Another pure sugar candy that later became a 19th century penny candy classic, was the rock candy. For confectioners, the rock candy must have been deliciously easy: just add sugar to water and let the crystallization process do what comes naturally -- forming big lumps of sugar crystals.
No mere sweets-lovers treat, rock candy has served many purposes and won much praise. In the early 1800s, for example, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association, a group co-founded by Paul Revere, showcased rock candy at a judged exhibition. Revere started the group in the late eighteenth century to address the problem of runaway apprentices, but soon their mission shifted to publicize the mechanical arts, showcase new products of all sorts, and provide funds for members’ widows and families.
Among its many varied identities, rock candy was a medicine, most admired for soothing sore throats, and part of the fermentation process. Many people used rock candy for both, at the same time. For example, older customers tell me their parents gave them rock candy with a shot of whisky and twist of pure honey when they were sick, a more or less medicinal whisky sour.
No joke: in the late nineteeth century, that combination was advertised to cure consumption and an array of pulmonary infections. One1893 ad, disguised as a heart-felt letter, relays a common message of the time:
Dear Sister,
We were delighted this morning to read in your letter of the sure recovery of Cousin Edith from her recent severe attack of pneumonia. In your last letter, you despaired of her ever leaving her bed. How thankful I am that you yielded to my entreaties and tried Clarke’s Rock Candy Cordials. It is such a pity that you did not doi so before spending so much money in doctors’ bills and medicines of mysterious compound. …Here…we look upon it as a sure cure for all throat and lung problems.
The follow-up “article” adds: “Physicians agree that pure rye whiskey is the most efficient as a tonic, and in combination with pure rock candy is unexcelled for pulmonary troubles.”
The enslaved people of the nineteenth century used rock candy mixed with whiskey as a medicine, as well. In one interview of the Federal Writer’s Project, eighty-year-old Josephine Baccus recalled the medicine she used, saying: “Oh de people never didn’ put much faith to de doctors in dem days. Mostly they would use de herbs in de fields for dey medicine. Dere two herbs I hear talk of. Dey was black snake root and Samson snake root. Say, if a person never had a good appetite de would boil some of dat stuff and mix it wid a little bit of whisky en rock candy and dat would sho give dem a good appetite.”
Outside the sickroom, in the more comfortable setting of the saloon, rock candy rested in whisky bottles, coolly fermenting into a 19th century drink known as “Rock n’ Rye.” You can imagine the drink was, more or less, medicine for the spirit, if not the soul.
But no one told that to the temperance crowd. They disparaged rock candy for its role in drink and tried to stop people from making it. They, along with poor to non-existence sales in saloons whipped into very dry submission, almost succeeded. Dryden and Palmer, a rock candy company that opened in 1880, claims to be the lone survivor of the prohibition-era ruckous.
Still, the rock candy’s greatest role in American history has been as a candy, whether in little, diamond-like bits, in chunks on a string, the old-fashioned way, or dyed and glistening on a stick crafted for cocktails. It’s popularity may have been enough to make a prohibitionist shriek, but the rock candy, and sugar candies overall, were embedded in our culture, at home as a metaphor as all-thing American in newspapers, magazines and stories.
For example, in one story in 1859, a rough and ready adventurer showed his softer side by carrying sugar candy in his saddlebag to “give to the children as I went along” In another piece protesting tax increases a few years later, the author railed that taxes are so bad, children sucking on their sugar-stick are taxed. Even The Liberator, an established Boston-based abolitionist publication (with strong temperance leanings), discussed controversy over a law regarding slavery as “Like a petulant boy whipped just enough to madden him-then give sugar candy to quiet him!”
By the late 1800s, rock candy was holding its own in penny candy stores and confectioneries. One newspaper nicely describes it this way: “Good rock candy is always sought for. Pure rock candy is crystallized sugar. The best is always on a string, and when held up to the light is clear as glass.”
Other uses of sugar were to come along, among them the sugar cube, which took off in the U.S. in the late 1800s. They looked much like a delicately formed sugar cube, perfect for a cup of tea held between the teeth while sipping, as European, turn-of the century immigrants were known to enjoy with a light confection.
No question: the sugar cane, with its dark history and demanding nature, was the Prince of the Sugars.
