UK. Old-Fashioned Boiled Sweets Quiz

Answer:

I can remember as a child waiting for a Saturday morning when we used to receive our pocket money. I would go to the Saturday Morning Pictures, buy a comic, either the "Dandy" or the "Beano", and buy some hard-boiled sweets. The boiled sweets lasted so much longer than the chewy type. In those days, our pocket money was highly valuable. If I remember, going to the pictures on a Saturday cost 6d, 2½p in today's money!

The history of boiled sweets can be traced back to the very early 1800s. This was the period when sugar cane became widely available. In the Victorian era, it was a time that specialist confectionery makers started to produce sweets. Over the next three decades, boiled sweets were developed by several manufacturers. In Morecambe, which is a seaside town in the UK, the first stick of rock was made in the 1830s, and the famous Blackpool rock was first on sale in 1887.

Before boiled sweets became popular as we know them today, a Danish company, Kongen, made a medicinal type of sweet because the king of Denmark in the 1600s didn't like the taste of his aniseed-flavoured medication. His doctors mixed up aniseed syrup with sugar and beetroot syrup, which made the taste more palatable for the king.

Historically, boiled sweets were handmade, which made them very expensive. They were really only available for the upper classes or rich people because of the price. It all changed when the industrial revolution started. The cost of refined sugar became cheaper to buy, and the technological and mechanical knowledge allowed factories to mass produce sweets rather than being handmade.


Just sugar is used to make boiled sweets, which are then heated to a high temperature. When the heated sugar syrup reaches the proper temperature, fruit flavourings and other colours can be added. "Drops" is another term for some traditional hard-boiled sweets. The reason is that they would be created by pouring a small amount of sugar syrup into moulds for icing trays.

The first company to make the cola cubes was the Pascall company in the 1940s. Rosie Apples sweets were first made in the UK by a company called Stockley's Sweets.

The first person to create pear drops was York confectioner Edward Sharp. The Johnson Dodson Company, situated in the Northeast region of England, produced the first black bullets in 1906.