Aug. 01, 2012 - Issue #876: The Art Of Serving
Provenance
Six things about jelly beans
In the early 20th century, jellybeans was a term bestowed on men who dressed stylishly to attract women, but possessed no substance or any other commendable qualities.
Eat at your own risk
The Harry Potter series capitalized on nasty flavoured jelly beans with Berty Bott's Every Flavour Beans, but a candy called BeanBoozled takes things one step further. The beans come in boxes of 10 colours and 20 flavours. For every one tasty colour, there's an equally disgusting companion, and the idea is that consumers never know which they're going to get. Flavours include skunk spray, moldy cheese, baby wipes, rotten egg and vomit.
They just appeared
No one knows where jelly beans came from, but they're believed to be a descendent of Turkish Delight and surfaced in the 1800s. It is also believed that Jordan Almonds could be another possible origin of jelly beans.
A lengthy process
It takes seven to 21 days to make a jelly bean. Part of the process is called known as panning, which is essential in creating the hard outer shell and chewy centre.
Old favourites
The average jelly bean assortment contains eight flavours. Standards include grape, black licorice, strawberry, lemon, orange, lime and cherry.
The good stuff
Jelly Belly, which has become the gourmet standard in the jellybean world, was invented in 1976. They were the first jelly beans to be sold in single flavours and have a flavour menu. There were enough of the candy eaten last year to circle the earth more than five times. V vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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