From the Vault: The Invention of Cotton Candy, Part 1

So what exactly IS cotton candy and how does this curious confectionary concoction tie into other culinary traditions, including China’s Dragon’s beard candy? Find out in this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. (originally published 1/30/2025) (part 1 of 2)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. We have a vault episode here for
you today. We're doing some stuff behind the scenes here
to catch up a little bit. So this is going
to be the invention of Cotton Candy, Part one off two.
It originally published one thirty, twenty twenty five. Let's jump right.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
In Cotton Candy by Edward Hirsch. We walked on the
bridge over the Chicago River for what turned out to
be the last time, and I a cotton candy. That
sugary air, that sweet blue light, spun out of nothingness.
It was just a moment, really, nothing more. But I

(00:46):
remember marveling at the sturdy cables of the bridge that
held us up, and threading my fingers through the long
and slender fingers of my grandfather, an old man from
the old world, who long ago disappeared to the nether regions.
And I remember that eight year old boy who had
tasted the sweetness of air, which still clings to my

(01:08):
mouth and disappears when I breathe.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, And that was I
said it in the opening, But again, that was the
poem Cotton Candy by the American poet Edward Hirsh. And
that's going to be relevant today because we're starting a
couple of episodes on the subject of cotton candy and
some of its historical predecessors. But I thought this would
be a good poem to feature, first of all, just

(01:47):
because I love it. It's very plainly stated, but very beautiful,
very evocative. There's something strong lurking in it about the
interplay of like strength and permanence on one hand, with
the imagery of the cables on the bridge and the
kind of tenacity of memory, but then on the other hand,
about ephemerality, like the fleetingness of human life, and the

(02:09):
inherent nothing substance of cotton candy, which somehow feels after
it's eaten, like it never existed, like it was never
a substance to begin with, and yet it persists as
a taste that clings to the mouth, as Hersch says,
clings to the mouth and disappears when you breathe, kind
of implying that there are some things that are ephemeral

(02:29):
and they disappear when we live. But anyway, to move
on to the subject, Yes, we're going to be talking
about cotton candy aka candy floss aka fairy flass. Now, Rob,
I don't know if you think along the same lines
as me here, but these alternate terms for cotton candy,
which I have encountered before, always struck me as incredibly

(02:52):
disgusting because, like a lot of American English speakers my age,
I assume the only time I ever used the word
floss is when referring to dental floss, and in fact,
for most of my life, I just assumed that the
dental application was the primary or even only meaning of
the word floss. Is dental floss.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah yeah, I mean that's obviously the primary way I
use it, and the other usages of floss that I've
encountered are always you know, expressly or I feel like
I got the impression that they were derived from dental floss,
like everything begins with dental floss, and therefore the idea
of there being like a parallel usage of it just

(03:35):
didn't occur to me either. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, So historically this is not the case. The English
word floss, from what I can tell, has uncertain etymological roots.
It might be related to the English word fleece, which
goes back to wool from a sheep or similar animal.
Or it might come from a French term flash, meaning
maybe wool or perhaps silk. But anyway, floss means fibers

(03:59):
like silk, wool, hair, or thread. So candy floss is
candy hair, which also doesn't sound very good. Maybe it's
just cultural familiarity because you also don't eat cotton. But
for some reason, to me, cotton candy is about as
appetizing as the terms for this substance get.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, plus at least like cotton has. You know, it's
organic in nature, and therefore it's like cotton candy. Well
that just sounds straight good for you, right.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, it's health food.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
When, of course, if I'm assuming everyone out there has
either had cotton candy or some derivative cotton candy or
even counted it, you know that it is, as the
poem so wonderfully describes it, blue light spun out of nothingness.
It's sugary air. It's just sweetness, like aggressive sweetness in
this like strange, barely physical form. It just melts in

(04:54):
your mouth immediately. And of course I'm always reminded of
that video that we discussed in a past episodes of
about Raccoons, where raccoon is given cotton candy and the
raccoon lowers it into the water as they are wont
to do, and then the raccoon is seemingly just horrified
when it melts away and just like instantly vanishes, just.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
A diamond of sadness and disappointment. Yeah, that little video. Yeah,
another question to lodge here at the beginning. I think
maybe we can partially answer this as we go along,
But I was thinking, why is it that we associate
cotton candy with fairs and carnivals. Why is it something
you get at the amusement park or the county fair

(05:38):
and other candies are not something like I mean, I
guess you can get you some sweet tarts at the
county Fair, but it's a particular kind of event associated
candy unlike many others.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, I mean, as we'll discuss, I mean basically get
into the fact that it does have twentieth century origins
that are very tightly bound to the World's Fair. So
it kind of to a large extent is born out
of the World's Fair. The technology to create it has
long been very mobile, works well with like a food

(06:13):
cart sort of a situation, but it does drag in
all these other additional aspects. Like I think of cotton candy,
which I have not had since I was a child
for obvious reasons. It makes me think of stickiness out
in public, away from a place to wash your hands.
It makes me think of like sweating and eating cotton

(06:33):
candy at the same time, Like there's a certain grunginess
to the experience that is not, you know, altogether, you know,
unattractive to the childhood brain. But you know, yeah, it
is closely associated with like an outdoor, busy environment.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
I mean yeah, I guess a lot of parents would
not be thrilled at the idea of like bringing home
a tub of cotton candy for their child to eat
at home.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Yeah, but kids won. I mean it's bright, it's amazing looking,
it's novel. I think all kids should have it, you know,
at least a few times I think I was asking
my own child, was like like, yeah, what was your
favorite cotton candy that you ever had? And they're like, oh,
I think I only had it once, and I think
maybe it was more than once, but still, Yeah, I
probably have been kind of limiting on the cotton candy.

