Cotton Candy Day

What the day is

Cotton Candy Day is observed on December 7, which is a strange date for a fairground food. The history compensates.

Origin and background

Spun sugar existed long before any machine, made by hand by confectioners flicking molten sugar off a fork into threads. It was slow, skilled and expensive, which kept it a luxury.

The machine that made it ordinary was patented in 1897 by William Morrison and John C. Wharton of Nashville. Morrison was a dentist, which is the detail everybody remembers and which is entirely true. They took the machine to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis under the name fairy floss and sold tens of thousands of boxes at twenty-five cents each, a serious price at the time.

The name still varies by country. It remains fairy floss in Australia and candy floss in Britain, and in France it is barbe à papa, which translates as daddy's beard.

The mechanism is simple and slightly startling. Sugar is melted in a spinning head and forced out through tiny holes by centrifugal force. The threads cool so fast that the sugar has no time to crystallize and sets instead as a glassy amorphous solid, in strands roughly the width of a human hair. The result is mostly air, which is why a head of cotton candy the size of a football holds a fairly modest amount of actual sugar.

The technique has since escaped the fairground. Researchers have used cotton candy machines to spin networks of fine fibers as scaffolds for growing tissue, dissolving the threads afterward to leave behind channels about the size of capillaries.

How to take part

• Buy it fresh rather than bagged. It is a different product within an hour.
• Keep it away from humidity, which collapses it almost immediately.
• Watch it being spun if you get the chance. The process is better than the result.
• Try it melted into a drink, which is the one modern use that genuinely improves on it.
• Spare a thought for the dentist. He deserves both the credit and the joke.