The Invention of Cotton Candy, Part 1

who long ago disappeared into the nether regions. And I remember that eight year old boy who had tasted the sweetness of air which still clings to my mouth and disappears when I breathe.

interplay of strength and permanence. On one hand, with the imagery of the cables on the bridge and the kind of tenacity of memory, but then on the other hand, about ephemerality, like the fleetingness of human life and the inherent nothing substance of cotton candy, which somehow feels after it's eaten like it never existed, like it was never a substance to begin with, and yet it persists as a taste that clings to the mouth, as Hirsch says,

clings to the mouth and disappears when you breathe kind of implying that there are some things that are ephemeral and they disappear when we live. But anyway, to move on to the subject, Yes, we're going to be talking

about cotton candy aka candy floss aka fairy flass. Now, Rob, I don't know if you think along the same lines as me here, but these alternate terms for cotton candy, which I have encountered before, always struck me as incredibly disgusting because, like a lot of American English speakers my age, I assume the only time I ever used the word floss is when referring to dental floss, and in fact, for most of my life, I just assumed that the dental application was the primary or even only meaning of

the word floss is dental flaws.

candy hair, which also doesn't sound very good. Maybe it's just cultural familiarity because you also don't eat cotton, But for some reason, to me, cotton candy is about as appetizing as the terms for this substance get.

melts in your mouth immediately. And of course I'm always reminded of that video that we discussed in past episodes about raccoons, where raccoon has given cotton candy and the raccoon lowers it into the water as they are wont to do, and then the raccoon is seemingly just horrified when it melts away and just like instantly vanishes.

cotton candy with fairs and carnivals. Why is it something you get at the amusement park or the county Fair and other candies are not something like I mean, I guess you can get you some sweet tarts at the County Fair, but it's a particular kind of event associated candy unlike many others.

all these other additional aspects. Like I think of cotton candy, which I have not had since I was a child for obvious reasons, it makes me think of stickiness out in public away from a place to wash your hands. It makes me think of like sweating and eating cotton candy at the same time. Like there's a certain grunginess to the experience that is not, you know, altogether, you know,

unattractive to the childhood brain. But but you know, yeah, it is closely associated with like an outdoor, dizzy environment.

Like it's one of those things as a parent when you're as if you can get cotton candy, you might be inclined to sort of steer them towards something else.

like an assault of sweetness. I would imagine. Yeah, I feel like there's also concerning fars, there's the not quite overt connection to be made between cotton candy and clown hair. You know, clowns have bright colored hair that is often

in big poofy arrays that may resemble cotton candy. Uh huh yeah yeah, And for me too, I'm also reminded of Killer Clowns from Outer Space, the horror movie from nineteen eighty eight, in which you have an array of wonderfully grotesque and colorful clowns I think some of the best horror movie clowns ever. And there are some key sequences where we find out that they use cotton candy to spin cocoons around their human victims.

What is this strange blue sugar air that is summoned out of some sort of a technological vat when a man sticks to it like a paper cone or conical array into it like a pit.

of Wisconsin. Now, to really understand what's going on here, before we get into the direct how and why of cotton candy, we should do a brief explainer on the science of heating sugar syrup, which is a mixture of sugar and water. The precise heating of sugar syrup is actually a big part of the candy making process, and the authors of this book talk about a fact that I thought was quite wild. They discuss how before candy

thermometers were in common, use candy thermometer. If you've never seen it before, you know, it's just a type of thermometer with a certain temperature range. You pin it to the side of a pot or whatever vessel you're heating your sugar syrup in, and it has sort of markers on it that will let you know different stages of the sugar syrup heating process. And I'll explain more about

that in a minute. But apparently, in the old school days, the old days, a lot of candy makers would test the temperature of their boiling syrup by feel literally with their fingers. Please do not try this yourself. This could lead to horrible, horrible burns. Like the only thing worse than touching a boiling hot liquid is touching a hot liquid that sticks to your skin. Oh apparently, and please don't get any ideas. I'm just gonna describe the trick here.

But you don't know how to do it. Okay, you don't know how to do it right, so don't try this at home. Apparently the trick was the old candy maker would dip their fingers into cold water first and then quickly dip them in the hot sugar syrup and then back into the cold water again. Please do not try this. Apparently there's kind of an art to doing it right, and even experienced candy makers would end up

with serious injuries and scars. But the idea is that the feel of the boiling syrup, along with the visual appearance, would help them know what temperature the syrup had reached.

