Gumdrop Day

What the day is

Gumdrop Day is observed on February 15. The candy is a firm, domed jelly, set with starch, pectin or gelatin, flavored and rolled in coarse sugar.

Two distinct types share the name. Fruit gumdrops are the brightly colored ones. Spice drops are the darker, smaller sort flavored with clove, cinnamon, anise and wintergreen, and they are a genuinely different eating experience that people tend to feel strongly about in one direction or the other.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The day's position immediately after Valentine's Day is probably not accidental, since it lands exactly when discounted candy floods the shelves.

The candy is nineteenth-century American in its familiar form, and its construction is more deliberate than it looks. The setting agent determines the texture entirely: gelatin gives a chewy, elastic bite; pectin gives a shorter, cleaner one that breaks rather than stretches; starch gives the firm, slightly grainy body of a traditional gumdrop. The sugar coating is not only decoration, since it absorbs surface moisture and keeps the pieces from fusing into a single mass in the bag.

Their structural career is a real phenomenon. Gumdrops hold a toothpick without splitting and stay put once set, which has made them the standard material for classroom engineering exercises and for decorating gingerbread houses, where they function as masonry rather than as sweets.

How to take part

• Taste a spice drop and a fruit gumdrop side by side. Most people have only ever eaten one kind.
• Build something. Gumdrops and toothpicks make sound geometric structures, and this is the classic activity with children.
• Make your own with pectin or gelatin. Homemade ones are softer and taste of the actual fruit.
• Use them in baking. Chopped gumdrops in a plain cookie dough is an old-fashioned recipe that still works.
• Store them in a sealed jar. Left in air they harden into something closer to gravel.