‘Tis the Season for Peppermint
From Peppermint Mochas at Starbucks to Peppermint Bark at Williams-Sonoma and the Christmas classic candy canes, ‘tis the season for everything to be coming up peppermint. According to this comprehensive 2016 Epicurious piece, the peppermint plant is native to Europe and the Middle East. As for the origin of candy canes, the piece points to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets” saying that " a local choirmaster in Cologne, Germany, sometime around 1670, was looking for a way to keep rowdy young people quiet while they were watching the live Nativity, and asked a local confectioner to create a special hard candy for the kids to keep busy on for a while. It was shaped like a cane—or, more to the point, a shepherd's staff.” And there’s more…until it’s all debunked later in the piece.
And that brings us to Bob McCormack who seems to be the inventor of the candy cane. Here on the GPB website, watch origin story of the world’s biggest candy cane factory…the place where red-and-white-striped candy was put into a machine that twisted it and bent it into a cane.
Peppermint is one of the best scents and tastes of the season - here’s our edit of all things peppermint and candy cane. As with so much on here, if you click through and buy something, we may get a commission.
