It is all a matter of temperature
Most sweets start the same way: SUGAR and water boiled together. What they turn into depends on how hot the syrup gets, because the hotter it goes, the more water boils away. Sweet makers test it by dropping a little into cold water. At around 115°C it forms a soft ball, right for fondant and the soft centres of chocolates. At around 120°C it makes a firm ball, which gives CARAMEL. Push on towards 150°C, the hard crack stage, and the syrup sets glassy and brittle, like a LOLLIPOP or a boiled sweet.
TOFFEE is cooked up towards the hard crack stage too, and its colour comes from the sugar and butter browning as they cook. TAFFY is pulled over and over on a hook while it is still warm, which stretches in tiny air bubbles and turns it pale and chewy. A HUMBUG is a striped boiled MINT made by twisting two colours of the same pulled sugar together. Our states of matter page covers what happens to water as it boils.
A name built from a man and a city
In 1920 a sweet maker in Bonn, Germany, called Hans Riegel started a company, and two years later he invented a chewy fruit sweet shaped like a dancing bear. He named the company from the first letters of his name and his city: HAns RIegel BOnn, or Haribo. The GUMMY bear has been copied around the world ever since. A GUMDROP is a similar sweet, coated in sugar.
LICORICE, spelled liquorice in Britain, is made from the root of a plant, and the sweet chemical in the root is up to fifty times sweeter than sugar. Pontefract in Yorkshire has made liquorice sweets for centuries. The JELLYBEAN was a favourite of American President Ronald Reagan, who kept a jar on his desk, and a bag of them flew on the space shuttle in 1983.
Names from around the world
SHERBET comes from the Persian and Turkish word for a cold, sweet drink. In Britain it now means a fizzy powder, which foams on the tongue because it contains an acid and bicarbonate of soda that react when they get wet. In America, sherbet is a frozen dessert.
NOUGAT, made from honey, sugar, whipped egg whites and nuts, is the pride of the French town of Montélimar. A PRALINE is said to be named after a seventeenth-century French diplomat, the Duke of Plessis-Praslin, whose cook coated almonds in sugar; in Belgium today, though, a praline means a filled CHOCOLATE. A TRUFFLE is a ball of chocolate and cream named for looking like the rare fungus dug up by pigs and dogs.
Americans say CANDY, and the British say SWEET for a single one and sweets for a bag. The French BONBON simply means good-good. A JAWBREAKER, called a gobstopper in Britain, is built up layer on layer around a tiny centre, which can take a factory a couple of weeks, and changes colour as it is sucked. The humble WRAPPER was an invention too: before sweets came individually wrapped, they sat loose in jars and were weighed into paper bags. FUDGE belongs to the soft-ball stage, and its own story is on our desserts page.