Most candy is made from sugar, which comes from sugarcane or from sugar beets. Sugar is naturally white, so the bright colors in candy come from dyes that makers add to it. Hard candy such as a lollipop follows a simple principle. The maker cooks sugar syrup until it is very hot, and when the syrup cools, it turns hard. Cooks heat the syrup until it is nearly all sugar with very little water left, a point they call the hard crack stage. In a scientific sense, hard candy is a glass. Its sugar is not arranged in crystals, so it snaps instead of crumbling.

Chocolate begins somewhere else, with the fruit of the cacao tree. The fruit is called a pod, and the cacao beans grow inside it, wrapped in a juicy white pulp. Workers pick only the ripe pods, by hand, using knives, because only ripe pods give top-quality beans. The beans are then taken out of the pod by hand as well. A fresh cocoa bean tastes very bitter and harsh, and it is not good to eat until it has been fermented, dried and roasted.

Fermenting comes first, and it is a living process. Yeasts and bacteria feed on the sweet pulp around the beans, and the beans themselves are changed by the heat and acid that these microbes make. The beans heat up to about 45 to 50 degrees Celsius, or 113 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and the whole process lasts about six days. The beans turn brown when it ends. Fermenting also makes the sticky pulp turn to liquid and drain away, which helps the beans dry.

After fermenting, any pulp that remains is stripped off and the beans are dried. Then the beans are roasted, and the roasting gives them the rich flavor we know as chocolate, and it makes the shells of the beans loosen so they can be removed. 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 the liquor makes it smoother, so it flows more easily.

Tempering heats, cools and reheats the chocolate to exact temperatures. Its goal is to make most of the cocoa butter set in one crystal form, called Form V, which gives chocolate its shine and snap. Once the chocolate is tempered, it is poured into molds, cooled, cut and wrapped. The cooling takes time, at least 20 minutes to an hour, before the bars are ready to be cut and wrapped for the shelf.

Olmec people in what is now southern Mexico began growing cacao around 1500 B.C.E., and they likely used it for a ceremonial drink. Chocolate reached Europe through Spain, although accounts disagree about exactly when it arrived, and the Spaniards were the first Europeans to drink chocolate. In Europe, long ago, sweets and chocolate were mostly for rich people, because sugar was expensive. For most of its history chocolate was a drink, and hard chocolate bars did not appear until 1847.

Honey was one of the first sweeteners. A cave painting in Spain, about 8,000 years old, shows a person collecting honey from a beehive. In India, people learned how 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, but the Industrial Revolution brought machines that could make a lot of candy.

Cotton candy uses sugar differently, and despite its name it is not made from cotton. Cotton candy is made of sugar that is spun into thin strands. Hot melted sugar flies out through tiny holes in a spinning bowl and cools in the air into thin threads. The first machine was patented in the 1890s, and in 1897 a dentist, William Morrison, worked with a candy maker, John C. Wharton, on it. 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. Because gelatin gels melt when warmed, a gummy melts in the mouth. The material is thermoreversible, meaning that heating thins it and cooling sets it again. Makers combine more than one sugar in the recipe. Sucrose provides the main sweetness, and fructose, which is sweeter than sucrose, boosts the flavor. Corn syrup plays a different part in the recipe, since it stops other sugars from forming crystals that would make the candy gritty.

Gummies are shaped in trays of starch. The candy mix is poured into dents pressed in the starch, and the starch keeps the candy from sticking. After the gummies set, a machine tips the tray over a vibrating screen to shake off the loose starch. Gummy candy needs about a day to set, because the trays rest in a cooling room for 24 hours or more. Jelly beans, too, are shaped in starch: a jelly bean has a soft middle and a hard shell made of sugar.

A jelly bean is made from sugar, corn syrup and food starch. Its soft middle is shaped in trays of cornstarch, because cornstarch keeps the shape pressed into it. The middles then go into a spinning pan. Sugar builds up on the soft middle and makes the hard shell, and then a glaze makes it shiny. Making one jelly bean takes 6 to 10 days from start to finish.

Words to know

• fermented: changed by microbes
• nib: bean meat
• tempering: heat and cool
• gelatin: gel protein
• glass: crystal-free solid