You have to learn the tricks and the art of the trade.

making thermometers, but they mentioned the following stages. Okay, there is the thread state and these I'm not going to give the temperatures for everything, but it starts with the thread state at two hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit or one hundred and ten celsius. And the final state I'm going to mention, is it about three hundred and five

degrees fahrenheit or one hundred and fifty two celsius. The states are thread state, then you get soft ball state, firm ball state, then hardball, soft crack, and hard crack. Aren't these enticing to your mind? Don't you want to know what all of these mean?

degrees celsius. You keep applying heat to the pot and it will never get any hotter as long as it can boil off. I mean, if you use a pressure cooker and you pressurize it, you prevent the steam from escaping, you can get it hotter. But if it is at regular pressure the steam can escape. It will just keep boiling at the boiling point, never get any hotter until all the water has evaporated. However, when you add a significant amount of sugar to the water, you actually increase

the boiling point of the solution. The sugar molecules dissolve in the solution make the water molecules more resistant to evaporation. When you've got sugar in the water, it's harder for those water molecules at the surface of the pot of water to make the phase transition into steam and boil off. So it takes more energy to boil the solution, which means the boiling point goes up. Mix in sugar, it's got a higher boiling point. But here's the interesting thing.

The amount of energy it takes to evaporate water from the solution is proportional to the sugar content. So the more sugar is in the solution relative to the amount of water, the higher the boiling point. So as you heat the sugar syrup to its boiling point, water evaporates, it does boil off, and this increases the ratio of sugar to water in the syrup and thus increases the

boiling point even further. And it will do this until eventually all of the water is evaporated or almost all of the water is gone, and at some point the sugar will just burn beyond increasing the boiling point. Another consequence of increasing the sugar to water ratio of the syrup through heating is that the viscosity of the syrup increases.

In other words, it becomes thicker. And this increase in viscosity is what candy makers are talking about with phrases like soft ball, hard ball, soft crack, and so forth. So these terms mostly describes something about what a drop of the syrup at each temperature and viscosity state does when you scoop it out, you PLoP it into a

bowl of cold water. So, for example, at the soft ball state, you drop a bit of the syrup into cold water, and first it forms little threads, and you can gather these up and mold them into a soft mass with your fingers. But the syrup at the soft ball stage is not thick enough to hold its shape and it will slowly collapse and flow under the force of gravity alone. So imagine the texture of like the soft caramel filling in a chocolate truffle. And so from here we go up the chain. You go to the

firm ball state. This means you can make it into a ball. You can form it into a ball with your hands, but it will be easily deformed and molded with the fingers. It'll basically hold its shape against gravity. At the hard ball stage, the cooled syrup will firmly retain its shape. The authors use saltwater taffy as an example of this texture. And after the ball stages, you've got the crack stages, soft crack and hard crack. And

the authors describe this this point as follows quote. Sugar syrup cooked to three hundred degrees fahrenheit and cooled quickly in cold water forms hard brittle threads that crack when you snap them. Thus the hard cracked state. In fact, sugar cooked to this temperature and cooled quickly to room temperature turns into a sugar glass and amorphous matrix of sugar molecules that has solid like characteristics. Hard candy and brittles are cooked to three hundred degrees fahrenheit to form

sugar glasses. So really, when you come back to the idea of monitoring the temperatures the syrup boils, the temperature monitoring is an indirect way for the candy maker to measure the remaining water content of the syrup, since the

boiling point goes up as the water content goes down. Now, regarding this concept of sugar glass from the quote I read, there's actually another chapter in the book on this idea, which is both interesting on its own and relevant to the subject of cotton candy, because, as counterintuitive as this sounds, cotton candy, this fluffy melt in your mouth mass is a type of sugar glass, in fact, is the authors describe it. They say, really, cotton candy should be thought

of as a type of fiberglass. It's a fiberglass that you can.