(07:21):
Like it's one of those things as a parent, when
you're asked if you can get cotton candy, you might
be inclined to sort of steer them towards something else.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, it's a great thing to bring as a treat
to the children of someone else at their house. Hey,
kids play with this in the living room.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, because it's pure sugar, it's it's sticky, it has
no real nutritional value. It's pure novel and therefore it
is the perfect thing to have.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
It af fair and that it's one of those foods
where the appeal of it is pure sensory novelty. Like
what's It's really not going to be like the best
tasting candy you're going to ever have. It's like, what's
appealing about it is that it is unusual, that it
looks interesting, in that it feels interesting in the mouth.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, we'll get into much later in this discussion. That
there are some traditions of cotton candy and some technologies
with cotton candy that are like pushing the boundaries of
what's possible, and they've managed to make it look even
more amazing, even more like some sort of a strange
blue sugar flame brought forth from another realm. But I

(08:25):
haven't tried it, and I suspect that the taste can
only be so complex because it is still is just
like an assault of sweetness, I would imagine. Yeah, I
feel like there's also concerning Farris, there's the not quite
overt connection to be made between cotton candy and clown hair.
You know, clowns have you know, bright colored hair that

(08:49):
is often in big poofy arrays that may resemble cotton candy,
uh huh yeah yeah, And for me too, I'm also
reminded of killer clowns from outer Space The Harm of
You from nineteen eighty eight, in which you have an
array of wonderfully grotesque and colorful clowns I think some
of the best horror movie clowns ever. And there are

(09:13):
some key sequences where we find out that they use
cotton candy to spin cocoons around their human victims.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
I'd forgotten about that, yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, and that wonderful usage. And I also find it
interesting because obviously there's a comparison being made here between
spun cotton candy and spun silk cocoons. And you actually
find these connections made as well in some Chinese traditions
with particular confections that are at least a kin to

(09:44):
cotton candy. Okay, all right, So at this point we
really should turn to a very obvious question before we
get into the history and invention of cotton candy properly.
What is it? What is this strange blue sugar air
that is summoned out of some sort of a technological
vat when a man sticks to it like a paper

(10:04):
cone or conical array into a like a pit.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yes, very good question. And the science behind cotton candy
turned out to be surprisingly fascinating, at least to me.
It sent me on a number of unexpected tangents. So
I hope you'll enjoy coming along with me. So I
want to shout out one of the best sources I
found on this, which was a series of chapters in
a book called Candy Bites The Science of Sweets. This

(10:32):
was by authors Richard W. Hardle and An Kate Hardle.
Richard Hardle is a professor of food science at the
University of Wisconsin. Now, to really understand what's going on here,
before we get into the direct how and why of
cotton candy, we should do a brief explainer on the
science of heating sugar syrup, which is a mixture of

(10:53):
sugar and water. The precise heating of sugar syrup is
actually a big part of the candy making process. And
the authors of this book talk about a fact that
I thought was quite wild. They discuss how before candy
thermometers were in common, use candy thermometer. If you've never
seen it before, you know, it's just a type of

(11:15):
thermometer with a certain temperature range. You pin it to
the side of a pot or whatever vessel you're heating
your sugar syrup in, and it has sort of markers
on it that will let you know different stages of
the sugar syrup heating process. And I'll explain more about
that in a minute. But apparently in the old school days,
the old days, a lot of candy makers would test

(11:37):
the temperature of their boiling syrup by feel literally with
their fingers. Please do not try this yourself. This could
lead to horrible, horrible burns. Like the only thing worse
than Touching a boiling hot liquid is touching a hot
liquid that sticks to your skin. Oh apparently, and please
don't get any ideas. I'm just gonna describe the trick here.

(11:58):
But you don't know how to do it, Okay, you
don't know how to do it right, so don't try
this at home. Apparently the trick was the old candy
maker would dip their fingers into cold water first, and
then quickly dip them in the hot sugar syrup and
then back into the cold water. Again. Please do not
try this. Apparently there's kind of an art to doing
it right, and even experienced candy makers would end up

(12:20):
with serious injuries and scars. But the idea is that
the feel of the boiling syrup, along with the visual appearance,
would help them know what temperature the syrup had reached.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, this detail. I'd never run across this before. But
this matches up with other things I was reading about
in terms of confectionery traditions and different cultures. And you
can just look around you, certainly in any major city,
and you can see examples of this. Like to be
a candy maker is to engage in a specialized profession.
Not everyone can do it. Yeah, it's serious business, and

(12:55):
you know you have to be mentored into it. You
have to learn the tricks and the art of the trade.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Now, the question is, why would it be so important
to know exactly what temperature you're boiling sugar syrup had reached.
You know, why would you actually risk third degree burns
just to know what temperature exactly the syrup was. Well,
it's because the chemical and physical properties of sugar syrup
change greatly depending on exactly how hot it has gotten.

(13:24):
So the authors mention these benchmarks. I don't know if
this is the exact terminology you'll see on most candy
making thermometers, but they mentioned the following stages. Okay, there
is the thread state and these I'm not going to
give the temperatures for everything, but it starts with the
thread state at two hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit or
one hundred and ten celsius. And the final state I'm

(13:45):
going to mention, is it about three hundred and five
degrees fahrenheit or one hundred and fifty two celsius. The
states are thread state, then you get soft ball state,
firm ball state, then hardball soft crack, and hard crack.
Aren't these enticing to your mind? Don't you want to
know what all of these mean?

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of baseball terminology.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
It sounds like it has nothing to do with baseball,
nothing at all. Oh, it does sound like all of
them could be like a hard crack is like the
site of the bad hitting. No, no, nothing to do
with baseball. It'll all make sense in the end.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
The thread state is when you just lasen up your
boots and there it is. It all works.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
That's right, should have the trash talking state. So the
interesting thing about sugar syrup, this makes it very different
from plain water, is that as you continue to boil
it over time, it's boiling point goes up. Now, how
is that possible? After all, we all know that when
you boil a pot of water, it has a maximum

(14:45):
temperature at one atmosphere of pressure. The hottest your boiling
water can get is two twelve fahrenheit or one hundred
degrees celsius. You keep applying heat to the pot and
it will never get any hotter as long as it
can boil off. I mean, if you use a pressure
cooker and you you pressurize it, you prevent the steam
from escaping. You can get it hotter, but if it
is at regular pressure the steam can escape. It will

(15:08):
just keep boiling at the boiling point, never get any
hotter until all the water has evaporated. However, when you
add a significant amount of sugar to the water, you
actually increase the boiling point of the solution. The sugar
molecules dissolved in this solution make the water molecules more

