Candy: what'd they have?

[Pete K]

Virginia's article was excellent! I used it to make up a few CW themed Christmas gifts. Nice job.

[cowboy]

I've done a bit of research and I have found from several sources that jelly beans actually may have appeared in the Civil War. (At least in the Union Army.) Here is a link to a site that talks about it. http://www.candyfavorites.com/shop/j...an-history.php Hope this helps!

[hanktrent]

The problem is, where's a copy of William Schrafft's ad? The factoid is repeated endlessly in modern histories of candies, but nobody seems to be able to produce a copy of the ad itself. Here's Schrafft's listing in an 1864 Boston directory: http://books.google.com/books?id=8IEqAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA320&dq=Schrafft+confect ioner Now we need somebody to find the ad.

And lest one think I'm being too skeptical, one can also find numerous secondary sources that say Union soldiers first learned to eat peanuts when they went south during the Civil War, yet primary sources show that Yankees had been eating peanuts in northern cities, at theaters and on railroads for a generation before the war. So once a wrong statement gets started, it gets passed around repeatedly on modern websites and in modern books as unfootnoted fact, each source looking like it's corroborating the other, but all apparently just copying each other.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[WDL]

I hope this isn’t off topic, but I’m sure that getting store-bought candy was a rare and memorable treat for many growing up during the era, so they would look for alternatives. My pa would often say, “That’s finer than chawed rosin!!” when he liked something. After asking him about it as a child he explained that people would often chew the resin being excreted off certain trees and showed me how (something my kids do to this day). I’ve never done it, but I’ve heard that you can make crystallized sugar out of maple sap. I would bet that has been the base of a lot of backwoods candies.

Although I am not familiar with the specific plant Silas Turnbo mentions in his manuscripts, and although in this case the story is tragic, it does appear the chewing of resin appeared to be popular with people in the Ozarks during the mid-nineteenth century also.

http://thelibrary.org/lochist/turnbo/v25/st710.html

Bill Lynch
Elliot’s Scouts
Missouri Border

[mmescher]

This is Virginia Mescher's spouse chiming in. While she wrote the article, I've been an observer of the discussion of jelly beans for quite a few years.

As Hank mentioned, despite considerable searching, Virginia has never located nor found anyone who has seen the supposed ad for jelly beans from the 1860's. Virginia has pushed the earliest date she can find (using primary resources) back quite a few years from when she first started looking but the earliest date is still no where near the civil war. She has been instrumental in getting many sources to delete their statements about 1860's for jelly beans but she can't get rid of all of them. But she would welcome changing her findings if anyone can produce the ad.

Jelly beans are kind of like references to brick tea being used or "sleep tight" referring to rope springs. We've found those at historic sites on both sides of the Atlantic. We definitely agree with Hank in that once a "fact" gets started, it is hard to stop. Especially if it will produce the "I never knew that" from spectators.

But if you'd like a non-CW example of how authors copied each other, read Euell Gibbons description of his experience with skunk cabbage in Stalking the Healthful Herbs. He was able to find five different authors who gave identical directions for preparation, and, from Gibbons' experience, none of them had ever tried the recipes. They had all just copied from each other.