What is a sweet? A curious and infuriating point is a lack of definition. The closer one looks, the more elusive the meaning. The British tend to think of sweets in the plural, and then resort to lists (humbugs, sherbet, liquorice, toffee…). Children are sure of what is meant by sweets, when standing in the sweet shop, and know to distinguish them from puddings served at meal times. But is chocolate a sweet? Yes and no—we talk about ‘sweets and chocolates’. Are biscuits sweets? Maybe not. What about marzipan? Perhaps, but why put it all over the Christmas cake? Boundaries are undefined. The concept of sweets is fluid. The confusion arises from the overlapping uses of sugar: as medicine, preserving agent, and spice, as well as a decorative, luxury status symbol. The use of sugar as a general sweetener is a late development.

There are many words in current usage, and in the speech and writing of times past, that describe sweets, sweet dishes, or sweet things. These need a degree of explanation before embarking on more particular accounts.

During the last two centuries, the word sweet has acquired two related but different meanings. It can be applied to sweets: dry, sugary confections bought from sweet shops. It has also come to mean sweet dishes, including jellies, fruit pies and suet puddings. In English, both usages date to early in the first half of the nineteenth century. Confusion over where sweets end and where puddings begin is not peculiar to Britain: the Arabic word halwa has similar connotations; and in Hindi, mithai indicates several different types of sweet, some of which are sugar confections and some of which are puddings.

The anomalies in our own language are due to the origin of sweets, or sweeties (an older version), as diminutives of sweetmeat. This word, still not entirely obsolete, was in common use for over 400 years up to the end of the nineteenth century. The suffix -meat has an archaic meaning of food in the widest sense (surviving in the phrase ‘meat and drink’); so sweetmeat simply means a sweet food. Sweet stuff, as noted by Henry Mayhew in London in the 1860s, was a parallel term. Stuff was a generalized expression for almost any commodity, as in the word foodstuff. 

To the inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England, sweetmeats were sugary foods in general. They included pieces of flavoured candy and sugar-covered nuts and spices, reflecting medieval theories on the medicinal value of sugar, while other sweetmeats used sugar as one ingredient amongst many, for structure, sweetness and an air of exotic luxury.

A word associated with sweet foods in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was banquet. The original meaning (still the sense in which it is now understood) was a large formal meal. Medieval feasts had 

provided several roles for sweetmeats. Apart from sweet dishes, sugar-work had a special part in the construction of large, edible ornaments called subtleties. These could be made from cast sugar, marzipan or sugar paste. Presented between courses for the delight of the diners, their subjects flattered guests of honour or provided conversation points. The description ‘subtlety’ fell out of use in the sixteenth century, although the idea of sugar ornaments has survived, with modifications, to the present day.

Another role for confectionery at feasts was as a digestif. During the Middle Ages, a habit of serving sugared spices with wafers and spiced wine had developed; these were eaten at the voidee, the close of the meal after the table was cleared. By the late sixteenth century, this little afterthought had been expanded and it was this, in England, which evolved into a banquet consisting entirely of sweetmeats. These sugar banquets were a collation of biscuits, preserved fruit, sweet wines and sugar confectionery. Banqueters revelled in conceits, so some of the sugar-work was made to look like savoury food—marzipan hams, sugar paste bacon, or eggs made from jelly coloured white or yellow. 

Banquets of sweetmeats might follow meals, or be separate afternoon or evening entertainments. They were intimate occasions: some large houses had a specially designed room or little folly tucked away for such indulgences, some (Whitehall for example) had veritable mansions. They were also opportunities for displaying wealth and skill. Sugar and the other ingredients were expensive, and confectionery was a skilled task, whether produced by ladies for their own households, or bought from fashionable confectioners.

In the sense of a feast of sweetmeats, the word banquet became obsolete around the start of the eighteenth century, but the idea of putting sweetmeats on the table at the close of a meal continued to develop. This eventually became dessert (from the French, desservir, to clear the table). Dessert was a word in use in English by the end of the sixteenth century, and it continued to mean a collection of sweet dishes and fruit after the idea of a sweetmeat banquet vanished.

By the early eighteenth century, under the influence of French confectioners, fashionable desserts had become very splendid. Dry sweetmeats were carefully piled in elegant pyramids on special dishes. In turn, these were arranged on tables covered with elaborate damask cloths, ornamented with figures and models, themselves often edible examples of the confectioner’s art. Creams, jellies and compotes of preserved fruit added variety. Desserts were frivolous and self-indulgent. However, other sweet dishes continued to be served during the body of the meal itself, and it was a North American, not British, usage that introduced confusion in the late eighteenth century, by extending the range of foods presented at dessert to include tarts, pies and sweet puddings. 

