Candy corn history: from Chicken Feed to Halloween
Candy corn is much older than its link to Halloween. It was first made in the 1880s and sold under the name “Chicken Feed”. Only in the 1950s did it become the candy of Halloween.
Who made it first
The inventor is not certain. The University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, in an article on the candy, notes that the National Confectioners Association credits “an employee of the Wunderle Candy Company in Philadelphia named George Renninger”. The same article says the first company to sell the sweet was the Goelitz Candy Company, known today as the Jelly Belly Candy Company.
A trade magazine gives the Goelitz date from inside the industry. In March 1952, The Manufacturing Confectioner congratulated a Goelitz veteran, Ed Kelley, on his 80th birthday, and recalled the company’s beginnings: “In 1898 the late Adolph Goelitz first made candy corn in Cincinnati, and Ed Kelley joined the company, which moved to North Chicago in 1910.” Even then, the company “still specializes in candy corn”, under the slogan “Goelitz Candy Corn—Worth Crowing For”.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?Why it looked like corn
The shape made sense in a farming country. Around the 1880s, the UGA article explains, “when agriculture dominated almost half of the American workforce, candy companies began making farming-themed candies like pumpkins, chestnuts and even turnips to market to children who lived in rural communities.”
The name “Chicken Feed” was a joke that worked because of what corn meant at the time. The article cites the candy historian Samira Kawash, author of Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure: “It wasn’t until war-time wheat shortages in 1917 that any but the poorest Americans would have considered corn flour, corn meal or corn bread acceptable foodstuffs.” Corn was what you fed the hens, so a candy that looked like a kernel was a farmyard gag.
How it was made
Atlas Obscura describes the old process as hard physical work. A slurry of sugar, corn syrup, fondant, marshmallow and water was dyed in the three colors, and then “laborers would then take 45-pound buckets of the hot liquid candy and pour it into long rows of trays of kernel forms, making three passes, one for each color of the corn.” The three bands, yellow, orange and white, come from those three pours.
When it became Halloween candy
Kawash, quoted in the UGA article, dates the change to the postwar years: “As Halloween became more and more dominated by candy beginning in the 1950s, candy corn increasingly became the candy for Halloween. There was a dramatic spike in October advertising of candy corn beginning in the 1950s.”
So the candy came first and the holiday found it later. Candy corn was a farm joke from the 1880s that happened to be orange and yellow when trick-or-treating needed a candy, and it has been part of Halloween ever since.