Dr. Tastegood

Sugar was once a rare and expensive medicine, and for a long time you’d buy it by prescription at an apothecary’s shop. Apart from their belief that sugar had laxative and stimulant properties, doctors noticed that if a medicine tasted really vile, sweetening made it easier to swallow. “A little sugar makes the dose go down,” as the saying goes.

So some old-fashioned candies were originally prescription drugs, as it were. One, rare in this country but still common enough in England, is the oddly named barley sugar, which used to be prescribed for colds. There’s supposed to have been some actual barley in it at one time, but basically barley sugar is a hard, clear form of sugar candy--much like modern cough drops, so it would at least have soothed your throat a little.

When sugar cane plantations were established in the Caribbean in the 17th century, breaking Egypt’s near-monopoly on sugar production, sugar became cheap and Europeans started demanding a little sugar without the dose. Barley sugar emerged as a candy eaten for pleasure. In those unsophisticated days, a plain, unflavored lump of sugar was a thrill.

Oddly, barley sugar was first known to Europeans in technological, rather than medical, contexts, under a name which came by way of medieval Byzantium from the Persian word pa^ni^d. The earliest recipe for penidia appears (along with a sesame-flavored version called sisami compositio) in the Mappae Claviculae, a 12th-century collection of dye and metallurgical formulas.