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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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sweets
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Sweet titbits of various kinds had been made for centuries with honey before sugar from American plantations became widely available in Europe. The invention of the vacuum pan in England in the early 19C turned sugar refining from a cottage industry to one of mass production. In the same period the modern names of sweets first appeared, though they probably bore little relation to their present-day equivalents.
Toffee (under an earlier name of 'taffy') is first described in 1817 as 'treacle thickened by boiling and made into hard cakes'; modern toffee, by contrast, includes butter. Butterscotch, now a brittle version of toffee for sucking rather than chewing, is first mentioned in 1855 as a 'treacle ball, with an amalgamation of butter in it'.
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Meanwhile the glutinous substances exuded by the acacia (known as gum arabic) or extracted from the root of the marsh mallow were making possible new pleasures such as gum drops, jujubes (named from the shape of the berry of the jujube tree) and marshmallows. The humbug was already a name for toffee flavoured with mint, though not as yet with its characteristic modern stripes. Fudge, a soft toffee whose name oddly shares with humbug the element of deception, came from America in the late 19C. The splendidly named gobstopper – originally a ball changing colour as successive layers are sucked away, but now used of any huge sweet – is a contribution of the 20C. Sweets consisting of hard sugar have been known generally as *rock.
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