(15:28):
resistant to evaporation. When you've got sugar in the water,
it's harder for those water molecules at the surface of
the pot of water to make the phase transition into
steam and boil off. So it takes more energy to
boil the solution, which means the boiling point goes up.
Mix in sugar, it's got a higher boiling point. But

(15:49):
here's the interesting thing. The amount of energy it takes
to evaporate water from the solution is proportional to the
sugar content. So the more sugar is in the solution
relative to the amount of water, the higher the boiling point.
So as you heat the sugar syrup to its boiling point,
water evaporates, it does boil off, and this increases the

(16:12):
ratio of sugar to water in the syrup and thus
increases the boiling point even further, and it will do
this until eventually all of the water is evaporated or
almost all of the water is gone, and at some
point the sugar will just burn beyond increasing the boiling point.
Another consequence of increasing the sugar to water ratio of

(16:32):
the syrup through heating is that the viscosity of the
syrup increases. In other words, it becomes thicker. And this
increase in viscosity is what candy makers are talking about
with phrases like soft ball, hard ball, soft crack, and
so forth. So these terms mostly describes something about what

(16:54):
a drop of the syrup at each temperature and viscosity
state does when you score out and you PLoP it
into a bowl of cold water. So, for example, at
the soft ball state, you drop a bit of the
syrup into cold water, and first it forms little threads,
and you can gather these up and mold them into
a soft mass with your fingers. But the syrup at

(17:17):
the soft ball stage is not thick enough to hold
its shape, and it will slowly collapse and flow under
the force of gravity alone. So imagine the texture of
like the soft caramel filling in a chocolate truffle. And
so from here we go up the chain. You go
to the firm ball state. This means you can make
it into a ball. You can form it into a

(17:38):
ball with your hands, but it will be easily deformed
and molded with the fingers. It'll basically hold its shape
against gravity. At the hard ball stage, the cooled syrup
will firmly retain its shape. The authors use saltwater taffy
as an example of this texture. And after the ball stages,
you've got the crack stages, soft crack and hard crack.

(18:00):
And the authors described this point as follows. Quote. Sugar
syrup cooked to three hundred degrees fahrenheit and cooled quickly
in cold water forms hard brittle threads that crack when
you snap them. Thus the hard cracked state. In fact,
sugar cooked to this temperature and cooled quickly to room
temperature turns into a sugar glass and amorphous matrix of

(18:24):
sugar molecules that has solid like characteristics. Hard candy and
brittles are cooked to three hundred degrees fahrenheit to form
sugar glasses. So really, when you come back to the
idea of monitoring the temperature as the syrup boils. The
temperature monitoring is an indirect way for the candy maker

(18:44):
to measure the remaining water content of the syrup, since
the boiling point goes up as the water content goes down.
Now regarding this concept of sugar glass from the quote
I read, there's actually another chapter in the book on
this idea, which is both interesting on its own and
relevant to the subject of cotton candy, Because, as counterintuitive

(19:06):
as this sounds, cotton candy, this fluffy melt in your
mouth mass is a type of sugar glass, in fact,
is the authors describe it. They say, really, cotton candy
should be thought of as a type of fiberglass. It's
a fiberglass that you can.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Eat that well, that feels entirely accurate and is as
appetizing as it should be.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
This actually leads to something that I didn't know about
old special effects in the movies. Did you know that
sugar plays a role in the history of breakaway glass
on movie sets.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
I have always heard this, but I've never closely examined it,
you know, but I'd always heard, you know, accounts of like, oh,
he's going through sugar glass there, or accounts like, well
it was supposed to be sugar glass, but they ended
up using real glass and somebody got injured. That sort
of thing.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Oh okay, so you knew that I didn't know this before,
or one of those many things. Maybe that if I knew, I.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
Forgot I didn't know enough about it to ever like
sight it, because it's one of those things that in the
back of my mind and have to think, well, maybe
I heard that wrong, Maybe they didn't use sugar.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
No, no, you didn't hear it wrong. It's not often
the case today, but i'll explain. So when you see
a movie stunt where somebody gets thrown through a plate
glass window, or you know, generally glass breaks on a person,
that is almost always a special prop called breakaway glass.
It looks like regular glass when it's solid, looks like
regular glass made out of silica, but it is not.

(20:33):
It's some kind of clear, brittle material that shatters on impact,
but it doesn't form the hard, sharp edges that would
cut you like regular window glass does. These days, it's
often made out of some kind of plastic resin, but
in older movies it was usually made out of sugar.
And by the way, sugar glass is not just a

(20:53):
term used in like the breakaway glass thing. I mean
a lot of the candies people eat are essentially a
form of sugar glass modified sugar glass, like lollipops, jolly ranchers, lifesavers,
et cetera. You can kind of see the glassiness when
you think of the texture of these things.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Well, now, I just I really want to look up
some examples from old movies where someone is like one
hundred percent going through a window pane made out of
sugar glass.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, like you shatter through it, and then you get up,
dust yourself off, pick up the pieces and eat them.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Possibly children and animals form in to consume the precious
sugar glass. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
I think they used sugar glass to make the methamphetamine
on the Breaking Bad set.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
That's right, I do remember reading that.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
But to come back to the chemistry of it, So,
as we mentioned already, you make sugar glass by boiling
syrup to the hard crack stage just means taking it
past three hundred degrees fahrenheit. At this point, the remaining
mixture is only about two percent water. And the authors
talk about how sugar actually comes in two primary physical
arrangements solid sugar. Of course, you can have melted forms

(22:09):
of sugar, but solid sugar is either going to be
crystalline sugar like rock candy, or sugar glass, and that
would include both jolly ranchers and breakaway glass on movie
sets and cotton candy. Glasses are interesting from a physics
and chemistry perspective because they combine properties of a solid

(22:30):
and a liquid, so they seem solid enough when you
look at them and touch them, but they actually behave
in some ways like a liquid. So crystalline solids have
these regular patterns into which the molecules are arranged. If
you look at them with a you know, at the
molecular level, you will see these like long repeating chains.
It's a very structurally uniform. Glasses, which are called amorphous solids,

(22:56):
do not show these regular patterns, at least not on
the large scale. They might have small patterns in little
local areas of molecules, but they're largely more jumbled up.
The molecules are all kind of just mixed together and
kind of frozen in a chaotic mess. So an interesting
consequence of the different molecular arrangement of glass is that

(23:18):
while it might be perfectly solid on a normal human timeline,
glasses do tend to flow in a way that crystalline
solids do not. And here in the book the author's
given illustration of this by making reference to something we've
talked about on the show before, the University of Queensland

(23:38):
Pitch drop experiment. I was trying to remember when this
came up. I know it won an Igno Bell Prize,
so may have been in that context, or it may
have been some other time. We were discussing rheology, which
is the scientific study of how matter flows. The short
version is this experiment, which began in the nineteen twenties
and I think is still ongoing, or at least was

(23:58):
ongoing until recently. I think it might still be going on.
It consists of leaving a mass of tar pitch which
is so thick it really seems like a solid, sitting
that down in a funnel, and then subjecting it to
atmospheric conditions and measuring how long it takes for part
of it to drip out the bottom of the funnel.

