Hard Candy
Confection
Top 10 pairings
Hard candy — boiled sweets, candy canes, humbugs, drops and rock — is the basic glassy-sugar confection: a syrup of sugar and glucose boiled to the hard-crack stage, flavoured and coloured, then cooled to an amorphous, transparent glass that shatters and slowly dissolves in the mouth. Peppermint is its classic flavour, in striped canes, pillow-shaped humbugs and clear mints, though the class runs to fruit drops, barley sugar, aniseed balls and sticks of seaside rock.
Picking a good onedrag
Glassy, dry, snapping cleanTacky, clouded, welded
Hard, flavour quietingEveryday bestStill a clean sweet. Crush it to shards over ice cream, or melt pieces into the cut-outs of biscuits, where it sets clear again as glass.
Hold it to the lightStill clear at the core, the shine gone flat and the edges and facets beginning to round
Snap or press a pieceStill cracks, a duller click, and the surface takes a faint print from a warm thumb
Unwrap and smellThe flavour still reads plainly but quietly, sitting closer to the plain sugar behind it
The wrapper and the jarA sealed tin or shop jar, the pieces still moving freely and separately against each other