Lollipop Day

What the day is

Lollipop Day is observed on July 20. The lollipop is hard candy on a stick, and the stick is the invention. Candy on its own is sticky and has to be handled; candy on a stick can be eaten slowly, put down and picked up again.

Origin and background

Hard candy is ancient, and people had been putting sweets on sticks informally for a long time before anyone commercialized it. The modern product is generally traced to the early twentieth century, and a confectioner named George Smith in New Haven, Connecticut is the usual claimant, having marketed the candies and later registered the name.

The word itself predates the product. Lolly is dialect English for tongue, and lollipop appears in print in the eighteenth century for various sweets, well before anything was mounted on a stick.

What turned it into a mass-market item was machinery. Hand-dipping candies onto sticks is slow, and automated machines developed in the 1910s and 1920s could produce them by the thousand, which dropped the price to the point where a lollipop became the standard thing to hand a child.

The candy itself is a piece of sugar chemistry. Sugar syrup boiled to around 150 degrees Celsius, the hard crack stage, contains almost no remaining water, and it sets into a glassy solid rather than a crystal. That glassiness is why a lollipop is transparent, why it shatters rather than crumbles, and why it turns sticky in humid air, since the sugar slowly pulls moisture back out of the atmosphere.

How to take part

• Make them. Sugar, water, corn syrup and flavoring boiled to hard crack, poured into molds with sticks, is an afternoon's work and needs only a thermometer.
• Watch the temperature rather than the clock. A few degrees past hard crack and the sugar begins to caramelize and turn bitter.
• Wrap them individually as soon as they cool, or they will fuse together.
• Try a boiled sweet from another tradition for comparison.
• Do not bite. The dental profession is consistent on this point.