cafe-sweets.net — A Treatise on Sweets

1815

On the Refinement of the Beet, & the Continental Sugar Crisis

The Napoleonic blockade of British shipping had, by the year of the Hundred Days, choked the European supply of Caribbean cane sugar to a thread. Into this vacuum stepped the German chemist Franz Karl Achard¹, whose laboratory in Cunern had, two decades earlier, demonstrated that the humble white beet (Beta vulgaris) might be coaxed to yield a crystalline sugar indistinguishable from its tropical cousin.

What had been a curiosity in 1799 became, by 1815, an industry: more than three hundred beet-sugar manufactories operated across the French and Prussian countryside. Sweetness, for the first time in the modern era, had a northern provenance². The dopamine pathway of the European palate quietly rewired itself.

“ The beet does not blush at being mistaken for the cane. Sweetness, like genius, is indifferent to its origin. ” — A. Parmentier, 1812 (apocryphal)

1847

The First Solid Chocolate Bar & the Industrial Conche

Joseph Fry of Bristol, working in his Union Street factory, succeeded in 1847 in combining cocoa butter with cocoa powder and sugar in a proportion that yielded, for the first time, a moldable solid bar of eating-chocolate³. Prior to this date chocolate had been almost exclusively a beverage; the bar was a structural innovation as much as a culinary one.

Four decades later, in 1879, the Swiss chocolatier Rodolphe Lindt would refine the technique still further with his eponymous conche — a long-running mechanical agitation of cocoa mass that drove off acidity and produced the smooth, melting texture we now consider definitional. The bar, like the codex, became a vessel.

1893

The Jelly Bean Debuts at the Chicago Columbian Exposition

The exact origin of the jelly bean is, like all confectionery beginnings, contested. The first reliably-documented commercial appearance occurs in 1893, in the candy halls of the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago⁴, where an unnamed Pennsylvania manufacturer is recorded as having offered "small flavored pellets of pectin and corn-syrup, formed in moulds of powdered starch."

The technique — the so-called starch-mogul process — remains, to this day, the industrial means of forming the jelly bean. A bed of dry corn-starch is impressed with a master, the impressions filled with hot pectin syrup, and the trays warmed for a day until each bean sets to its iconic glossy interior. The exterior is then panned in dragee-style coating drums — a process inherited directly from the medieval comfit-makers of Verdun⁵.

“ Observe the bean: it is the modern emblem of the discrete, countable, and dopaminergic. Each one is a small bound argument for joy. ” — from the Compendium of Sugar Forms, 1962

1928

The Gummi Bear: the Bonn Apothecary & the Pectin Revolution

Hans Riegel, a former confectioner's apprentice in the city of Bonn, registered in 1920 the firm Haribo (HAns RIegel BOnn) and, by 1922, had produced his first Tanzbar — a dancing bear of soft gelatin candy, sold by the piece at fairs⁶. By 1928 the form had stabilized: a small, ursine, fruit-flavored, gelatin-bound figure approximately 22mm tall, formed in starch moulds inherited from the jelly-bean process.

The significance of the gummi bear is, the present author contends, more than commercial. It is the first piece of candy to be sold explicitly as a figure — a representational object rather than an abstract pellet or stick. It re-introduced into modern confectionery the iconographic tradition of the medieval sugar sculpture, and prepared the cultural ground for the dopamine-figural revival of the 21st century.

1969

The Sour-Keys Patent & the Tartaric Awakening

In the summer of 1969, while the wider world's attention was occupied with lunar matters, a small confectionery house in Toronto filed a patent for a soft-set pectin candy coated in a mixture of citric and tartaric acids in a 7:3 ratio⁷. The product, marketed as Sour Keys, would become the founding member of a confectionery sub-class previously absent from the literature: the sour gummy.

The sour gummy is, in neurochemical terms, a small adversarial system: the tongue registers acid as a low-grade threat (the pH falls briefly to 2.2), the brain releases a small startle-burst of dopamine, the sweet undercoat then reassures. The whole arc takes approximately 2.4 seconds and is, in this author's view, the first deliberate confection designed around a reward-prediction-error⁸ — though the term itself would not be coined for another two decades.

“ The sour is not in opposition to the sweet. The sour is the sweet, with footnotes. ” — Marginal note, Sour Keys patent application, fol. 4r

2024

The Dopamine Revival & the Neuro-Confectionery School

The contemporary moment — let us not pretend to historical distance — is one of explicit neurochemical address. The candy aisle of 2024 speaks the language of the laboratory: focus gummies, mood drops, dopamine pearls. Brightly-colored, figural, often acidic, and marketed in pastel-foil pouches that borrow the visual grammar of pharmaceutical packaging⁹.

What is novel here is not the chemistry — sugar has always rewarded the mesolimbic pathway — but the candidness of the address. The confection no longer hides behind story or character. It announces its mechanism. We have arrived, the author submits, at a kind of candy-modernism: the apparatus is exposed, the function is named, the dopamine is sold by the milligram¹⁰.

And yet — one notes, in closing — the product still tastes of fruit. The 1893 jelly bean and the 2024 dopamine pearl share more than they differ.

Folio II

Footnotes & Apparatus Criticus

The marginal apparatus of the treatise above. References, demurrals, side-arguments, and the small ornamental notes that academic prose accumulates in its lower margins.

1. Achard, F. K. Anleitung zur Bereitung des Rohzuckers aus den Runkelrüben. Berlin, 1799. The Cunern memorandum is held at the Prussian State Archives, manuscript Pr.Br.Rep. 70, Bl. 12–17.
2. Cf. Mintz, S. Sweetness and Power. Penguin, 1985, ch. 4, on the political economy of northern sweetness and its colonial reverberations.
3. The Fry firm's 1849 Patent No. 11,712 is sometimes mis-cited as the patent for the bar itself; in fact the patent concerns the sectional mould. The bar predates the patent by two years and was unpatented as a form.
4. See Larson, E. The Devil in the White City, app. iii, on confectionery vendors at the 1893 Exposition. The jelly bean is mentioned in three contemporaneous newspaper accounts (Tribune, 19 May; Inter Ocean, 27 May; Daily News, 4 June).
5. The dragée of Verdun, traditionally a sugared almond, has been continuously manufactured by the Médicis house since 1220 — the longest unbroken confectionery practice in Europe.
6. Riegel's autobiography, Bonn und der Bär (1947), is the standard primary source. The 1922 dancing-bear was reputedly inspired by the trained bears that performed at the Bonn Pfingstmarkt.
7. Canadian Patent 832,490, filed 14 July 1969, "Coated soft pectin confection, sour-acid type." The 7:3 ratio is specified in claim 4.
8. Schultz, W., Dayan, P., Montague, P. R. "A neural substrate of prediction and reward." Science, 275(5306), 1997, pp. 1593–1599.
9. The visual borrowing from pharmaceutical packaging is, at the level of typography, almost wholesale: small caps for ingredient lists, sans-serif neue-grotesque body type, foil-stamped lot numbers. This is treated at length in a forthcoming article.
10. The phrase "candy-modernism" is the author's; it has, to date, no other usage in the literature. Whether it survives the present treatise is a matter for younger scholars.

A Treatise on Sweets

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