Cotton Candy Drops

Cotton Candy – The Story of Fun!

Sugar-based cotton candy demonstrates the history of candy in reverse. It started not as a medicine, like other candies, but as a fun food. Also known candy floss in Great Britain, fairy floss in Australia, la barbe à papa (Papa's beard) in France, and zucchero filato (sugar thread) in Italy, cotton candy was originally called “spun sugar.” The sweet was made in the 15th century by skilled pastry chefs in Venice who took sugary strands of spun sugar and wove them into elaborate designs, using a fork, broom handle and human ingenuity. The result was mainly for the well-to-do.

In 1769, Elizabeth Raffald, author of the The Experienced English Housekeeper offered readers a way "To spin a Silver Web for covering Sweetmeats” and in the 1840s, spun sugar baskets were advertised as an “ornamental confection” for the “nobility and gentry” and a sweet in England.

Cotton candy remained a hand-spun treat until the late 1800s when American candymaker John C. Wharton and his friend dentist, William Morrison, decided to popularize cotton candy by inventing a cotton candy-making machine. They introduced their creation at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. They doled out scoops in a wooden box to an eager public. Each serving cost 25-Cents, which was half the cost of an admission ticket.  All told, Wharton and Morrison  earned more than $17,000 in six months. Since then, cotton candy has found a place on boardwalks, carnivals and other festive events.

Cotton candy has, at last, found a place in the medical world, as well. Researchers at the New York–Presbyterian Hospital and Cornell University recently realized that cotton candy filaments mimic our bodies’ capillary systems. Since then, researchers have been using the cotton candy model to create synthetic flesh that could supply blood to damaged tissue. Or as the website Futurist put it: “Cotton Candy May be the Key to Creating Artificial Organs.”