Everything Sweet, Delectable & Lovely!
Janice Feuer-Haugen
November-December 2017 • Vol 3, No 95
Perhaps you, too, have wondered about those visions of sugar plums. I imagined sugar plums as something sweet, luscious and beautiful. But what exactly were those sugar plums (and how do I make them)? With a little research, I read that the visions of sugar plums most likely were of “comfits.” Not much as I imagined, as comfits are a type of hard candy. They were difficult to make and consisted of many layers of sugar covering seeds such as coriander or caraway and possibly of fruit.
Fortunately, I gained a new understanding after reading an article by Samira Kawash in The Atlantic. She wrote that “in Tchaikovsky’s day, sugar plum was both the name of a particular candy and the universal signifier of everything sweet and delectable and lovely.”