(24:18):
I think the finding was that each drop took roughly
eight to ten years. Oh wow, so this chunk of
tar looks totally solid to us, But in regular atmospheric
conditions it is flowing. It's just flowing very slowly. And
other glasses are like that, except flowing even more slowly.

(24:40):
And here at the author's cite a now debunked belief.
So what I'm about to say is a myth. Do
not take this away as genuine knowledge, but a now
debunked belief about stained glass windows in some medieval cathedrals.
This was based on the observation or the observation people
thought they had made that some of these window panes
appear to be thicker at the base than they are

(25:01):
at the top. And to whatever extent that is true,
the popular explanation is they're melting. These windows were made
hundreds of years ago, and you know installed, I don't know.
So you imagine a cathedrals built in the twelve hundreds,
and these windows are put in, and this has just
been over hundreds of years. They're gradually flowing down due

(25:23):
to the force of gravity, and so the bases of
them are getting thicker than the top. And now the
authors note that this claim is disputed by experts. I
went and looked this up, and it seems to me,
it's not just disputed. From what I can tell, it
is thoroughly disproven. For example, I found the following paper.
This is called Viscous Flow of Medieval Cathedral Glass, and

(25:45):
this is by Osgar Gulbeton, John C. Morrow, Ziaujug, and
Olus N. Boratav published in the American Journal of the
American Ceramic Society twenty eighteen. Their abstract begins by describing
the urban legend about the flowing windows and then notes
that quote, advances in glass transition theory and experimental characterization

(26:08):
techniques unquote will allow this idea to be tested more
directly than it ever has before. And then from here
I'm going to read from the abstract with some abridgments
for simplicity. Quote. In this work, we investigate the dynamics
of a typical medieval glass composition used in Westminster Abbey,
depending on the thermal history of the glass. The room

(26:30):
temperature viscosity is about sixteen orders of magnitude lower than
found in a previous study of soda lime silicate glass,
which is a common type of glass used in making windows.
But the authors go on later quote despite this significantly
lower value of the room temperature viscosity. The viscosity of
the glass is much too high to observe measurable viscous

(26:53):
flow on a human timescale. Using analytical expressions to describe
the glass flow over a wall, we calculate a maximum
flow of about one nanometer over a billion years. So,
just for context, a nanometer is one one billionth of
a meter or like, you know, two percent as wide

(27:15):
as some viruses. A sheet of paper is roughly one
hundred thousand nanometers thick, So if they are flowing like that,
it would not be enough for us to measure that.
This would not explain any measurable thickness difference at the
bottom of the glass.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
Right, you'd need some sort of like crazy time machine slash.
I don't know, alien preservation of a cathedral to be
in play. It's just impossible to imagine a scenario where
this would be observable to the naked eye.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
The glass does flow, I mean those windows will be
melting by the heat death of the universe. They're just
not going to be flowing, you know, in a few
hundred years. Yeah, But anyway, this observation relates to a
very interesting sign scientific measure that the authors of this
book mention. The hurtles mention what is called the Deborah number.

(28:08):
This is a number used in rheology and realogy is
the study of how matter flows to describe the ratio
of two figures. One is how quickly a fluid mass
flows or how quickly it deforms under pressure versus how
long you are able to observe it and cool fact

(28:29):
is that the Deborah number gets its name from a
passage in the Hebrew Bible. It's in the Book of
Judges chapter five, which is telling of a song by
the prophet Deborah in which she's prophesying a great destruction
to come, and she says, this is the King James version. Lord,
when thou wentest out of sear, when thou marchest out

(28:52):
of the field of edom, the earth trembled, and the
heavens dropped. The clouds also dropped water. The mountains melted
from before the Lord. And sometimes that line about the
mountains melting before the Lord is expressed as the mountains
flowed before the Lord. Some theologians I think this is
a later interpretation. Some theologians explain this by saying that

(29:15):
it's not just a simple expression of power, i e.
God can melt mountains, but an expression of God's dominion
over time, meaning like he lives and sees forever, he
is eternal, so to him mountains which are completely solid
throughout the lifetime of a human, you know, not a
noticeable change in a few decades to God's point of view,

(29:36):
and seeing outside of time, they just flow like soft caramel,
which would be somewhat scientifically accurate. I am not convinced
that's what the author of this passage actually had in mind.
It sounds to me more like a classical expression of
power and might. But interesting nonetheless.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Oh absolutely, I love it when there's an interpretation of
ancient writings like this that are not actually pushing some
sort of an ancient AA technology agenda, but are like,
you know, it's kind of nice that science matches up
here in a way that again is not pushing an
agenda in either direction.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah. Well, I'm not trying to slam the passage in anyway.
I mean, this is a great passage of the Bible.
That interpretation might be implying a kind of scientific insight
that the authors of the passage probably did not have.
But at the very least, it is a very interesting
coincidence and you know, if the author actually did have
that insight, that's quite interesting too. But to come back

(30:32):
to sugar glass, of course, sugar glass is much keener
on flowing than the soda lime silicon glass that you
would be used in a stained glass window in a cathedral.
The sugar glass will flow more easily, and this leads
to apparently funny considerations in older movie making. So the
authors talk about how if a prop window of sugar

(30:55):
glass was made in the morning on an old movie set,
the production would kind of need to hurry long and
shoot the window smashing scene soon because the window wouldn't
last forever. As you might guess if you've ever left
Jolly ranchers out in a hot car under the stress
of heat and moisture conditions in the air, the sugar

