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January 30, 2025 62 mins

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 episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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 remember marveling
at the sturdy cables of the bridge that held us up,

(00:25):
and threading my fingers through the long and slender fingers
of my grandfather, an old man from the old world
who long ago disappeared into the nether regions. And I
remember that eight year old boy who had tasted the
sweetness of air which still clings to my mouth and
disappears when I breathe.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your My name is
Robert Lamb.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
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 because

(01:22):
I love it. It's very plainly stated, but very beautiful,
very evocative. There's something strong lurking in it about the
interplay of 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

(01:44):
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 Hirsch says,
clings to the mouth and disappears when you breathe kind
of implying that there are some things that are ephemeral

(02:04):
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

(02:26):
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 flaws.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
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 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

(03:09):
it just didn't occur to me either.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yeah 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

(03:34):
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 3 (03:53):
Yeah. Plus, at least like cotton has, you know, it's
organic in nature, and therefore it's like cotton cant that
just sounds straight good for you, right.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, it's health food.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
When, of course, if I'm assuming everyone out there has
either had a 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

(04:28):
melts in your mouth immediately. And of course I'm always
reminded of that video that we discussed in past episodes
about raccoons, where raccoon has 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.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Just a diamond of sadness and disappointment. Yeah, a 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

(05:09):
you get at the amusement park or the county Fair
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 3 (05:27):
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

(05:48):
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

(06:08):
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 but you know, yeah,
it is closely associated with like an outdoor, dizzy environment.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
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 3 (06:33):
Yeah, but kids won I mean it's bright, it's it's
amazing looking, it's novel, and 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.

(06:56):
Like it's one of those things as a parent when
you're as if you can get cotton candy, you might
be inclined to sort of steer them towards something else.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
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 3 (07:09):
Yeah, because it's pure sugar, it's it's sticky, has no
real nutritional value, it's pure novel and therefore it is
the perfect thing to have it affair.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
And that it's one of those foods where the appeal
of it is pure sensory novelty. Like 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, and that
it feels interesting in the mouth.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
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

(08:00):
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 fars, there's the not quite
overt connection to be made between cotton candy and clown hair.
You know, clowns have bright colored hair that is often

(08:24):
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 horror movie 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 some key

(08:48):
sequences where we find out that they use cotton candy
to spin cocoons around their human victims.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
I'd forgotten about that, yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Yeah, and that wonderful usage. And I also 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 cotton candy. Okay,

(09:21):
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 cone or conical

(09:42):
array into it like a pit.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
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

(10:07):
was by authors Richard W. Hardle and Anikate 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

(10:28):
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

(10:50):
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

(11:12):
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.

(11:33):
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

(11:55):
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 3 (12:07):
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 and 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.
Like it not everyone can do it. Yeah, it's serious business,

(12:29):
and you know, you have to be mentored into it.
You have to learn the tricks and the art of
the trade.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
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.

(12:59):
So the author 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

(13:20):
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 3 (13:39):
Yeah, there's a lot of baseball terminology.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
It sounds like it has nothing to do with basement,
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.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
In the end, the thread state is when you just
lasen up your boots and there it is. It all works.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
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, its 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

(14:20):
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 pressurize it, you prevent the steam from escaping,
you can get it hotter. But if it is at

(14:40):
regular pressure the steam can escape. It will 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 dissolve
in the solution make the water molecules more resistant to evaporation.

(15:05):
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 here's the interesting thing.

(15:26):
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 ratio of

(15:47):
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 the
syrup through heating is that the viscosity of the syrup increases.

(16:11):
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 a drop
of the syrup at each temperature and viscosity state does

(16:33):
when you scoop it out, 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 the soft
ball stage is not thick enough to hold its shape

(16:55):
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 ball with
your hands, but it will be easily deformed and molded

(17:16):
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. And
the authors describe this this point as follows quote. Sugar

(17:39):
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
sugar molecules that has solid like characteristics. Hard candy and

(18:03):
brittles are cooked to three hundred degrees fahrenheit to form
sugar glasses. So really, when you come back to the
idea of monitoring the temperatures the syrup boils, the temperature
monitoring is an indirect way for the candy maker to
measure the remaining water content of the syrup, since the
boiling point goes up as the water content goes down. Now,

(18:27):
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 as this sounds,
cotton candy, this fluffy melt in your mouth mass is

(18:48):
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 3 (18:59):
Eat that well, that feels entirely accurate and as appetizing as.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
It should be. 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 3 (19:17):
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 1 (19:31):
Oh, okay, So you knew that I didn't know this before,
or one of those many things. Maybe that if I knew,
I forgot.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
I didn't know enough about it to ever like cite it,
because it's one of those things that in the back
of my mind and I have to think, well, maybe
I heard that wrong, Maybe they didn't use sugar.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
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 break away glass.
It looks like regular glass when it's solid, looks like
regular glass made out of silica, but it is not.

