Get Sleepy: Sleep meditation and stories - The Sleepy History of Candy Hearts (Premium)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, Thomas here. You're listening to a preview episode. You can enjoy the entire story tonight by subscribing to our supporters' feed. There you'll get access to the entire back catalogue, bonus episodes, and more, and it's all completely ad-free. Click the link below to learn more and thank you so so much. Me and the team really appreciate your support. You've probably seen them before. The little hearts with messages like, be mine and call me. You may have received them in a Valentine's Day card, or picked some up in a shop to nibble on at home. Like candy corn at Halloween, they are a holiday treat that's hard to forget, with their fruity flavours, chalky texture and satisfying rattle as they fall out of the box. They trace

Starting point is 00:01:19 their roots back to apothecary lozenges from the 1800s. Medicine and candy, well-being and sugar, these seemingly opposite things have long been intertwined. But looking through the lens of history, it makes sense why. The story of candy stretches back generations and spans the globe. Even something as simple as its name helps us piece together its journey to the present day. Depending on where you live now, you may call sugar confectionery different things, like sweets or lollies.

Starting point is 00:02:16 But in the United States, where our conversation hearts were first made, candy is the name of choice. The word comes from the late middle English verb to sugar candy or to preserve by coating in sugar. That came from the French phrase that meant crystallized sugar, which was borrowed from Arabic and stems from an earliest Sanskrit word meaning fragment. Candy and its predecessors have been tantalizing people's taste buds for thousands of years. Long before modern sugar confectionery took hold, people were coming up with innovative ways to enjoy sumptuous treats.

Starting point is 00:03:17 Depending on when and where you lived, you would have had different types of early sweets. lived, you would have had different types of early sweets. In the Escalona River Valley, in eastern Spain, lie the Aranya caves. They are famous for the prehistoric rock art left by some of our mesolithic or stonage ancestors. One of the scenes depicts a person gathering honey from a beehive. While we don't know the precise age of the picture, some people believe it to be around 8000 years old. If you were living in ancient Egypt or Greece, honey would have been the main source of sweetness before sugarcane moved west. Higher glyphics of beekeepers attest to the fact that Egyptians had learned how to maintain hives to have a continuous source.

Starting point is 00:04:27 They were even using honey to make an early equivalent to marshmallows, around 2000 BCE. However, it was more common to use honey to preserve fruits, nuts, flowers and plants. This candeing process led to the creation of many bite-sized treats, like small cakes made of dates, nuts and seeds that were pressed into molds. These delicacies were so beloved across the Mediterranean that there were even candy shops in ancient Roman cities. The popular offering was dates soaked in honey and stuffed with almonds. On the other side of the world, indigenous people in what is now North America have long

Starting point is 00:05:32 tapped trees for sap and processed it to make syrup. In colder areas, people would leave bark containers filled with sap outside to freeze. That helped separate the water from the sugar. By the first century, pottery allowed for boiling the liquid instead. As we move south, we enter the land of the sugarcane plant, which is native to the tropics.

Get Sleepy: Sleep meditation and stories - The Sleepy History of Candy Hearts (Premium)

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