(31:15):
glass window would gradually soften and then eventually begin to
melt and flow like the mountains before the Lord.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Oh wow. Yeah, I mean, we've all heard or read
examples of really hot movie shoots, you know, be it
a set or some sort of a location. Throw melting
sugar glass into that scenario. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Now, here's where we finally get back directly to cotton candy.
The Heartles claim that cotton candy is probably descended from
a previously existing confectionery product called spun sugar. Now, spun
sugar is made by heating sugar syrup to the hard
crack phase. Remember that's the highest phase again, that's how

(31:58):
you make sugar glass. You take it up to pass
three hundred degrees fahrenheit and then you pour that syrup
over something like a fork or a wisk, which allows
it to drip and stretch out and form these long,
thin strands as it cools and hardens. So sometimes people
I've seen this on like cooking shows before, people will
make shapes out of sponge sugar. You know, they'll like

(32:23):
pour the threads over the back of a bowl or
something like that and then peel it off, and then
you will have this interesting wiry dome of these sugar threads.
To me, sponge sugar has always kind of looked like
a thin wire. It's kind of shiny, so it has
that metallic look to it.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah. Yeah, And I have encountered this on some desserts
as a grown up, and yeah, I mean, it's probably
the best place to utilize this sugar technology for the
adult palette, right, because it's not acting on its own.
It's just kind of like a little novelty on top
of something that maybe has a more complex flavor.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
I'm not knocking it, but I think the appeal of
sponge sugar is more for looking at than eating. I
don't know how much fun it really is to eat
these little wires of sugar syrup.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
But it's nice to know that you can.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here the authors talk a bit
about the history of how cotton candy was invented, like
where the first machines came from. I think we'll get
more into that later in maybe later today or in
part two of the series, but to begin with, just
like what is it? Physically? What is it? Cotton candy
is sort of like sponge sugar, but taken to an

(33:35):
almost spiritual extreme of wispiness. It's usually made with a
special machine which includes a rapidly rotating disc or tray
called a spinner, and then in the middle of that
tray there's a heating element. So you pour the flavored
sugar into the middle of the spinner with the heating element.
It gets melted by the heating element and then this

(33:58):
in the liquid form as the thing spins. It leaks
out of tiny holes in the outside wall of its
containers spinning container, and these tiny streams of melted sugar
make contact with the cold, unheated air outside the spinner,
then quickly solidify into sugar glass, but microscopic hair like

(34:20):
strands of sugar glass. Then the operator collects all of
these fibers from a larger kind of container or tray,
collects them into a cone or onto a stick, and
here's your cotton candy. Now here's where we come back
to the comparison to fiberglass. The haartles in the book
right quote. Fiberglass, first commercialized by the Owen Corning Fiberglass

(34:44):
Corporation in nineteen thirty eight, is made by extruding molten
silica glass through small holes to make thin strands or
fibers of glass. As the strands exit the extruder, they
cool into the solid glassy state and are collected further processing.
The process is essentially the same as for making cotton candy,

(35:06):
which is just great. Now, of course, there are major
differences due to the chemical differences between silica based glass
and sugar glass. Regular fiberglass made out of glass glass
silica glass is used as an insulation material in construction.
It's quite resistant to heat and moisture. That is one

(35:26):
of its main appeals. Cotton candy is exactly the opposite.
Contact with heat or moisture will destroy the structure of
cotton candy, so once it's made, it's got a short
shelf life, or you've got to like seal it off
against the atmosphere basically like, yeah, you need to eat
it right away or put it inside water type packaging.

(35:47):
And the water type packaging is not just for protection
against the raccoon washing full dunk scenario. Sugar is hygroscopic,
meaning it will absorb water from the air around it,
so you know, usually there's some water content in the air.
I guess you're a cotton candy might survive longer if

(36:07):
you make it in the middle of the desert, but
to whatever degree it's humid outside, cotton candy will quickly
go from being fluffy and delightful to kind of like
collapsing down and becoming a sticky, semi melted mess. And
then of course if you actually like splash water on
it or it gets rained on, that's just the end
of it.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, heartbreaking in.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Fact, you can look up I did before we started here.
Cotton candy, like slow death of cotton candy time lapse videos,
and these are really good and they always have hilarious
music because you're just watching joy die. You're watching a
lump of cotton candy over the course of you know,
three or four hours, just slump down and collapse. But

(36:48):
the music that's playing sounds like like orbital or something.
It's very like feel good, upbeat, very upbeat.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
I was surprised by that. I thought it would be
more like, you know, nine is Nails Hurt or something,
you know.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
For the Johnny Cash cover.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah, the Johnny Cash cover Slowed the Cave Cotton Candy, or.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
The Johnny Cash cover of Rusty Cage, because you know,
it's like, in a way, it's breaking out of the
form you have put it in. I'm gonna break my
Rusty Cage of being an extruded, you know, hair like
filament of glass and I'm just going to turn into
what I've always wanted to be, a thick, sticky like puddle.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah. The one that I watched at the end, after
it had like shrunken down, they then chopped it up
or cut it up with scissors, and it was I
don't know why it's so fascinating.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, yeah, So that's what's going on with the chemistry
of cotton candy. Much more interesting subject than I expected
it to be. But there's also a lot of interesting
stuff about cotton candy and how it interacts with sort

(37:55):
of the history of confectionery and other related candies treats
made in the past.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
That's right now. Obviously, I think most of us are
aware of this. Humans have always had a sweet tooth
ready to pounce upon such sweet treats that you might
find in the natural environment as carrots, berries, or perhaps
even if you're lucky and daring, a taste of wild honey.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
I was wondering, is honey about as sweet as it
gets in terms of natural products just things you would
find in nature, unprocessed or unreduced pretty much?

Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, I mean, because oftentimes when you hear examples of
like the sweet tooth of our ancient ancestors, you know,
they're talking about things like carrots as being like extremely sweet,
and that's something that in our modern sugar saturated world,
like we don't even think about carrots being sweet, but
carrots are sweet like, take a little time to appreciate
a candy carrot the next time you're rooting around in

(38:55):
the fridge.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
I recall when I was a kid there were carrots.
I think they were like baby carrots, which are not
actually baby carrots, by the way. They're just different ways
of cutting a carrot.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, they're just ugly carrots and carrot leftovers that are
trimmed down into these little notes.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, it's the carrot principle of It's kind of like
tater tots, you know, it's reducing waste. But yeah, carrots.
I remember some baby carrots when I was a kid
that were sold under some brand name that was like
Sugar Treats or something like that. There was just carrots,
but I think it was a way of tricking kids
at the stores. Something goes, oh, that's called sugar yum yum.

(39:32):
They did taste sweeter somehow. They just got to prime
your mind.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
Yeah, I mean that's one of the reasons kids will
actually eat them most of the time.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
But we're not hating on carrots. But carrots are great.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
Great love carrots. But there's a lot of evidence for
humanity's deep seated sweet tooth. The spider caves and what
is now Spain featured depictions of human honey gathering. The
believe the oldest known depiction of bees and evidence of
human conception of honey and or the harvesting of honey.

(40:01):
I've seen different dates for this, including eight thousand BCE
and some more like six thousand BC, but suffice to
say it's very ancient evidence, and the practice obviously predates
the depiction Humans were going out and harvesting honey, stealing
honey from the insects that created now. As we've discussed

(40:21):
in the show before, the ancient Egyptians made various uses
of honey medicinal the magical, but they also appreciated it
for its sweetness and proper sugar based confections go back
at least to two thousand BCE in India according to
Sanskrit texts, though I've also seen the date of refined
sugar in India going back to six thousand BCE, and

(40:44):
the English words sugar and candy are both distantly related
to their original Sanskrit terms. As such, there is of
course a very deep rooted sweets culture in India, and
I don't have a lot of expertise in it. But
I have been to Indian sweet shops before as an adult,

(41:09):
so I was I've almost I've never been in the
market for the sweets they have. I'm usually buying something
like Somosa's or something. But as such, there is of
course a robust world of Indian sweets out there. It's
a very deep sweet culture, one that I sadly did
not have access to as a child, when I would
have most appreciated all of this. You know, I only

(41:31):
had Indian food basically once I was at least in college,
I think. So when I go into Indian sweet shops,
I'm impressed by all the colors and shapes, but I
just don't have the appetite for it. I don't know
if there are any listeners out there who have definite
recommendations about what I should try at the local Indian

(41:51):
sweet shops. Let me know and I will go out
and I will conduct the experiment. Now, when it comes
to European traditions of sweets, sugar based to confects emerged
during the Middle Ages as luxury goods brought in initially
via apothecaries in the Middle East, but in other parts
of the world. As we've been discussing places where sugarcane
grew naturally, talking about South Asia, Southeast Asia, and potentially

(42:15):
New Guinea, or of course lands adjacent to those lands,
places where candy culture could either emerge or easily flow into.
In those cases we see more deeply rooted sugar cultures,
deeply rooted sweet cultures, such as in India. Now fast
forwarding to cotton candy, just to put all that in perspective,

(42:36):
we're going to get more into the origin story of
cotton candy. But again, generally, the generally accepted invention story
for cotton candy proper is that it is unleashed upon
the world at the nineteen oh four World's Fair, an
invention by a pair of Tennesseeans dentist William Morrison and
a confectioner by the name of John C. Wharton, both

(43:00):
full based.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
I believe dentists creating cotton candy.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
Yes, yes, that is a frequently spouted fact that never
stops being hilarious, because again it is just essentially peer shite. There.
Of course, some other contemporary rivals for the invention honors here,
as is often the case with inventions from the nineteenth
or twentieth century, as we've discussed before in our invention episodes,

(43:24):
but generally people point to Morrison and or Alton there
when it comes to the invention of proper cotton candy.
There are also some additional arguments for nineteenth or even
fifteenth century CE European origins for cotton candy or things
adjacent to cotton candy. One of the more fascinating arguments
that I ran across was that was that cotton candy

(43:47):
or something similar to it dates back to China's Han dynasty,
which would place it somewhere between two two BCE and
nine C, or between twenty five and two twenty CE,
depending on where in the Hun dynasty you're falling. Okay,
so in this we're talking about long sheet tongue or
dragons Beard candy, sometimes abbreviated in Western circles as d

(44:13):
b C. I've not personally had Dragon's Beard candy. It's
possible that I've had the chance and just didn't recognize
my opportunity, or just wasn't looking for something sweet. I
think that's ultimately the tragedy of being exposed to different
sweet cultures. As you grow older, you just have less
of an appetite for it, but it's still it's very

(44:36):
interesting looking. You can easily look up various YouTube videos
of Dragon's Beard candy, and I've also seen places where
you can apparently buy it online, you know, where it's
like shrink wrapped or something. The same is true of
some Middle Eastern examples that will refer to of similar treats,

(44:57):
such as Middle Eastern flos Alva, which sometimes has the
flossy hairl like consistency that we're talking about. But I've
also seen images of it that look like they're a
bit more solid, but in that kind of reminds me
of these examples that we're just talking about of what
happens when you take cotton candy, allow it to sit,
and then you cut it up. So maybe it's a

(45:17):
case like that where you have different versions of what
the is ultimately going on to the tray in the
confectionery store. But flas Alva also looks quite good. I
would definitely accept some of this from Tilda Swinton in
a sleigh if she was offering this Turkish delight. So
I was reading a bit more about Dragon's Beard candy.

(45:39):
I found a really nice Eater travel article by Tiffany
Lee from twenty twenty four titled Welcome the Year of
the Dragon with Dragon's Beard Candy if you can find
it by the way, Happy Lunar New Year. As we
have now entered into the Year of the wood Snake.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Now refresh my memory, rob woodsnake means that, like you
get a year of a specific animal, like year of
the Dragon, year of the pig. This is a year
of the snake. But also the animal is under the
influence of a certain planet, and so that would mean
that's the wood aspect. Is that right?

