snack bar
Jelly Beans
What happens when you combine two different kinds of sweets? You wind up with the tasty treat known as the jelly bean.
Bite into a jelly bean and look at its chewy center: this part of the jellybean comes from Turkish Delight, a treat that children in the Middle East first enjoyed two thousand years ago.
Now, pick out your favourite flavour and admire the coloured shell: this soft outer portion was first created during the 1600s. Candy-makers in France used a technique called “panning” to make Jordan Almonds – a candy that we still eat at weddings – by rocking almonds in a bowl filled with sugar and syrup. Eventually, machines performed this hard work in large rotating pans, and the technique was borrowed to produce jellybean shells.
No one knows who came up with the idea to combine soft shells with chewy centers to make jellybeans, but experts know that it happened sometime during the 1800s, and somewhere in the United States. The earliest known advertisement for jelly beans is from 1861, when a Boston candy-maker encouraged customers to send jelly beans to soldiers fighting in the Civil War.
If you entered a general store in the early 1900s, you’d find jelly beans in glass jars, separated by individual colours. They came in eight fruit-based flavours, and people called them “penny candies” – a term that still exists today – because they were so cheap.
In 1976, The Herman Goelitz Candy Company released a new type of jelly bean – the gourmet jelly bean. The company, which eventually changed its name to Jelly Belly, added a twist to traditional jelly beans by flavouring both the shell and the center (the original jelly beans didn’t have flavour in the middle). They also created quirky new flavours, including cream soda, pear and buttered popcorn.
These days, you can munch on jelly bean versions of Lifesavers and Starburst candies, or gobble up jelly beans inspired by movies and books. The Harry Potter–themed jelly beans from Jelly Belly come in flavours such as vomit, earwax, and booger. Don’t they just sound delicious?
Bean bits:
• Since the 1930s, people have associated jelly beans with Easter because of their
egg-like shape.
• Jelly beans traveled to space in 1983, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan had
some stored aboard the Challenger space shuttle as a tasty surprise for the
astronauts.
• Characters in The Ant Bully refer to jelly beans as “sweetrocks.”
• If you bite into a watermelon jelly bean from Jelly Belly, you’ll notice that it’s green
on the outside and red on the inside – just like the fruit.
• Americans celebrate National Jelly Bean Day on April 22.
— Sean Fitzgerald