Most candy is made from sugar, which comes from sugarcane or from sugar beets. Hard candy, such as a lollipop, is made by cooking sugar syrup until it is very hot. A cooler syrup makes soft candies like fudge. The hottest point, the hard crack stage, makes crunchy candies like brittle and lollipops. At that point the syrup is nearly all sugar, with very little water left. Hard candy is then cooled quickly into a hard, brittle solid. The syrup begins to set right away, so candy makers must work fast.

Candy is very old. The first candy in history was probably made with honey. People in ancient Egypt used honey to sweeten foods, and one account says they mixed honey with sesame seeds. People in India learned to boil sugarcane juice into solid sugar. Around 250 C.E., sugar candy was made there, shaped like animals and people. Candy making grew into big business in the 1800s. Before then, nearly all candy was made by hand, and the Industrial Revolution brought machines that could make a lot of candy.

Chocolate begins on a cacao tree. Its fruit is a pod, and the beans grow inside it, wrapped in a juicy white pulp. Workers pick only ripe pods by hand, with knives, because only ripe pods give top-quality beans. The beans are then taken out of the pod by hand. Then the beans ferment. They heat up to about 45 to 50 degrees Celsius, or 113 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat comes from the work of tiny living things in the pulp.

Fresh cocoa beans taste very bitter and harsh, so they are not good to eat until they have 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. Nibs are ground into a thick paste called cocoa liquor, which has no alcohol in it. Rolling makes the liquor smoother, so it flows more easily.

Chocolate reached Europe through Spain, but accounts disagree about exactly when. The Spaniards were the first Europeans to drink chocolate. In Europe, long ago, sweets and chocolate were mostly for rich people. Sugar was expensive, so sweets were a luxury. For most of its history, chocolate was a drink, and hard chocolate bars did not appear until 1847.

Sugar is naturally white, so candy gets its bright colors from dyes that are added to it. 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. The middles then tumble in a spinning pan. Sugar builds up and makes the shell, and a glaze makes it shiny. One bean takes 6 to 10 days from start to finish. Sugar can hurt teeth, so brush twice a day with fluoride toothpaste.

Gummy candy gets its chew from gelatin, a protein that comes from animals. Gelatin turns a sugary liquid into a soft gel. The candy mix is poured into dents pressed in trays of starch, and the starch keeps it from sticking. Gummy bears were first made by a company called Haribo in Germany in the 1920s, and its founder, Hans Riegel, was a confectioner. They became a craze in the United States in the 1980s, after a German company began making them there.

Cotton candy is made of sugar that is spun into thin strands. Cotton candy machines, which spin sugar into strands, have a spinning bowl with tiny holes. Hot melted sugar flies out through the holes, cools in the air and becomes thin threads. The first machine was patented in the 1890s. In 1897, a dentist named William Morrison worked with candy maker John C. Wharton on it. Morrison and Wharton called their cotton candy "fairy floss." They sold it at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair for 25 cents a box, and the machines still spin sugar into thin strands today.

Words to know

• cacao: chocolate tree
• ferment: change using germs
• nib: bean meat
• liquor: thick cocoa paste
• gelatin: gel protein