It's some kind of clear, brittle material that shatters on impact, but it doesn't form the hard, sharp edges that would cut you like regular window glass does. These days, it's often made out of some kind of plastic resin, but in older movies it was usually made out of sugar. And by the way, sugar glass is not just a term used in like the breakaway glass thing. I mean a lot of the candies people eat are essentially a form of sugar glass modified sugar glass, like lollipops, jolly ranchers,

life savers, et cetera. You can kind of see the glassiness when you think of the texture of these things.

arrangements solid sugar. Of course, you have melted forms of sugar, but solid sugar is either going to be crystalline sugar like rock candy or sugar glass, and that would include both jolly ranchers and breakaway glass on movie sets and cotton candy. Glasses are interesting from a physics and chemistry perspective because they combine properties of a solid and a liquid. So they seem solid enough when you look at them and touch them, but they actually behave in some ways

like a liquid. So crystalline solids have these regular patterns into which the molecules are arranged. If you look at them with a you know, at the molecular level, you will see these like long repeating chains. It's a very structurally uniform. Glasses, which are called amorphous solids, do not show these regular patterns, at least not on the large scale. They might have small patterns in little local areas of molecules,

but they're largely more jumbled up. The molecules are all kind of just mixed together and kind of frozen in a chaotic mass. So an interesting consequence of the different molecular arrangement of glass is that while it might be perfectly solid on a normal human timeline, glasses do tend to flow in a way that crystalline solids do not.

And here in the book the author's given illustration of this by making reference to something we've talked about on the show before, the University of Queensland pitch drop experiment. I was trying to remember when this came up. I know it won an Igno Bell Prize, so may have been in that context, or it may have been some other time. We were discussing rheology, which is the scientific

study of how matter flows. The short version is this experiment which began in the nineteen twenties and I think is still ongoing, or at least was ongoing until recently. I think it might still be going on. It consists of leaving a mass of tar pitch which is so thick it really seems like a solid, sitting that down in a funnel, and then subjecting it to atmospheric conditions, and measuring how long it takes for part of it

to drip out the bottom of the funnel. I think the finding was that each drop took roughly eight to ten years. Oh wow, So this, you know, chunk of tar looks totally solid to us, But in regular atmospheric conditions it is flowing. It's just flowing very slowly. And other glasses are like that, except flowing even more slowly. And here at the author's site a now debunked belief.

So what I'm about to say is a myth. Do not take this away as genuine knowledge, but a now debunked belief about stained glass windows in some medieval cathedrals. This was based on the observation or the observation people thought they had made that some of these window panes appear to be thicker at the base than they are at the top. And to whatever extent that is true,

the popular explanation is they're melting. These windows were made hundreds of years ago, and you know installed, I don't know. So you imagine a cathedrals built in the twelve hundreds, and these windows are put in and it's just been over hundreds of years. They're gradually flowing down due to the force of gravity, and so the bases of them are getting thicker than the top. And now the authors note that this claim is disputed by experts. I went and looked this up, and it seems to me it's

not just disputed. It from what I can tell, it is thoroughly disproven. For example, I found the following paper. This is called Viscous Flow of Medieval Cathedral Glass, and this is by Osgar Gulbeton, John C. Morrow Zaujug, and olus In Boratav published in the American Journal of the

American Ceramic Society twenty eighteen. Their abstract begins by describing the urban legend about the flowing windows, and then notes that quote advances in glass transition theory and experimental characterization techniques unquote will allow this idea to be tested more directly than it ever has before. And then from here I'm going to read from the abstract with some abridgments

for simplicity. Quote. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of a typical medieval glass composition used in Sminster Abbey, depending on the thermal history of the glass. The room temperature viscosity is about sixteen orders of magnitude lower than found in a previous study of soda lime silicate glass, which is a common type of glass used in making windows.

But the authors go on later quote despite this significantly lower value of the room temperature viscosity, the viscosity of the glass is much too high to observe measurable viscous flow on a human timescale. Using analytical expressions to describe the glass flow over a wall, we calculate a maximum flow of about one nanometer over a billion years. So just for context, a nanometer is one one billionth of a meter, or like you know, two percent as wide

as some viruses. A sheet of paper is roughly one hundred thousand nanometers thick, so if they are flowing like that, it would not be enough for us to measure that. This would not explain any measurable thickness difference at the bottom of the glass.

One is how quickly a fluid mass flows, or how quickly it deforms under pressure, versus how long you are able to observe it. And a cool fact is that the Deborah number gets its name from a passage in the Hebrew Bible. It's in the Book of Judges chapter five, which is telling of a song by the prophet Deborah in which she's prophesying a great destruction to come, and

she says, this is the King James version. Lord, when thou wentest out of sear, when thou marchest out of the field of edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped. The clouds also dropped water. The mountains melted from before the Lord. And sometimes that line about the mountains melting before the Lord is expressed as the mountains flowed before the Lord. Some theologians I think this is a later interpretation.

