by: ccruiserboyy – Content Caboodle

Cotton candy – what would childhood be without it? It’s sticky, sweet airiness brings memories of summer days spent under the circus tent, or meandering through the country fair’s exhibits. Let’s not forget nights sent on the carnival’s Ferris wheel, cotton candy in one hand while the other grips the car’s bar for dear life.

Cotton candy goes back a long way, though, from its appearance at fairs and carnivals. It wasn’t the light, airy, wispy stuff we know today, but spun sugar was all the rage in the days of knights and their fair damsels. Since sugar was rare and expensive, it was a treat reserved only for the very rich, so few folks ever got to experience it. Medieval cooks first spun sugar on forks to create webs and strands to decorate cakes and other sweets. Confectioners would make castles and dragons and fairy tale creatures from it to the delight of the rich and famous of the day. Lords and ladies would marvel over the spun sugar creations, while the lowly servants could only look on with longing.

Later, cookbooks shared the techniques involved in spinning sugar. Most involved swirling a fork into the sticky cooked sugary syrup and drawing it out at just the right time to create the right thickness of sugar thread. These threads were then spun or wound around an upturned bowl. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, spun sugar was again the rage in Europe, with confectioners creating sugar Easter eggs and covering other candies such as chocolate in intricate webs of spun sugar. This was pretty much how cotton candy (called spun sugar) existed until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

No one can really say for sure who “invented” cotton candy as we know it today. Four separate individuals – Thomas Patton, Josef Delarose Lascaux, John C. Wharton, and William Morrison – all had a hand in it, it would seem.

In 1899, John Wharton and William Morrison were granted a patent for a machine that melted and spun the sugar. The pair of Nashville, TN candy makers then got really creative. They introduced their “fairy floss” and its electronic maker at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, otherwise known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904, and the tradition of cotton candy and fairs was born. They sold nearly 69,000 boxes of the stuff at 25 cents each. It was one of the Fair’s most expensive treats, earning the two men over $17,000, nearly half a million dollars in today’s world.

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