Speaker 1 (46:12):
Right? There are different elemental factors that come into play,
so you know, it might be like iron snake, water snake,
wood snake. This year is the wood snake.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
I like wood snake. It's very earthy.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
Yeah. So the author here, Lee, herself born to immigrant
parents from Hong Kong, describes childhood memories of buying the
treat from a food stall in Toronto, and she describes
the candy as follows. I thought this was a nice
description quote. The candies stretched sugar strands wrapped around a
crunchy core of peanuts, coconut and sesame seeds create a

(46:46):
series of textual sensations on the tongue. Some strands dissolve
into a soft mass, while others shatter into foyotine flakes
before the whole thing morphs into a chewy, crunchy jumble
of nugat. Foyotine by the way, that is, I had
to look this up and it was not familiar with
it as a crunchy French confection made from thin sweetened crapes.

(47:10):
I've never had this one either, but I you know,
I get the idea.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Is the foy part of foyotine does that share root
with like, oh, I don't know how to pronounce this
me meal foy or whatever. The thousand layers thing.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
Ooh, that sounds likely is one of those layers crunchy.
I guess it would have to be.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
I think they're I think they're all crunchy, aren't they.
I think like a bunch of it's like tons and
tons of crunchy layers. I think it means it means
like a thousand layers or a thousand sheets or something. Okay, Yeah,
like I I L L E F e U I L.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
L E Okay, so a thousand sheets that all have
the same experience. I was thinking like each sheet would
have a different consistency and that that would be impossible
to pull off. So anyway, we have pretty complex confection
here in dragon Beard candy with sugar floss wrapped around
a nutty center. If it sounds less sweet because of
the nuttiness, well, Lee assures us that it's plenty sweet.

(48:07):
You'll most likely find it in places where traditional Chinese
suites are sold. I am not sure if I have
a local source for it here in Atlanta, or I'm
going to just have to look for it the next
time I'm in a bigger city. Listeners, do send your
recommendations if you have had this and know where it
is sold. But based on Lee's article, it sounds like
it hasn't completely caught on in the West, despite occasional

(48:30):
spikes and popularity as a fad, like I believe she mentions,
like in New York at one point it became popular
for a little bit, but then people became distracted by
something else, and it hasn't really become entrenched in the
way that other imported suites have. Okay, And as she discusses,
it's pretty labor and skill intensive, so that's another hurdle

(48:53):
for it really taking over. According to Lee. It takes
two years of mentorship to learn to make it, and
it's one of those things like hand pulled noodles where
half the appeal is watching someone make it. And I
guess that holds true of western cotton candy as well.
Like you want to watch the cotton candy man stick
that cone or tube into the little cauldron, stir it around,

(49:18):
and emerge with that big puff of blue sugar.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
There's a kind of pleasure in watching the cotton candy
made that's similar to how people watch those videos of
things being cleaned, like people watching videos of a dirty
carpet being hosed out, or of people dusting and stuff.
There's something similar going on in the way the wisps
are collected.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
Yes, it is like a spell as being cast of
dragon's beard candy, Lee writes. Quote. Classic recipes require chefs
to heat granulated sugar and maltose together with extracting precision,
shape them into a molten puck, and expand that puck
into a lasso. Then, with deft fingers and the aid

(50:00):
of rice flour, they stretch, pull, and fold the sugar
onto itself into a figure eight until silky Vermicelli like
strands appear before wrapping the threads around the filling, and
you have to get the required temperatures exactly right, which
makes sense matching up with when we were talking about
earlier with the temperature precision involved in any of these

(50:21):
various stages of heating sugars and syrups, and you have
to be prepared to make adjustments depending on ambient temperature
as well, especially in the case of like open carts
where someone might be making this candy oh yeah, and
then you really need to eat them the day off.
Much like cotton candy. It's like, you want it fresh.
If it sits around, it's not going to hold its form.

(50:44):
I'm assuming the prepackaged source that you can buy on
the internet. It's obviously it's not gonna be the same experience,
but maybe they're able to keep it from drying out
with some air tight packaging, you know, and I guess
it's better than nothing if you don't have access to fresh.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
I was having trouble picturing the full finished products, so
I looked it up and it looks like it. You know,
it's often made into kind of a dumpling form or
it's like a hot pocket, but with the pastry replaced
with these these white white sugar threads, and then the
interior filling being the nut coconut mixture you mentioned earlier.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
Yeah. Yeah, now getting back to the history of this
sugar retreat, Lee does cite a popular legend that dragons
Beard candy was an imperial treat dating back to the

(51:38):
Han dynasty, with the emperor himself giving it its name
since the white strands reminded him of dragons whiskers. You'll
also find this mentioned on the Wikipedia entry for Dragon's
Beard candy, though the citations there don't really go anywhere active.
As far as I could.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
Tell, rumors rumors bound.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
So on one hand, I think the dragons whiskers description
is perfect. To compare it to a Western movie, think
of the luck dragon from the Never Ending Story. Falcore. Okay,
it's like if you had a segment of falcre and
you like sliced into them, and yeah, you would have
like the nugat like center with the nuts and the

(52:17):
coconut and all, and then the white fur on the outside.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
Shave a foulcore, wrap it around, wrap the trimmings around
some nuts. There you go.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
Yeah. So, in past episodes on inventions, We've discussed the
questionable historical accuracy of anything that is attributed to an emperor,
Chinese or otherwise in terms of its invention. Sometimes the
guy the toidets to take all the credit, and a
lot of legends there, Yeah, a lot of legends. And

(52:48):
while it's the naming here and not the invention itself
that is attributed to a hunt emperor, I think we
might exercise similar caution. But the more interesting question here
is really whether there is any indicator that this dessert
item or something much like it actually dates back to
the year two twenty CE or much earlier. Okay, So

(53:10):
I turned to a couple of other sources on this
about so the history of sweets and sugar in general,
as pointed out by Tim Richardson in Sweets a History
of candy, sugar cane was introduced into China early in
the first millennium BCE, but that, unlike with India, it
didn't develop. China didn't develop a sugar based sweet culture

(53:30):
and arguably never really did, at least not on the
scale comparable to the robust tradition of sweets that you
find on the Indian subcontinent. Yeah, Okay, Maltos which I
mentioned earlier, remained the sweetener of choice in China. This
is a jelly extracted from grains and sorghum reeds. Honey
was also used, and they long remained dependent on imported

(53:54):
sugar from India and Indo China for anything that actually
called for sugar or some mix of sugar and these
other sweeten and Richardson writes that this was likely due
to technological difficulties with sugar refinement and or just lack
of demand for it, okay, which makes sense. It's like,
it's one thing to acquire the secrets of sugar refining,

(54:16):
but then is there a need for it? Do people
actually want it? As is it anything other than a
novelty for the court. And if it is just a
novelty for the court, then maybe you just keep importing it.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
Right yeah, yeah, And.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
So Richardson says it wasn't till six forty seven CE
that the emperor at the time, and I believe this
would be Tongue Taizong sent delegates to India to learn
the secrets of sugar refinery, and from then on there
are various Chinese advancements in the sugar industry. In twelve eighty.
Richeson points out that Kubla Khan brought in Egyptian experts

(54:50):
to share the secrets of white sugar, which, you know,
if you're going to have a stately pleasure, dome got
to have that white sugar.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Yeah. Just did he have cotton candy in the pleasure?