Some theologians explain this by saying that it's not just a simple expression of power i e. God can melt mountains, but an expression of God's dominion over time, meaning like he lives and sees forever, he is eternal, so to him, mountains which are completely solid throughout the lifetime of a human, you know, not a noticeable change in a few decades to God's point of view, and seeing outside of time, they just flow like soft caramel, which would be somewhat

scientifically accurate. I am not convinced that's what the author of this passage actually had in mind. It sounds to me more like a classical expression of power and MND But interesting nonetheless.

that's quite interesting too. But to come back to sugar glass, of course, sugar glass is much keener on flowing than the soda lime silicon glass that you would be used in a stained glass window in a cathedral. Sugar glass will flow more easily, and this leads to apparently funny

considerations in older movie making. So the authors talk about how if a prop window of sugar glass was made in the morning on an old movie set, the production would kind of need to hurry along and shoot the window smashing scene soon because the window wouldn't last forever. As you might guess if you've ever left Jolly Ranchers out in a hot car under the stress of heat and moisture conditions in the air, the sugar glass window would gradually soften and then eventually begin to melt and

flow like the mountains before the Lord. Oh wow.

you make sugar glass. You take it up to pass three hundred degrees fahrenheit, and then you pour that syrup over something like a fork or a wisk, which allows it to drip and stretch out and form these long, thin strands as it cools and hardens. So sometimes people I've seen this on like cooking shows before, people will

make shapes out of spun sugar. You know, They'll like pour the threads over the back of a bowl or something like that and then peel it off, and then you will have this interesting wiry dome of the sugar threads. To me, sponge sugar has always kind of looked like a thin wire. It's kind of shiny, so it has that metallic look to it. Yeah.

almost spiritual extreme of wispiness. It's usually made with a special machine which includes a rapidly rotating disc or tray called a spinner, and then in the middle of that tray there's a heating element. So you pour the flavored sugar into the middle of the spinner with the heating element. It gets melted by the heating element, and then this

in the liquid form. As the thing spins, it leaks out of tiny holes in the outside wall of its containers spinning container, and these tiny streams of melted sugar make contact with the cold, unheated air outside the spinner, then quickly solidify into sugar glass, but microscopic hair like strands of sugar glass. Then the operator collects all of these fibers from a larger kind of container or tray, collects them into a cone or onto a stick, and

here's your cotton candy. Now here's where we come back to the comparison to fiberglass. The haartles in the book right quote. Fiberglass, first commercialized by the Owen Corning Fiberglass Corporation in nineteen thirty eight, is made by extruding molten silica glass through small holes to make thin strands or fibers of glass. As the strands exit the extruder, they cool into the solid glassy state and are collected for further processing. The process is essentially the same as for

making cotton candy, which is just great. Now, of course, there are major differences due to the chemical differences between silica based glass and sugar glass. Regular fiberglass made out of glass glass. Silica glass is used as an insulation material in construction. It's quite resistant to heat and moist that is one of its main appeals. Cotton candy is

exactly the opposite. Contact with heat or moisture will destroy the structure of cotton candy, So once it's made, it's got a short shelf life, or you've got to like seal it off against the atmosphere basically like, yeah, you need to eat it right away or put it inside water type packaging. And the water type packaging is not just for protection against the like raccoon washing full dunk scenario.

Sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it will absorb water from the air around it, so you know, usually there's some water content in the air. I guess your cotton candy might survive longer if you make it in the middle of the desert, but to whatever degree it's humid outside, cotton candy will quickly go from being fluffy and delightful to kind of like collapsing down and becoming a sticky, semi

melted mess. And then of course if you actually like splash water on it or it gets rained on, that's just the end of it.

Humans were going out and harvesting honey, stealing honey from

the insects that created now. As we've discussed in the show before, the ancient Egyptians made various uses of honey medicinal the magical, but they also appreciated it for its sweetness and proper sugar based confections go back at least to two thousand BCE in India according to Sanskrit texts, though I've also seen the date of refined sugar in India going back to six thousand BCE, and the English words sugar and candy are both distantly related to their

original Sanskrit terms. As such, there is of course a very deep rooted sweets culture in India, and I don't have a lot of expertise in it, but I have been to Indian sweet shops before as an adult, so I was I've almost I've never been in the market for the sweets they have. I'm usually buying something like Somosa's or something. But as such, there is of course a robust world of Indian sweets out there. It's a very deep sweet culture, one that I sadly did not

