Candy canes, the famous sugar canes: the sweet created to keep children quiet

White and red candy canes are a clever thing and there is no other way to describe the reasons that led to their birth. It is a very simple sweet, an elongated candy in the shape of stick, usually two-tone, traditionally cinnamon-flavored although today there are plenty of variations. Originally they were simple sticks, straight, without any shape, but already by the eighteenth century their appearance was very reminiscent of the current one.

The birth of sugar canes, also known as candy canes, is closely linked to a German legend who sees these sweets as the best way to appease children.

The legend that gave birth to candy canes
Popular folklore offers us a very specific date on a silver platter: candy canes came into the world in Christmas 1670 due to the intolerance of the choir director of St. Peter und Maria, the enchanting Cologne Cathedral. The man, in an attempt to remedy the fuss that the children made in church during religious celebrations, asked a producer friend to during the celebration.not to disturb, so as to keep them busy and eat during mass: candy canes that the little ones could brilliant and simple something to help him. The idea was candied sweets

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There was a great commotion following this choice because many faithful rebelled: how could it be considered Christian, < a i=3>offering sweetsand not paying attention to the word of the Lord? The choir director,slyly, invented an explanation from scratch: not being able to tell the children’s parents that they were annoying to say the least, he said that the stick shape was made to remind the little ones of the shepherds’ visit to the cave where Baby Jesus was born and that the white color of the candy cane was supposed to representinnocence of the Savior’s life.the purity and

Over time the legend was enriched, especially with the arrival of the sticks as we know them today (therefore with the ” ;rounded head), and the conquest of the American market. The hesitations regarding these sweets have always been present, but already in the nineteenth century sugar canes had abandoned the churches and ended up in grocery stores. In the United States the meanings linked to candy cane have become multiple:

one of the main ingredients of industrial sticks is caramel, which represents solidity of faith in Jesus;
another fundamental ingredient of American candy cane is mint, a vegetable that recalls the flavor of #39;hyssop, an aromatic plant very present in the Old Testament, used for the purpose of purification;
the shape of the stick, if upside down, resembles the “J”, initial of the name “Jesus”;
white represents purity;
the red recalls the blood that Jesus shed to redeem men from sin;
the three thin strips that make up the stick represent, finally, the frustrated women that Jesus receives from the soldiers.
The true story of Christmas candy canes
Everything told so far is actually a legend, with a kernel of truth a> throughout Europe.they were already widespread in the 16th century has never had objective confirmation. There is only one truth: it is certainly not the moment in which candy canes appeared for the first time but it is proven that Cologne Cathedral and that there are many allegorical meanings linked to these sweets, but the history of. It is true that candy canes have a German origin

The first official documentation, however, dates back only to 1837 , the year in which the panelists of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association in Boston displayed the first boxes of sugar canes< /span>.one of America’s best-selling sweets with candy canes making candy canes decorate their trees in “The Complete Confectioner, Pastry-Cook, and Baker”, a cookbook, but only three years later there was an explosion of this trend in the United States. In 1847, a German-Swedish emigrant named August Imgard hung candy canes on his Christmas tree, sending the resulting American Christmas card. . All the friends and relatives loved the idea and started to and they weren’t very successful: too simple and even ugly (they were still just sticks of white sugar). Another very important date is 1844 because the first recipe appearsThey didn’t go well at all in one of the first culinary competitions we remember.

Despite the Americans’ proverbial business acumen, for quite a while For years no one has thought to industrialize the process and so these sweets were made by hand. The wake-up call to the industry came after World War I thanks to two pastry chefs from Chicago, the Bunte Brothers , who filed the first patents for machines designed for the production of candy canes. Practically at the same time, the figure of Robert McCormack burst onto the scene in Albany, Georgia: the man had a candy company, the Famous Candy Company, which became Bobs Candies. In a very short time it became the world leader in the production of candy canes.< /span>

The factory began with manual processing which led to a loss of 20% of the product: bending the sticks to create the curved shape was a real feat and they often broke. Gregory Harding Keller, at the time a seminary student in Rome, came to McCorgmack’s rescue. , who in the Eternal City found a sort of “grinder contraption” able to bend sugar without breaking it. Every summer he returned to America, trying to improve this tiny Italian invention until, in 1952, Keller finally moved to Arkansas. After years of refinement he patented the Keller Machine , a machine capable of automating the process of twisting soft candies into spiral strips and cutting them into lengths precise. The Keller Machine revolutionized business and created a new industry: the commercial production of candy canes.