(20:07):
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

(20:28):
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,
life savers, et cetera. You can kind of see the
glassiness when you think of the texture of these things.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
Well, now I just I really want to look up
some examples from from old movies where someone is like
one hundred percent going through a window pane made out
of sugar glass.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, like you shatter through it and then you get
updust yourself off, pick up the pieces and eat them.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
Possibly children and animals form in to consume the precious
sugar glass.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
Yeah. I think they use sugar glass to make the
methamphetamine on the Breaking Bad set.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
That's right, I do remember reading that.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
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 have melted forms of sugar,

(21:44):
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 and a liquid.

(22:06):
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, do not

(22:31):
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 mass. So an interesting consequence of the different
molecular arrangement of glass is that while it might be

(22:54):
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 pitch drop experiment.

(23:14):
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 ongoing until recently.
I think it might still be going on. It consists

(23:37):
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. I think
the finding was that each drop took roughly eight to
ten years. Oh wow, So this, you know, chunk of

(24:00):
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.
And here at the author's site 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

(24:23):
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
at the top. And to whatever extent that is true,
the popular explanation is they're melting. These windows were made

(24:45):
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 it's just been
over hundreds of years. They're gradually flowing down due 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

(25:06):
and looked this up, and it seems to me it's
not just disputed. It 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
this is by Osgar Gulbeton, John C. Morrow Zaujug, and
olus In Boratav published in the American Journal of the

(25:30):
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
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

(25:52):
for simplicity. Quote. In this work, we investigate the dynamics
of a typical medieval glass composition used in Sminster Abbey,
depending on the thermal history of the glass. The room
temperature viscosity is about sixteen orders of magnitude lower than
found in a previous study of soda lime silicate glass,

(26:12):
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
flow on a human timescale. Using analytical expressions to describe

(26:33):
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
as some viruses. A sheet of paper is roughly one

(26:53):
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 3 (27:05):
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 1 (27:20):
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 in a few hundred years.
But anyway, this observation relates to a very interesting scientific
measure that the authors of this book mention. The hurdles
mention what is called the Deborah number. This is a

(27:43):
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 a cool fact is that

(28:04):
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 of

(28:27):
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 it's not just

(28:51):
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, and seeing outside of time,

(29:12):
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 MND
But interesting nonetheless.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
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 alien 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 1 (29:46):
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 very interesting coincidence.
And you know, if the author actually did have that insight,
that's quite interesting too. But to come back to sugar glass,

(30:08):
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. 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 glass was made

(30:30):
in the morning on an old movie set, the production
would kind of need to hurry along 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 glass window

(30:51):
would gradually soften and then eventually begin to melt and
flow like the mountains before the Lord. Oh wow.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
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 1 (31:12):
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

(31:33):
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 spun sugar. You know, They'll like

(31:57):
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 the 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. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
Yeah, And I have encountered this on some desserts as
a grown up, and yeah, I mean it's it's probably
the best place to utilize this sugar technology for the
adult palette, right because it's 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 1 (32:33):
I'm not knocking it, but I think the appeal of
sponge sugar is more for for looking at than eating.
I don't know how much fun it really is to
eat these little wires of sugar syrup.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
But it's nice to know that you can.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
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 in 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 spun sugar, but taken to an

(33:09):
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

(33:33):
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

(33:55):
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

(34:18):
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 for
further processing. The process is essentially the same as for
making cotton candy, which is just great. Now, of course,

(34:43):
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 moist
that is one of its main appeals. Cotton candy is

(35:04):
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. And the water type packaging is not

(35:24):
just for protection against the like 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 your cotton candy might
survive longer if you make it in the middle of
the desert, but to whatever degree it's humid outside, cotton