Of all the words associated with sweetmeats, pudding has probably the weakest link to sugar. Derived from the same root as the French boudin, it 

originally meant a mixture stuffed into an animal gut, as in black pudding, or hog’s pudding. It could be sweet or savoury. The culinary method was extended in the seventeenth century to mixtures contained within cloths, which were cooked or boiled in the same manner as those in animal wrappers. Later still, it was accepted as a description of a mixture in a covered bowl or basin, that was boiled as if wrapped in cloth or bladder.The more general application of the word to the sweet course as a whole is appears to have evolved in the nineteenth century. Puddings are still seen as ‘proper’ food, the final part of a structured meal. Puddings are not sweets; John Betjeman’s poem, mocking social aspirations, turns the conundrum neatly on its head, when the narrator asks about the final course of a meal, ‘Is trifle sufficient for sweet?’ One thing is certain: a Stuart lady, whether or not she regarded trifle (or dishes which predated it) as a sweetmeat proper for dessert, would have been vexed if that was all she had to put on a banquet table.

The battle between sweet, dessert and pudding still rages in modern Britain, with each usage vilified by one party or another for spurious gentility, inaccuracy, or the speaker’s lack of understanding of antecedents—part of the linguistic class system chronicled by Alan Ross and Nancy Mitford. Modern restaurants have dodged the issue by calling the sweet course ‘afters’ or ‘endings’, much as they avoid the pitfall of false Frenchness by dubbing hors d’oeuvre ‘starter’. It only underlines the fact that we have never, as a nation, managed an agreed set of terms to describe the progress of meal without borrowing from foreign vocabularies: perhaps because the very concept of courses was imported in the first place.

The word sweetmeat connects sugar to food and meals. Its important linkage with medicine can be seen in the word confection. This derives from Latin conficire, meaning to put together, make up or compound, implying a certain purposefulness. The same Latin root gave us comfit for sugar-covered spices (although comfits seem originally to have been fruit preserved with sugar), and the verb to confect as description of making up a compound mixture for medicine or spicing. Medieval physicians sweetened many medicines; they considered that sugar had intrinsically health-giving properties, and knew it helped preserve the plant-derived essences on which they relied. Improving flavour was probably incidental. Sugar was combined with herbs, spices, flowers, gold and precious stones to make tonics and aphrodisiacs. By the end of the fifteenth century, confection had acquired the specific meaning of a sweetmeat, with a general medicinal connotation.

In the early seventeenth century, the terms comfit-maker and confectioner both described people who made sweets. Confectioner and the collective noun, confectionery, have remained in the language. Advertisements and trade cards show that by the eighteenth century, confectioners made and sold a much wider range of goods than either mere medicines, or the stock-in-trade of their modern counterparts: preserved and candied fruit, biscuits, macaroons, syrups, comfits, and more ephemeral sweet foods, such as ices, creams and jellies; often also pies and tarts (including savoury ones). They 

sold or rented dessert frames—devices for presenting large formal desserts in fashionable patterns—and sugar figures or ‘images’ for embellishing the table. 

Medicines, in the form of medicinal sweets, also remained within the realm of the confectioner, who was expected to know about liquorice, pastes of marshmallow, and gum-based troches (medicated pastilles or sweets for ailments such as coughs). But another source of medicinal confectionery was the apothecary, whose stock included roses preserved in sugar, liquorice compounds, and syrups made from flowers or herbs. Confectioners and apothecaries were respectable, but the itinerant quack physicians or mountebanks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not. These people, with the aid of much showmanship, sold cures, including sweet confections, to crowds in the street. Henry Mayhew recorded in 1851 that ‘perhaps the last mountebank in England, was [seen] about twenty years ago, in the vicinity of Yarmouth. He was selling"cough drops" and infallible cures for asthma, and was dressed in a periwig and an embroidered coat, with ruffles at his wrist, a sword to his side, and was a representation, in shabby genteel, of the fine gentleman of the reign of Queen Anne.’

By the mid-nineteenth century, the more potent aspects of medicinal confectionery were transferring from apothecaries to the new profession of pharmacists. Liquorice and marshmallow were on their way to losing their medicinal associations; mountebanks had vanished, and Mayhew could find only six street-traders who specialized in vending ‘curative confectionaries’. In our own time, confectionery has almost lost the medicinal aspect. Vestiges can be detected in cough sweets and pastilles sold by sweet-shops and pharmacies (this helps explain why the chemist in my home village included barley sugar sticks amongst his stock-in-trade).

The line between little sugary treats and real food has blurred, as confectionery is now considered to embrace three main categories. These are based on sugar, chocolate, and flour. It is the latter which really causes confusion, as it overlaps with the skills of the baker and includes pâtisserie and breads. When the three branches are considered, in modern English the word confectionery probably comes closer to the original spirit of the word sweetmeat than does sweet. Ice-cream and soft drinks have maintained links with confectionery, and are still considered in the food industry to be products closely related to sweets, a unity exemplified most recently by the national 

taste for Mars Bar ice-cream.

There are numerous dialect words for sweets in English. ‘Gi’ us a spice,’ we said in the village of my childhood, hoping for a fruit pastille or gum, an aniseed ball or a mint imperial. We never stopped to wonder why we used this word. It echoes the broader meaning of Old French espice. John Ayto explained the original meaning as ‘a range of (mainly sweet) items used in cooking, but it was still far broader in application than its modern English descendant, spice: it could refer to jams and sweets, for example, to honey, sugar and milk.’ In twentieth-century Yorkshire dialect, it meant sweets of any kind, and if more specific links existed (for instance, with sugared spices of medieval confectionery), they have not been recorded. Another English dialect word for sugar confectionery, more widely known, is goody, or goody-goody. This is similar to the French bonbon, expressing the notion that something which tastes good must be intrinsically good. Bonbons more or less coincide with items in the English category of sugar confectionery (although they are often more elegant). Many other words have been recorded, such as comforters, sucks, suckers (or sookies) and the word lolly—now in common use for a sweet on a stick—which is thought to derive from an old word for tongue.

