A lollipop, a chocolate bar and a jelly bean look nothing alike. Yet most candy starts the same way. Most candy is made from sugar, and sugar comes from sugarcane or from sugar beets. What changes is how the candy maker cooks it, so let us look at a few favorites. A cooler syrup makes soft candies like fudge. The hottest syrup, the hard crack stage, makes crunchy candies like brittle and lollipops.

Why does hard candy snap? A cook boils sugar syrup until it is nearly all sugar, with very little water left. Then it cools into hard candy that snaps. That is how a lollipop is made. The syrup is cooked very hot, and when it cools it turns hard. Cooks say the syrup has reached the hard crack stage.

Sugar candy is very old. The first candy in history was probably made with honey. One account says people in ancient Egypt mixed honey with sesame seeds. Around 250 C.E., people in India learned to boil sugarcane juice into solid sugar. They shaped the candy like animals and people. In Europe, long ago, sugar was expensive, so sweets were a luxury for the rich.

Chocolate starts on a cacao tree. The fruit is called a pod, and the beans grow inside it in a juicy white pulp. Workers pick only ripe pods, by hand, with knives, because only ripe pods give top-quality beans. A fresh cocoa bean tastes very bitter and harsh. It is not good to eat until it has been fermented, dried and roasted.

Roasting gives the beans the rich flavor we know as chocolate. It also makes the shells loosen. The shells are removed, and what is left is the nib, the meat of the bean. Chocolate is made from the nib. For most of its history, chocolate was a drink. Hard chocolate bars did not appear until 1847. Today the cocoa mix is poured into molds, cooled, cut and wrapped. The cooling takes at least 20 minutes to an hour.

A jelly bean has a soft middle and a hard shell made of sugar. It is made from sugar, corn syrup and food starch. A machine called a depositor squirts hot candy syrup into tiny dents in trays of starch. Cornstarch is used because it keeps the shape pressed into it. Then the middles tumble in a spinning pan. Sugar builds up on them and makes the shell, and a glaze makes it shiny.

Making one jelly bean takes 6 to 10 days from start to finish. Candy gets its bright colors from dyes that are added to it, because sugar is naturally white. Retailers once sold jelly beans by color for holidays. Some makers still make bigger beans for holidays such as Easter, Halloween and Christmas.

Gummy candy gets its chew from gelatin, a protein that comes from animals. Gelatin turns a sugary liquid into a soft gel. The mix is poured into dents in trays of starch, and the starch keeps it from sticking. Then the trays rest in a cooling room for 24 hours or more. Gummy candy needs about a day to set, so it takes patience as well as sugar.

Cotton candy was invented by a dentist. In 1897, William Morrison, a dentist, worked with a candy maker named John C. Wharton on the first machine. Cotton candy machines have a spinning bowl with tiny holes. Hot melted sugar flies out through the holes, cools in the air and becomes thin threads. Sugar can hurt teeth, so brushing twice a day with fluoride toothpaste helps protect them.

Words to know

• cacao: chocolate tree
• fermented: changed by germs
• depositor: squirting machine
• nib: bean meat
• glaze: shiny coating