Licorice confection is the glossy black chewy sweet made by cooking sugar and a starchy binder with the concentrated extract of licorice root, flavoured on top with anise oil and often sharpened, in its most divisive form, into salty salmiak by the addition of ammonium chloride. Beloved far beyond the licorice root spice it is built on, it is a defining candy of Northern Europe — from Dutch drop and Nordic salt licorice to English liquorice allsorts.