Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Food and Drink

Behind the sweetness of treats
glendabyline

Someone asked a friend the other day, are you a sweet or a salty? What? she replied. The questioner was referring to her preference for snacks: when the munchies attack does she grab a bag of Werther’s or a bag of potato chips?

While the two sides of the snack debate will defend their respective choices to the end of time, I’ll ’fess up now that I’m a sweet-head, one who comes by it quite honestly.

My mom’s gene pool is to blame for this addiction. Growing up, we kids all knew she’d trade her first-born, that would be my older sister, at least for a few hours, for a box of chocolates. Her parents, and their parents, invariably had a dish of candy on hand in a pretty little bon-bon dish. Favourites were Bridge Mixture, licorice allsorts, Rob Roy mix with those funny nuggety peanuts that look like little brown space satellites, and English toffees wrapped in brightly coloured foil and cellophane. They also all had false teeth.

In spite of my mouth full of fillings, or perhaps because of it – after all, almost all my tooth surfaces are impermeable now – I love my candy. Here’s the scoop on some classic favourites:

Jujubes:

The name alone is enough to make you smile. My sister and I loved just saying jujubes, never mind their fascinating filling-pulling texture and delirious sugar high. (American readers note: our Canadian variety of jujubes are quite different, and arguably more delicious than yours.)

Everybody has his or her favourite. In days of early discovery, mine was green and my sister’s was black, allowing us to pick through a bowl of them in relative peace.

The original jujubes are also known as Chinese dates or Chinese jujubes. These dark red, plum-like fruits are from the Ziziphus jujuba , a thorny tree native to Asia, but now grown around the world, including Texas and Mexico. The jujube fruit is a bit dry and spongy, sweet, with maybe a bit of tartness, packing double the amount of vitamin C of an equal weight of oranges. In the Orient it was traditionally valued for its restorative qualities, and its ability to soothe sleepless nights.

Candy jujubes, on the other hand, are a dental and nutritional nightmare of sugar, corn syrup, starch, gelatin and flavorings. Don’t read the ingredient list, or you may never buy them again: the coating to prevent them from sticking together is petrolatum – isn’t that Vaseline? But they’re so much fun to chew and pick out of your teeth!

Halva:

If there’s a block of this tasty little confection in the house, I can’t leave it alone till it’s gone. Again, this has as much to do with the flavour as the texture, an unparalleled delight of grainy, compressed layers, with a pleasant resistance. Sort of like a soft Crispy Crunch bar.

We have the Muslims to thank for halva, and so many other treats. The Muslim fondness for, and expertise at making sweets spread throughout their newly expanded kingdom in the 5th and 6th centuries faster than you can say candy, a word derived from the Arabic word for sugar.

The kingdom ranged from India, across the Middle East, Persia and North Africa, to the Pyrenees and Iberian Peninsula . P eople inhabiting the areas we now call Spain and southern France learned the pleasures of marzipan and nougat, two other all-time favourites, from their Muslim conquerors.

In other regions, the sweet of choice was halava (Sanskrit), or halvah (Hebrew), or halawa (Arabic transliteration) – the spelling varies about as much as the substance itself from place to place. However one spells it, it originally was a "sweetmeat" first made in Baghdad, similar to fudge dotted with almonds.

Following the spread of Muslim food and culture, we were pretty much left with two main types of halva today. In the Indian subcontinent, it is more like a dessert, made with semolina wheat, sugar or honey and oil. In Pakistan it’s a sweet wheat or carrot pudding called halwahgajar .

Iranian halva is a pastry mixture of browned butter and flour blended with syrup, coloured and flavoured with saffron. It’s served as a dessert or spread on bread.

Halva served at home in Greece is an egg and semolina cake topped with a sizzle of hot syrup. The commercial version is a firm paste of puréed nuts and seeds, predominantly almond and sesame, more typical of the second type of halva. This one we associate with the area around the Mediterranean, the Balkans and much of the Middle East. Key ingredients are tahini and sugar or honey, with flavouring and colour provided by an array of ingredients including chocolate, pistachios, vanilla or oranges.

Peanut brittle:

This was also an all-time favourite frequently found in the grandparents’ candy dish, maybe because we all felt we were eating a balanced snack, what with all the protein in peanuts.

But here’s an allergen alert: besides the obvious nuts (the original French praline was a brittle made with almonds), brittles are essentially sugar and butter with milk solids added, so lactose intolerants beware. In fact, the higher the dairy content, the less these sweets stick to your teeth.

The delicious "caramelized" flavour and brown colour of peanut brittle comes from the same cooking process of plain sugar syrup that yields caramels and their cousins, toffees. Late in the cooking, baking soda is added to brittle syrups. The resulting bubbles of carbon dioxide are trapped in the hardening syrup and give the brittle a nice light, almost foamy texture.

The same baking soda effect occurs to a greater degree in seafoam candy, that crazy concoction redolent with delicious caramel flavours that bubbles up in your mouth as you eat it.

However, this isn’t the case with fizzy or crackling candies. Here baking powder in the sugar syrup is responsible. Pop Rocks go one step further – sugar syrup is loaded with carbon dioxide gas then chilled quickly under pressure to trap the gas in the candy. Apparently some chefs like using them in dishes to create unexpected effects. Surprise! Your dessert just exploded in your mouth.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who suggests that a trip to the Great Glass Elevator Candy Shop may soon be in order

.