Speaker 1 (55:00):
I mean it's the perfect place for it, right. I
can imagine Kubla Khan with some sort of cotton candy
in each hand.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Though you know what happens when you get it, wet
goes down through the caverns, measureless to man less.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
See nice. Another book, I was looking at Sweets and Candy,
A Global History by Laura Mason discusses Dragon's Beard candy
briefly within the larger context of pulled sugar sweets that is,
again syrup boiled to a crack and while malleable, worked
into desired forms and literally pulled by hands and or

(55:33):
hooks to create ropes and threads. She defines this process
as ancient but also not necessarily well recorded. She mentions
that the pulling of these confections was probably or perhaps
originally thought to quote convey special qualities, and I believe
these special qualities are linked to the rarity of sugar

(55:55):
in some of the places where this would have been conducted,
and also the seeming alca of working it into these shapes,
sometimes shapes that themselves might convey special meanings, such as
rings and circles. But also, yeah, just coming back to
the modern example of cotton candy, watching its creation does
feel like a kind of magic, and we can imagine

(56:17):
easily imagine our ancestors and parts around the world engaging
in a similar fascination.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Yeah, I mean this takes us back to something we
talked about at the beginning of the chemistry section, which
is like the minute attention before modern thermometers that would
allow you to, you know, to just easily judge exactly
how hot your boiled syrup mixture is getting, like the
attention and know how required to get it to just
the right temperature to have the properties you want.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Yeah, she stresses that broadly. With pulled sugar confections, colors
can be added, and I don't think I was fully
aware of this, but this is where the basics of
the candy cane come into play. Traditionally, candy cane is
apparently more of a pulled sugar confection, but not necessarily

(57:06):
in its modern, mass manufactured version. And then there are
various pulled candy traditions and pretty much every culture to
sort of catch the pulled sugar bug as it traveled
out of sugar rich lands into other realms. She of
course highlights pulled Turkish keeton halva, also known as piecemanna,

(57:26):
noting the addition of butter and flour in that process.
She stresses that keaton halva is different from cotton candy, though,
and that there's no true Western equivalent. As cotton candy,
she writes, is coarse and gritty. I don't remember if
that's accurate, but it sounds right. I do vaguely recall
sort of a grittiness to it, but at least right

(57:47):
before it melts well, keatsan hava is smooth or soft.
But of course pulled sugar in the West also connects
into traditions of pulled taffy, the example many listeners may
be familiar with than you know. Generally you have like
some sort of machine with hooks for that, and dragon's
beard candy, she writes, is closer to keisan halva and

(58:07):
related confections and accounts of Keaton Halve date back at
least as far as the early fifteenth century CE. As
for the earliest possible origin of Dragon's beard candy, she
does write that a Chinese confectionery tradition probably developed from
around the seventh century CE, when sugar began to replace
honey in sweetcakes. In Chinese culinary traditions, sugar based items, though,

(58:33):
would have been only for the aristocracy, and it would
remain that way for centuries. So it would seem possible
that some form of pulled sugar treat, even something close
to what we know of as Dragon's beard candy today,
was brought before a Han Chinese emperor. It seems like
it's possible, But it also seems possible that this treat

(58:53):
might have developed later, during at least the seventh century
rather than the third century. See. I wish there were
firmer sources on the Han dynasty legend here, but I
at least couldn't find them in English. So if anyone
out there has access to additional data on this legend,
I would love to hear.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
About it totally.

Speaker 3 (59:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Also, I mean there, you know, as we've been discussing here,
like sugar and treats. They do seem to travel reasonably
easy from one culture to another, so you'll often find
different versions of cotton candy or or dragon's beard candy
or something like this in various other cultures. Like there
there's like a Korean version of of a poll sugar treat.

(59:36):
There's a Persian variant of halva that is called Pashmak.
There's an Indian variant that's called I believe son pop d.
So you know, they're probably endless variations across time and space.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
But also speaking of time and space, I mean I
think about how when you get into these really delicate
versions of sponge sugar, they become increasingly sensitive to atmospheric conditions,
which may limit their ability to certainly their ability to
travel as finished products. You know, you would have trouble
like making a confection like this and then having it

(01:00:12):
survive I don't know, a trip to market or something
like that, so much like they're made at the fair
these days. It's something that in most conditions would probably
need to be eaten immediately, but maybe in some conditions
I don't know, like a cold, dry place or something,
it could survive longer.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
It definitely seems the case where if word of this
treat traveled to your emperor, you would have to quickly realize, well,
I just can't tell the emperor about this. I have
to bring someone with their supplies and their tools in
order to make this for the emperor.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Yeah. Yeah, you can't like make it ahead and bring
it to that. You've got to make it there.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
Yeah. And again, as the sources noted, there's a lot
that's been lost to history. Sugary treats are not always
the things that are talked about in the surviving histories.
All right, we're gonna go ahead and close this episode out,
but we're going to come back for at least a
part two on cotton candy because there's more to discuss.
I think we're probably going to get into the twentieth

(01:01:11):
century origins of modern cotton candy a bit, and then
there are also going to be some offshoots, things that
are maybe cotton candy and name only, but are still
pretty fascinating from other disciplines of the science world.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
Can't Wait.

Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
All right, just a reminder to everyone out there that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema. If you are let's see. If
you're on the social media's, you can find us on
most of those major platforms. If you're on Instagram, we're

(01:01:48):
stvym podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
Huge Things as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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