![]() ![]() ![]() By the early 20th century, over 90 percent of the world’s peppermint and spearmint oils came from Michigan.(See “ A Taste of the Season: The Art and Science of Peppermint.”)Īs elusive as the peppermint-sugar connection and the origin of the candy cane hook are the cane’s red-and-white stripes. It first took hold in upstate New York, and gradually spread west to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. In the late 18th century, for example, when castor oil became a popular tonic, it was often served up to unhappy recipients floating on peppermint water.Ĭommercial production of peppermint for peppermint oil-the “essence” toted westward by Lewis and Clark-seems to have begun in the mid-18th century in England and in the early 19th century in the United States. ![]() Peppermint’s distinctive cooling taste, described by one writer as a cross between pepper and chlorophyll, was also traditionally used to disguise the taste of other, more awful-tasting drugs. Altoids-now America’s top-selling mints-were invented by Smith Kendon of London in 1781. Lewis and Clark, for their epic 1804-6 expedition to the Pacific, packed “essence of peppermint” in their medical kit. Seventeenth-century herbalists routinely recommend mint for upset stomachs and frayed nerves and the early European colonists, who doubtless suffered from both, brought mint with them to America. He also adds that mint juice is “good for the voice when a person is about to engage in a contest of eloquence,” and mentions that it’s also nice in sauces. Mint, according to Pliny, was good for gastrointestinal ailments, liver disease, ulcers, hiccups, and snakebite. Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, in his 37-volume Natural History written in the first century CE, lists 41 medicinal uses for mint (probably both spearmint and peppermint often early authors lumped the two together). Peppermint has a long history as a cure for digestive upsets, dating back to ancient Egypt where it’s mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus (1550 BCE) as a remedy for stomach pains. While Luther’s starry walk may be apocryphal, enthusiasm for decorating trees seems to have run high, since the town of Ammerschweier in Alsace felt compelled to pass a restrictive ordinance targeted at those with a tendency to go overboard, decreeing that no person “shall have for Christmas more than one bush of more than eight shoe lengths.” The early trees were decorated with fruit, nuts, candies, cookies, and paper cones, and it does seem plausible that a hook might have been added to candy sticks around that time as a tree-hanging convenience.īut what about the candy cane’s iconic flavor? No one knows who first came us with the idea of combining peppermint with sugar to make peppermint candy. Folklore often gives credit for the Christmas tree to Martin Luther who, while walking home one winter night, supposedly admired stars winking through the branches of an evergreen, and so brought a tiny tree home to his family and decorated it with candles. An alternative story holds that the hook was invented simply to make candy sticks easier to hang on Christmas trees.īy the 16th century, European Christians had adopted the tradition of decorating trees in their homes during the Christmas season. The stick got its cane-like hook, one unsubstantiated story claims, when a 17th-century choirmaster at Germany’s Cologne Cathedral convinced a local candy maker to bend sugar sticks into the shape of shepherd’s crooks, to amuse bored and restless children during Christmas mass. The earliest proto-candy-cane was most likely a plain white sugar stick of the sort used by frazzled parents of the 1600s as pacifiers for fussy babies. What we do have are a lot of guesses, gossip, and rumors. We don’t know who invented them or why, or when and where they first got their red-and-white stripes. Candy canes are now as much a feature of Christmas as carols, evergreen trees, and mistletoe, but we don’t know much about them. ![]()
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