Three flavours that were everywhere a century ago and are now hard to find
outside a nostalgia shop. Each disappeared for a different reason, and the
reasons are more interesting than the flavours are unusual.
Horehound: the sweet that started as medicine
Horehound is a bitter herb in the mint family, used for coughs and sore
throats long before anyone thought of it as confectionery. The candy is
essentially the remedy made palatable — boiled sugar carrying an extract that
on its own is genuinely unpleasant.
That origin explains the taste. It is bitter first, herbal underneath, with a
cooling finish that arrives late. It is not trying to be nice in the way a
fruit sweet is trying to be nice.
Why it faded: as actual cough medicine improved and diversified, the
sweet lost its reason to exist. What survives is a taste people associate with
grandparents, which is precisely why it survives at all.
Sassafras: the flavour that lost its ingredient
Sassafras root was the original backbone of root beer and a common candy
flavour — sharp, floral, faintly medicinal in a completely different way from
horehound.
Why it changed: safrole, the compound that gives sassafras root its
character, was restricted for use in food in the United States in 1960 after
animal studies raised safety concerns. Commercial sassafras flavouring since
then is typically safrole-free, which is why old descriptions of the taste do
not always match what you get now.
So this is a flavour that is still made and still recognisable, but genuinely
not identical to what someone born in 1930 remembers. That is unusual, and
worth knowing before you decide your memory is faulty.
Butterscotch: the one that survived by being useful
Butterscotch is boiled brown sugar and butter, taken to the hard-crack stage.
Unlike the other two it never went away — but it did get quietly replaced.
Most modern "butterscotch" is a flavouring rather than genuinely cooked sugar
and butter, because the real thing is time-consuming and does not keep as
well. The difference is detectable: real butterscotch has a slight dairy
roundness and a bitterness at the edge from the caramelised sugar. The
flavouring version is sweeter and cleaner.
Why it survived: it works in other things. Butterscotch became a sauce, an
ice cream flavour, a pudding, a chip in a cookie. Flavours that only exist as
a boiled sweet are fragile; flavours that colonise other categories persist.
What these three have in common
All are adult flavours — bitter, herbal or caramelised rather than
straightforwardly fruity and sweet. Children's confectionery moved decisively
toward bright fruit and sour in the second half of the twentieth century, and
these did not follow.
They are also all slow. A hard candy that takes four minutes to dissolve
belongs to a different pace of eating than a chew or a gummy, and that is
arguably the real reason they feel old-fashioned.
Trying them fairly
Give each one a full piece and several minutes rather than a taste. These
flavours are constructed to unfold — horehound in particular is unpleasant for
the first ten seconds and then turns into something else entirely.
And taste them alone, not in a mixed handful. Against a cherry stick, horehound
does not stand a chance, which is exactly how most people form the opinion
that they do not like it.
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