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    Unravelling cotton candy's sweet origins: Exploring the 120-year journey of the pink fluff

    Synopsis

    Around 1897, inventor William Morrison and a confectioner created a machine to make fine-spun sugar.

    Cotton CandyiStock
    Cotton Candy
    Tamil Nadu’s cotton candy ban may spread to other states, like Karnataka and Telangana. The problem is not the spun sugar itself, but a potentially harmful dye that gives it its vivid pink colour. It is such a popular street treat that it’s become common to see vendors carrying poles dangling with packets of pink fluff.

    Making and selling cotton candy in packets has become so widespread that it’s less common to see it being made. This used to be a fixture at all fairs and tourist centres, with a large drum in which coloured sugar was melted and centrifugally spun into thin strands. The vendor gathered a sugary cloud on a stick, which melted in your mouth, while also coating your hands, clothes and everything it touched.

    Making cotton candy requires the spinning drum. So, it is always an outside food, bought in places of public entertainment which parents tend to view with suspicion. Kids love cotton candy, but adults tend to be dubious, which might explain the readiness to ban it. And they might be even more dubious if they knew it was first popularised by a dentist.

    This was 120 years ago, at the St Louis World’s Fair, 1904. Pâtissiers had been spinning sugar strands for a while, but it was only around 1897 when William Morrison, a dentist and part-time inventor based in Nashville, Tennessee, teamed up with confectioner John C Wharton to create a machine to make fine-spun sugar. They received a patent in 1899, but decided to wait till the world fair to really go public.

    The St Louis World Fair was created to commemorate the centenary of the Louisiana Purchase, a vast tract of land nominally claimed by France. The US’s purchase of it in 1803-04 transformed a confederation clustered around the eastern edge of the continent into a dominant power. The lands would become USA’s Midwest, large tracts of land that could be farmed to produce vast amounts of grain and meat.

    The 1904 fair announced the arrival of a country that had, superficially at least, overcome a devastating Civil War and was now placed to use the agricultural power of the Midwest to trade food with the world. Unlike similar fairs in London and Paris, the US was not showcasing colonial empires. Despite very real territorial ambitions, it promoted itself as an equal partner with the rest of the world, inviting countries around the world, including China, Japan and India, to send exhibits.

    India sent tea and a temple. The temple was a wooden carved replica of a Jain temple, which vanished after the fair till it was, improbably, discovered in a Las Vegas casino in the 1980s, billed as the ‘Gateway to Luck’. (It is now at the Jain Centre of Southern California). An Indian tea centre was set up under Richard Blechynden, who was part of a family with deep links to India — his great-grandfather’s Indian diaries have recently been published and another family member was the long-term secretary of the Agri-Horticultural Society, which introduced many food crops into India.

    Blechynden found it hard selling tea in the heat of St Louis’s summer, so hit upon the idea of sweetening it and serving it on ice. Iced tea was definitely being made before, but Blechynden is credited with popularising it at the World Fair. Another product popularised at the fair is said to have come about when Ernest Hamwi, a waffleseller, rolled one into a cone and placed a scoop of ice-cream on top. Cotton candy was just one more product made famous at the fair.

    But the real product being sold was electricity. The fair celebrated this new source of power in all its forms, including electric machines for spinning candy and making ice. The fair signalled the start of an era of American dominance of power and produce, and perhaps we are still trying to get used to that.

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