Hand-Pulled Candy Sticks

You know those old-timey shops with faux wicker baskets, faux 19th century aprons, and old time-esq candles with a really, really sweet smell. There, you will find the “old-time” candy sticks, brightly colored, hard-textured and as industrial as a sledgehammer but with greater appeal to kids.

The original stick was made of sugar, cream of tartar, and flavoring. They were porous, with enough air space for young revelers at festivals, fairs and seaside resorts to use them as a straw in lemonade or simply in halved lemons. You can still find original-ish versions in shops today, although most are made by machines, not by hand.

Scientific American magazine described the components
of making a sugar stick in an interesting article published in 1837:

“The ordinary hard stick candy is an example of the amorphous condition produced in sugar by working it in a plastic state. In order to aid in this condition of producing sugar, a little cream of tartar is added which has the effect to prevent crystallization. The sugar, while in a plastic mass is pulled, a portion of it being taken in the hands of the workman, is drawn out partially by the hands. The middle of the mass is thrown over a hook provided for the purpose and the ends being still grasped the workman steps backwards thus drawing the mass into a sort of rope. This rope is doubled and the process repeated until the proper consistency is obtained when the sugar is divided into sticks and allowed to be cool and hard.”

One confectioner described the process today goes something like this: “Stripes are made by laying upon a plastic roll of sugar while still hot colored bars of cold sugar which becoming soft when in contact with the hot
sugar, are drawn out with it to the proper size.     
As for the color? While many people are concerned with anything that starts with letters such as “FDA” and numbers, such as “Red #2” and pine for the good old days of fresh, healthy foods, they shouldn’t bother. Things are much better. Here’s proof, from Scientific American: “The use of poisonous colors is not so frequent as formally. Red and yellow candies are very rarely colored with poisonous matter. The greens are most liable to be poisonous, especially the light shade called apple green which sometimes consist of atsenit eof cooper, a very poisonous substance.”