(35:46):
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 3 (36:00):
Yeah, heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
In 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 the music that's playing sounds like like

(36:25):
orbital or something. It's very like feel good, upbeat, very upbeat.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
I was surprised by that. I thought it would be
more like, you know, nine is Nails Hurt or something,
you know, for the Johnny Cash cover, Yeah, the Johnny
Cash cover Slow to Cave cotton candy.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
Or 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 3 (36:58):
Yeah, the one that I watched at the end, after
it had shrunken down, they then chopped it up or
cut it up with scissors, and I don't know why.
It's so fascinating. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
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 of

(37:30):
the history of confectionery and other related candies and treats
made in the past.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
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 1 (37:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Unreduced pretty much? 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 take a
little time to appreciate a candy carrot the next time

(38:29):
you're rooting around in the fridge.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
I recall when I was a kid, there were carrots.
I think there were like baby carrots, which are not
actually baby carrots, by the way, they're just different ways
of cutting a carrot.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
Yeah, they're just ugly carrots and carrot leftovers that are
trimmed down into these little nottes.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
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.

(39:06):
They did taste sweeter somehow. They just got to prime
your mind.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
Yeah, I mean that's one of the reasons kids will
actually eat them most of the time.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
But we're not hating on carrots. But the carrots are great.
It's great love carrots.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
But there's a lot of evidence for humanity's deep seated
sweet tooth. The spider caves and what is now Spain
feature depictions of human honey gathering. Is the believe the
oldest known depiction of bees and evidence of human conception
of honey and or the harvesting of honey. I've seen

(39:36):
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 that the depiction.
Humans were going out and harvesting honey, stealing honey from
the insects that created now. As we've discussed in the
show before, the ancient Egyptians made various uses of honey

(40:00):
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 the English
words sugar and candy are both distantly related to their

(40:24):
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, so
I was I've almost I've never been in the market

(40:47):
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, I only had Indian food

(41:07):
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 sweet shops.
Let me know, and I will go out and I

(41:29):
will conduct the experiment. Now, when it comes to European
traditions of sweets, sugar based confections emerged during the Middle
Ages as luxury goods brought in initially via a pothecaris
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 New Guinea, or

(41:51):
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, we're going to

(42:11):
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

(42:32):
John C. Wharton, both Nashville based.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
I believe dentists creating cotton candy.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
Yes, yes, that is a frequently spouted fact that never
stops being hilarious, because again it is just essentially peershe 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,

(42:59):
but 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 or

(43:22):
something similar to it dates back to China's Han dynasty,
which would place it somewhere between two two BCE and
nine CE, or between twenty five and two twenty CE,
depending on where in the Han dynasty you're falling. Okay,
so in this we're talking about long she Tongue or
dragons Beard candy, sometimes abbreviated in Western circles as d

(43:48):
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. 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 interesting looking.

(44:11):
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, such

(44:31):
as Middle Eastern floss halva, which sometimes has the flossy
hairlike 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 like what happens when
you take cotton candy, allow it to sit, and then
you cut it up. So maybe it's a case like

(44:53):
that where you have different versions of what the is
ultimately going on to the tray in the confectionary. But
flasava 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. I found a really

(45:14):
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 1 (45:31):
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 3 (45:47):
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 1 (45:55):
I like wood snake. It's very earthy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
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 series of

(46:22):
textual sensations on the tongue. Some strands dissolve into a
soft mass, while others shatter into foyatine flakes before the
whole thing morphs into a chewy, crunchy jumble of nougat. Foyatine.
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. I've never

(46:45):
had this one either, but you know, I get the idea.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Is the foy part of foyotine? Does that share a
root with like, oh, I don't know how to pronounce
this meal foy or whatever? The thousand layers thing?

Speaker 3 (46:57):
Ooh, that sounds likely is one of those layers crunchy.
I guess it would have to be.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
I think they're I think they're all crunchy, aren't they.
I think 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. Oh, okay, yes,
like im I l L E f e U I l.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
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.