Some sweets, especially those designed to appeal to small children, are often repulsive to adult palates. So in France, bonbon is subverted to bonbec by children to indicate the ‘rubbish’ confectionery which adults hate (and call toute la cochonnerie, all that stupidity). An equivalent usage in the dialect of north-east of England is kets or ketty (literally meaning rubbish or garbage). Most of the sweets we bought as children, vividly coloured, highly flavoured and strangely shaped, would have been called bonbecs by our French counterparts. A fine tradition of modelling inedibles such as milk bottles, dinosaurs, mountain bikes, spiders, flies, and numerous other creepy-crawlies out of fruit-flavoured gum flourishes. These are no stranger than the conceits beloved of the seventeenth-century nobility who decked their banquet tables with sugar models of gloves and buckles and shoes. Fashions change; the ideas which once marked the aspirations of courtiers have subtly altered to become a rite of passage for children.

Sugar that is hard, crystallized by evaporation of the boiling juice, is said to be candy. Sugar candy, broken off a loaf, was a standard form of household sugar in Europe until the early twentieth century. Of all the words in the sugar lexicon, candy probably has the most ancient derivation. It could be regarded as the archetypal sweetmeat, with a history which stretches back over fifteen centuries to India. The earliest records of candy in English are in 

the phrase ‘sugar candy’, paralleled in French, sucre candi, Spanish azucar cande, and equivalents in Portuguese, Italian, and medieval Latin.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces candy through Arabic to the Persian qand, for sugar, the crystallized juice of the sugar-cane, and thence eastwards to India. The ultimate origin is thought to be Sanskrit khanda, meaning sugar in crystalline pieces. The modern definition of sugar candy, as crystallized sugar, is still close to the latter. For a substance to retain an ancient name in such a widespread form shows that it must have been highly valued and considered worthy of notice. The derivation of the word sugar, too, can be traced back through Arabic, to Persian and Sanskrit antecedents.

Sugar candy was first recorded in English at the end of the fourteenth century. A century or so later, it travelled to America with the earliest settlers. Eventually the word candy was adopted in North American English, developing a similar meaning to sweets on the our side of the Atlantic (but without the wider notions of pudding). North Americans differentiate between several forms—hard candy (equivalent to English boiled-sugar sweets), soft candy, candy chews, cream candy, stick candy, and candy canes (striped rock in walking-stick shapes). In Britain, the word candy in this generalized sense is rarely used. It survives only in dialect, or with reference to very specific confections, such as candied fruit. Even then it is threatened by the use of crystallized as a synonym for the latter. It is sad that this useful and venerable word has passed from the wider British vocabulary.

None of these circumlocutions arrive at a present-day definition of a sweet. Sweetmeat, which gave sweets their inter-connected meanings is too broad: it indicates many foods which have in common the use of sugar as an ingredient, and carries a sense of things preserved. But nor are sweets puddings. Puddings need bowls and cutlery; sweets are picked up in the fingers. Puddings are kept hot or chilled and must be consumed in a short space of time, or they go bad; sweets can be kept, for months or even years.

The occasions on which sweets were eaten in the past still resonate. The after-dinner mint has the same semi-ritual significance as sugar-coated spices at medieval banquets. A chocolate Santa Claus given to a child at Christmas (the archetypal feast in English tradition) recalls the subtleties which decorated the tables of feasts for the medieval nobility. Sugar banquets may be partially responsible for the image sweets still have in Britain, as ‘naughty but nice’, an indulgence between meals. Despite their relative cheapness, all are suffused with undertones of luxury, a little ‘something extra’. 

Sweets are small and conveniently portable. Eaten at any time of day or night, they can be given as special gifts, offered politely with coffee, scoffed 

furtively, sucked for hours, chewed and crunched, shared between children as special marks of favour, and (if you’re less than about eight years old), taken out of the mouth and inspected to see how disintegration progresses. Puddings are often large and are part of a structured meal, indicating to those at the table that it is nearly finished. Puddings are food and part of everyday life (as are most cakes and biscuits). Sweets make things special: they symbolize fun, celebration, status and love.

This gives sweets their enduring fascination. Many foods carry a weight of symbolism; but sweets are distinguished by the combination of long keeping, classification (at least in Britain) as mostly suitable for children, and being technically demanding. They reflect a long use of sugar as luxury, medicine and preservative. The keeping qualities of sweets, and their special packaging, means they can be treasured, a visible reminder of a special event or person. Emphasis on sweets as something for children leads to the development of particular aspects, such as fantastical shapes or strange flavours and textures. Introduction of new ingredients, advances in technology and changing fashion lend a gloss of novelty to an underlying tradition which is strongly conservative.