have access to as a child. When I would have most appreciated all of this, I only had Indian food basically once I was at least in college, I think. So when I go into Indian sweet shops, I'm impressed by all the colors and shapes, but I just don't have the appetite for it. I don't know if there are any listeners out there who have definite recommendations about what I should try at the local Indian sweet shops. Let me know, and I will go out and I

will conduct the experiment. Now, when it comes to European traditions of sweets, sugar based confections emerged during the Middle Ages as luxury goods brought in initially via a pothecaris in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world, as we've been discussing places where sugarcane grew naturally, talking about South Asia, Southeast Asia, and potentially New Guinea, or of course lands adjacent to those lands, places where candy

culture could either emerge or easily flow into. In those cases, we see more deeply rooted sugar cultures. Deeply rooted sweet cultures, such as in India now fast forwarding to cotton candy. Just to put all that in perspective, we're going to

get more into the origin story of cotton candy. But again, generally, the generally accepted invention story for cotton candy proper is that it is unleashed upon the world at the nineteen oh four World's Fair, an invention by a pair of Tennesseeans, dentist William Morrison and a confectioner by the name of John C. Wharton, both Nashville based.

it comes to the invention of proper cotton candy. There are also some additional arguments for nineteenth or even fifteenth century CE European origins for cotton candy or things adjacent to cotton candy. One of the more fascinating arguments that I ran across was that was that cotton candy or something similar to it dates back to China's Han dynasty, which would place it somewhere between two two BCE and nine CE, or between twenty five and two twenty CE,

depending on where in the Han dynasty you're falling. Okay, so in this we're talking about long she Tongue or dragons Beard candy, sometimes abbreviated in Western circles as d b C. I've not personally had Dragon's Beard candy. It's possible that I've had the chance and just didn't recognize my opportunity or just wasn't looking for something. I think that's ultimately the tragedy of being exposed to different sweet cultures.

As you grow older, you just have less of an appetite for it, but it's still it's very interesting looking. You can easily look up various YouTube videos of Dragon's Beard candy, and I've also seen places where you can apparently buy it online, you know, where it's like shrink

wrapped or something. The same is true of some Middle Eastern examples that will refer to of similar treats, such as Middle Eastern floss halva, which sometimes has the flossy hairlike consistency that we're talking about, But I've also seen images of it that look like they're a bit more solid, but in that kind of reminds me of these examples that we're just talking about of like what happens when you take cotton candy, allow it to sit, and then

you cut it up. So maybe it's a case like that where you have different versions of what the is ultimately going on to the tray in the confectionary. But flasava also looks quite good. I would definitely accept some of this from Tilda Swinton in a sleigh if she was offering this Turkish delight. So I was reading a

bit more about Dragon's Beard candy. I found a really nice Eater travel article by Tiffany Lee from twenty twenty four titled Welcome the Year of the Dragon with Dragon's Beard Candy if you can find it by the way, Happy Lunar New Year, as we have now entered into the Year of the wood Snake.

whole thing morphs into a chewy, crunchy jumble of nougat. Foyatine. By the way, that is, I had to look this up and it was not familiar with it as a crunchy French confection made from thin sweetened crapes. I've never had this one either, but you know, I get the idea.

sweets are sold. I am not sure if I have a local source for it here in Atlanta or and I'm going to just have to look for it the next time I'm in a bigger city. Listeners, do send your recommendations if you have had this and know where

it is sold. But based on Lee's article, it sounds like it hasn't completely caught on in the West, despite occasional spikes and popularity as a fad, like I believe, she mentions, like in New York at one point it became popular for a little bit, but then people became distracted by something else, and it hasn't really become entrenched in the way that other imported suites have. Okay, And as she discusses, it's pretty labor and skill intensive, so

that's another hurdle for it really taking over. According to Lee, it takes two years of mentorship to learn to make it, and it's one of those things like hand pulled noodles, where half the appeal is watching someone make it. And I guess that holds true of Western cotton candy as well, like you want to watch the cotton candy man stick that cone or tube into the little cauldron stirred around and emerge with that big puff of blue sugar.

strands appear, before wrapping the threads around the filling. And you have to get the required temperatures exactly right, which makes sense matching up with what we were talking about earlier, with the temperature precision involved in any of these various stages of heating sugars and syrups, and you have to be prepared to make adjustments depending on ambient temperature as well, especially in the case of like open carts where someone might be making this candy. Oh yeah, and then you

really need to eat them the day off. Much like cotton candy. It's like, you want it fresh. If it sits around, it's not gonna hold its form. I'm assuming the prepackaged sorts that you can buy on the internet. It's bright, and obviously it's not gonna be the same experience, but maybe they're able to keep it from drying out with some air tight packaging, you know, And I guess it's better than nothing if you don't have access to fresh I was.

