouring, wrapped in wisps of Cellophane.'

Nobody ever said that sweets were good for you but they were irresistible. Remember the luxurious way in which sherbet effervesced in the mouth? Remember sherbet lemons - bright yellow, hard-boiled sweets packed with sherbet in the middle like grenades? Then there were paper tubes filled with sherbet just waiting to be sucked out through a liquorice straw.

What joy we derived from those crystals which were nothing more than sugar, bicarbonate of soda, tartaric acid plus colours and flavours. And what hours of pleasure we got from the ever-changing gobstopper. Making them, according to Laura Mason, was a time-consuming operation. 'The sugar crystal centres are placed in a heated revolving pan and syrup added in a series of changes. A different colour is used in each batch of syrup and the process is repeated until the required size is reached - a well proportioned gobstopper requires up to a thousand coats.

This is a fascinating book full of off-beat information. Did you know that wine gums never had anything to do with alcohol - and were invented in 1909 by a Methodist teetotaller? That butterscotch has nothing to do with Scotland? That Liquorice Allsorts were born when a Bassett salesman got a case of samples accidentally muddled?

Sweets and chocolates have a remarkable survival rate - the Mars Bar first appeared 166 years ago. Fry's choco1ate cream bar (still going strong) dates from 1866. Dolly Mixtures, Edinburgh rock, and acid drops seem to have been around for ever. Regional diversity persists in confections like Pontefract Cakes, Moffat Toffee, Jeddart Snails, Berwick Cockles and Kendal Mint Cake. "The contents of sweetie jars," says Laura Mason, "remain available symbols of affection, status and well-being." Her book has recipes, some of which go back to the 17th century, and is a hard-boiled look at the colourful world of confectionery.