Rock candy was a pure sugar candy – sugar, sugar and more sugar…for what might very well be millennia. In 19th century, rock candy became a penny candy classic, often colored with yes to give it more pizzaz. For confectioners, 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.
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.
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.