As far as I could tell, rumors rumors bound. So on one hand, I think the dragons whiskers description is perfect. To compare it to a Western movie, think of the luck dragon from the Never Ending Story Falcore. Okay, it's like if you had a segment of Falcre and you like sliced into them, and yeah, you would have like the nougat like center with the nuts and the coconut and all, and then the white fur on the outside.

we might exercise similar caution. But the more interesting question here is really whether there is any indication that this desert item or something much like it, actually dates back to the year two twenty CE or much earlier. Okay, So I turned to a couple of other sources on this. About the history of sweets and sugar in general, it's pointed out by Tim Richardson in Sweets a history of candy. Sugarcane was introduced into China early in the first millennium BCE,

but that, unlike with India, it didn't develop. China didn't develop a sugar based sweet culture and arguably never really did, at least not on the scale comparable to the robust tradition of sweets that you find on the Indian subcontinent.

lack of demand for it, okay, which makes sense. It's like, it's one thing to acquire the secrets of sugar refining, but then is there a need for it? Do people actually want it? As is it anything other than a

novelty for the court. And if it is just a novelty for the court, maybe you just keep importing it, right, yeah, yeah, And so Richardson says it wasn't till six forty seven CE that the emperor at the time, and I believe this would be Tongu Tai Zong sent delegates to India to learn the secrets of sugar refinery, and from then on there are various Chinese advancements in the sugar industry.

In twelve eighty, Ridges And points out that Kubla Khan brought in Egyptian experts to share the secrets of white sugar, which, you know, if you're going to have a stately pleasure dome, got to have that white sugar.

as ancient but also not necessarily well recorded. She mentions that the pulling of these confections was probably or perhaps originally thought to quote convey special qualities, and I believe these special qualities are linked to the rarity of sugar in some of the places where this would have been conducted, and also the seeming alchemy of working it into these shapes, sometimes shapes that themselves might convey special meanings, such as

rings and circles. But also yet, just coming back to the modern example of cotton candy, watching its creation does feel like a kind of magic, and we can imagine easily imagine our ancestors and parts around the world engaging in a similar fascination.

out of sugar rich lands into other realms. She of course highlights pulled Turkish keton halva, also known as piecemagna, noting the addition of butter and flour in that process. She stresses that Keaton halva is different from cotton candy, though, and that there's no true Western equivalent. As cotton candy, she writes, is coarse and gritty. I don't remember if

that's accurate, but it sounds right. I do vaguely recall sort of a grittiness to it, but at least right before it melts well, keats and hav is smooth or soft. But of course, pulled sugar in the West also connects into traditions of pulled tathy the example many listeners may be familiar with, and you know, generally you have like

some sort of machine with hooks for that. And Dragon's Beard candy, she writes, is closer to Keithon halva and related confections, and accounts of Keaton halve date back at least as far as the early fifteenth century CE. As for the earliest possible origin of Dragon's Beard candy, she does write that a Chinese confectionery tradition probably developed from around the seventh century CE, when sugar began to replace

honey in sweetcakes. In Chinese culinary traditions, sugar based items though, would have been only for the aristocracy, and it would remain that way for centuries. So it would seem possible that some form of pulled sugar treat, even something close to what we know of as dragon's beard candy today, was brought before a Han Chinese emperor. It seems like it's possible. But it also seems possible that this treat might have developed later, during at least the seventh century

rather than the third century seee. I wish there were firmer sources on the Han dynasty legend here, but I at least couldn't find them in English. So if anyone out there has access to additional data on this legend, I would love.

an Indian variant. It's called a belief sown pop D. So you know, there are probably endless variations across time and space.

fair these days. It's something that in most conditions would probably need to be eaten immediately, but maybe in some way conditions I don't know, like a cold, dry place or something, it could survive longer.

to discuss. I think we're probably going to get into the twentieth century origins of modern cotton candy a bit, and then there are also going to be some offshoots, things that are maybe cotton candy and name only but are still pretty fascinating from other disciplines of the science world.