(47:42):
You'll most likely find it in places where traditional Chinese
sweets are sold. I am not sure if I have
a local source for it here in Atlanta or and
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

(48:04):
occasional 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

(48:27):
that's another hurdle 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

(48:47):
that cone or tube into the little cauldron stirred around
and emerge with that big puff of blue sugar.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
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 3 (49:14):
Yes, it is like a spell is 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

(49:35):
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 what we were talking about earlier,
with the temperature precision involved in any of these various

(49:56):
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 gonna hold its form. I'm assuming

(50:20):
the prepackaged sorts that you can buy on the internet.
It's bright, and 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 I was.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Having trouble picturing the full finished product, 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 3 (50:53):
Yeah, yeah, Now getting back to the history of this
sugary treat, Lee does cite a popular legend that Dragon's
Beard candy was an imperial treat dating back to the

(51:13):
Han dynasty, with the emperor himself giving it its name
since the white strands reminded him of dragon's whiskers. You'll
also find this mentioned on the Wikipedia entry for dragons
Beard candy, though the citations there don't really go anywhere active.
As far as I could tell, rumors rumors bound. So
on one hand, I think the dragons whiskers description is perfect.

(51:36):
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 nougat like center with the nuts and the coconut
and all, and then the white fur on the outside.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Shave of Fulcore. Wrap it around, wrap the trimmings around
some nuts. There you go.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
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 top gets to take all the credit and
a lot of legends there, yeah, a lot of legends.

(52:22):
And 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 indication that this
desert item or something much like it, actually dates back
to the year two twenty CE or much earlier. Okay,

(52:44):
So I turned to a couple of other sources on this.
About the history of sweets and sugar in general, it's
pointed out by Tim Richardson in Sweets a history of candy.
Sugarcane 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 and arguably never really did,

(53:07):
at least not on the scale comparable to the robust
tradition of sweets that you find on the Indian subcontinent.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
Yeah, okay, Maltos.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
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 sugar from India and Indo China for anything that
actually called for sugar or some mix of sugar and
these other sweeteners and Richardson rides that this was likely

(53:37):
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,
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

(53:58):
novelty for the court, maybe you just keep importing it, right, yeah, yeah,
And so Richardson says it wasn't till six forty seven
CE that the emperor at the time, and I believe
this would be Tongu Tai Zong sent delegates to India
to learn the secrets of sugar refinery, and from then
on there are various Chinese advancements in the sugar industry.

(54:19):
In twelve eighty, Ridges And points out that Kubla Khan
brought in Egyptian experts 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 1 (54:31):
Yeah. Just did he have cotton candy in the pleasure dome?

Speaker 3 (54:35):
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 1 (54:41):
Though you know what happens when you get it. Wet
goes down through the caverns, measureless, demand less. See nice.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
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 sweet that is,
again syrup boiled to a crack and while malleable, worked
into desired forms and literally pulled by hands and or
hooks to create ropes and threads. She defines this process

(55:12):
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
in some of the places where this would have been conducted,

(55:32):
and also the seeming alchemy of working it into these shapes,
sometimes shapes that themselves might convey special meanings, such as
rings and circles. But also yet, just coming back to
the modern example of cotton candy, watching its creation does
feel like a kind of magic, and we can imagine
easily imagine our ancestors and parts around the world engaging

(55:57):
in a similar fascination.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
Yeah. I mean this takes back to something we talked
about at the beginning of the chemistry section, which is
like the minute attention before modern thermometer is 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 3 (56:20):
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

(56:40):
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 keton halva, also known as piecemagna,

(57:00):
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

(57:22):
before it melts well, keats and hav is smooth or soft.
But of course, pulled sugar in the West also connects
into traditions of pulled tathy the example many listeners may
be familiar with, and you know, generally you have like
some sort of machine with hooks for that. And Dragon's
Beard candy, she writes, is closer to Keithon halva and

(57:42):
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,

(58:07):
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

(58:28):
might have developed later, during at least the seventh century
rather than the third century seee. 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.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
To hear about it totally. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:48):
Also, I mean, 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 tree. There's

(59:11):
a Persian variant of halva that is called Pashmak. There's
an Indian variant. It's called a belief sown pop D.
So you know, there are probably endless variations across time
and space.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
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

(59:47):
survive a 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
way conditions I don't know, like a cold, dry place
or something, it could survive longer.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
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 1 (01:00:21):
Yeah. Yeah, you can't like make it ahead and bring
it to that. You've got to make it there.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
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 going to 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 century origins of modern cotton candy a bit,

(01:00:50):
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 1 (01:01:01):
Can't wait.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
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

(01:01:22):
stvym podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
Huge thanks 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 2 (01:01:47):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

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