ISSUE 53-SWEETS & CANDIES-Part 2: Gum Drops
The Rise of the Gum Drop
When you look at histories of confectionery there is this invariable message that the origins of gum drops are shrouded in mystery. But maybe that just means the people who are interested in candy history at not very astute thinkers. There is little debate about what a gum drop is: a thimble shaped colored and fruit flavored firm gel, sometimes coated with crystalized sugar. Why it is called a GUM drop can be readily seen when we examine the formula used by early 20 century commercial candy makers in creating it.
LEMON GUM DROPS
Twenty pounds of Gum Arabic
Two gallons of water
Two pounds of glucose
Twenty pounds of white A sugar
Two quarts of water
One teaspoonful of cream of tartar.
Cook to three hundred degrees.
One tablespoonful of oil of lemon.
Charles C. Huling, Revised American Candy Maker (Philadelphia, 1906), 111.
Gum Arabic, the exudation of the Acacia Tree, was a favorite ingredient of the early modern apothecary. Its fibrous element was a gelatinizer, a stabilizer, and an emulsifier. It is found advertised in American newspapers as early as the 1730s, and was used then in painting, and medicine throughout British America. The medical uses are most significant for our purposes, because Gum Arabic was used as the matrix for drugs in making pills. Since most drugs tended to be bitter, pharmacists often dulcified the pills, adding a sweetener and a powerful flavor, such as mint or orange or lemon.
A lemon drop was a pill without the active drug element. Now about the DROPS. There was a category of candy that became quite popular in the Atlantic world. It consisted in sugar cooked until melted to which mint flavor, or rose flavoring, or lemon flavoring was add and then cooled on a marble slab into mini-pools of sweetness. Mint and Rose were the early favorite flavors in the 1780s. Others followed. When considered abstractly the flavored sugar drops were ½ of a classic 18th century dulcified pill. Adding gum Arabic to the mix inhibited the full crystallization of the sugar and the creation of a semi-soft texture,a gum like matrix with enough structure to be shaped.
The earliest American citation of gum drops as a confection being sold by a store as a retail confection is in Baltimore in December 18, 1833 at Charles Jordan’s Confectionery and Distillery on 100 Baltimore Street.
The association of gum drops with medicine was maintained by numbers of early advertisements recommending their use as a cough drop.
In the post-Civil War period the “A.B. gum drop” was put on the market as a cheap form of gum drop, with various starches replacing the sugar and Gum Arabic. These were sold without the coating of crystalized sugar and had more pronounced fruit flavoring. They were sold in barrel lots at 7.5 cents per pound. There are many excellent descriptions of confectioners making gum drops on a commercial scale in the wake of the Civil War. This from The Farmer’s Cabinet (October 22, 1868).