782 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A PAPER OF CA^^DY. 



By WILLIAM SLOANE KE^;NEDY. 



FULLY to set forth the changes undergone by a cupful of cane- 

 juice during its conversion, first into a cube of while sugar and 

 then into a musk-lozenge or a lemon-drop, wouhl require volumes. 

 And even then one could not give a complete account of candy-mak- 

 ing, for' the reason that each skilled confectioner of hand-made candies* 

 has — like a painter or sculptor — his own incommunicable touch and 

 methods. Yet a few words will suffice to give a general outline of the 

 toothsome art. 



We get our word " candy," not from the Cingalese city of that 

 name, but from the Arabian qimnd, meaning sugar. Now', sugar is. 

 the crystallized juice of one of the gigantic grasses ; candy, therefore, 

 is only boiled grass-juice. As the bee collects from its two and a half 

 million plants the nectar for its pound of honey, so man — a kind of 

 giant bee — extracts from various ))lants their delicious liquors, which 

 he afterward turns by his art into that sweet and shining sand called 

 sugar. It was the ancients who called the crystals of sugar sweet sand 

 and gravel — the Sanskrit word ^co'kdra (our sugar) meaning gravel. 

 Sugar is made in small quantities, it is true, from the palm-tree, 

 the sorghum-cane, beets, California watermelons, potato-starch, and 

 milk ; yet the only kind that is used for the best candies is the clear 

 juice of the Chinese cane, that tall and beautiful purple-striped and 

 straw-colored plant of Malabar, Assam, Otaheite, Louisiana, and the 

 West Indies, which even more than our mondamin, or tasseled maize, 

 deserves the honor of poetical legends and myths. 



The sugar-cane, like the domestic fowl, has taken two thousand 

 years to make the circuit of the globe, always faithfully following 

 man along a certain latitude in his westward migrations. From China 

 or Bengal to Persia, Arabia, Spain, Madeira, Cuba, Louisiana, Cali- 

 fornia—such has been its route, until now, facing westward, it may 

 nod a welcome across the great Pacific to the shores of its old home 

 in China and the East Indies. 



In the making of candy some "raw" or brown sugar is taken (the 

 best coming from the West Indies), but for the bulk of confections 

 only refined sugar is used. Sugar may be clarified in small quantities 

 by the white of eggs ; in the plantation sugar-houses it is refined by 

 lime or lime-water ; but, in the great refineries, bone-black or animal 

 charcoal is now used for this purpose, bullock's blood being discarded. 

 When blood was used, its coagulation collected the impurities, which 

 were then skimmed off, together with the coagulated blood. The rea- 

 son of the immense height to which these refineries are built is that 

 the liquid sugar, having once been raised to the highest story, may, in 



