Squashies are a strange thing to build a following around. They are not sour,
not sharp, not novelty-shaped, and not new — Swizzels has been making sweets
in Derbyshire since the 1920s. Yet they keep turning up in imported-candy
hauls, and people who try them tend to come back.
Here is what they actually are, and why the reaction is what it is.
The name is a literal instruction
They are meant to be squashed. Press one between finger and thumb and it
gives, holds the dent for a second, then eases back. That is the entire
selling point, and it is a texture almost nothing in the American aisle does.
A standard gummy resists and springs. A marshmallow collapses and stays
collapsed. Squashies sit between the two: soft enough to deform under light
pressure, elastic enough to recover slowly. The technical reason is
aeration — air is whipped through before setting, so the sweet is much less
dense than its size suggests.
Pick up a bag and it feels underweight. That is not short measure. That is
the product.
Why they read as unfamiliar rather than just "foreign"
Two things are doing the work:
Lower density means faster flavour release. More surface area inside the
sweet, so it dissolves quickly once you start chewing. Flavour arrives all
at once rather than building.
The flavours are British reference points. Drumstick is the obvious
one — raspberry and milk, a combination that has no real American
equivalent and reads to a US palate as "creamy fruit," which is why people
struggle to describe it.
That difficulty in describing the taste is, as far as we can tell, most of
the appeal. A sweet you cannot immediately categorise gets talked about.
Drumstick, specifically
The Drumstick flavour is a Swizzels original — the lolly it is based on has
been made since the 1950s. It pairs raspberry with a milk note. Not vanilla,
not cream soda: something closer to milkshake.
If you have only ever had American raspberry candy, which tends to be sharp
and single-note, this will not taste like raspberry to you at first. Give it
three or four. It resolves.
Buying imported sweets without disappointment
A few honest cautions, because imported candy has a higher rate of "I did not
enjoy that" than most categories:
Check the pack size before comparing prices. A 100 g bag is about
3.5 oz. Imported sweets are usually sold in smaller units than American
equivalents, so per-bag prices look higher than they are per ounce.
Aerated sweets do not travel well in heat. A bag left in a hot car
compresses and the pieces fuse. They are still edible, still fine, but the
squash is gone — and the squash is the point.
Store them sealed. Aerated candy stales faster than dense candy,
because there is more internal surface for moisture to leave. An opened bag
is noticeably firmer after a week.
Do not chill them. Cold makes them stiff and mutes the flavour, which
removes both of the things that make them distinctive.
Who these are actually for
If you like a long, satisfying chew that fights back — these are not it, and
you may find them insubstantial.
If you like sweets that are soft, quick and slightly odd, and you enjoy
handing someone something they cannot immediately name, they do that job
better than almost anything else we import.
That is a narrower recommendation than "everyone will love these," but it is
the accurate one.
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