Pour yourself a handful of jelly beans and you're holding a little edible time capsule. Those glossy, chewy pebbles have travelled through Ottoman kitchens, Civil War-era candy shops, a Californian ice cream parlour and the Oval Office before landing in your lolly bowl. Grab a scoop of your favourites and let's dig into the surprisingly rich (and occasionally disputed) history of the jelly bean.
Two Candies Walk Into a Confectioner's Kitchen
Nobody can point to a single inventor and say "there, that's the moment the jelly bean was born." Instead, most confectionery historians believe the jelly bean is the happy result of two much older sweets colliding. Its soft, chewy centre is widely thought to be a descendant of Turkish delight, a jelly-like sweet whose exact origins are genuinely murky. One popular story credits an 18th-century Istanbul confectioner named Bekir Effendi with the invention, though the truth is nobody can verify it with certainty.
The jelly bean's hard, glossy shell, meanwhile, is believed to owe a debt to Jordan almonds, the sugar-coated almonds that have been served at weddings and celebrations for centuries. Coating a soft centre in layer after layer of hardened sugar syrup is done through a technique called "panning," which confectioners in 17th-century France used to sugar-coat almonds. Put a Turkish delight-style jelly centre through that same panning process, and you're most of the way to a jelly bean.
A Civil War Care Package? Maybe.
Here's where the story gets fuzzy, and we think it's more fun to admit that than to pretend otherwise. A well-worn tale credits Boston confectioner William Schrafft with popularising jelly beans around the time of the American Civil War, supposedly urging people to send them in care packages to Union soldiers. Some food historians, including Susan Benjamin, have pointed to an old Schrafft advertisement as evidence for this. Other historians are more sceptical, noting that solid documentary proof is thin on the ground, and that soldiers were probably more likely to be receiving Necco Wafers than jelly beans. So take the Civil War connection as a charming "maybe" rather than a confirmed fact.
What we do know for certain is that jelly beans were an established penny candy by the late 1800s. The first confirmed printed use of the term "jelly bean" turns up in 1886, and the word had become common enough to earn its own entry in Webster's dictionary by 1905.
From Penny Candy to Easter Basket Icon
Jelly beans have led something of a double life. In the 1920s, "jelly bean" was also slang for a flashy, not-terribly-substantial young man about town (F. Scott Fitzgerald even wrote a short story called "The Jelly-Bean" in 1920 poking fun at the type). Thankfully, the candy's reputation held up rather better than the slang did.
By the 1930s, jelly beans had found their true calling: Easter. Their egg-like shape made them a natural fit for the holiday, and bakers began using them to decorate cakes and fill Easter baskets alongside chocolate bunnies. Today jelly beans are the second most popular Easter treat in the United States, trailing only chocolate eggs and bunnies, and they're a firm favourite in Australian lolly bags year-round.
The Rolls-Royce of Jelly Beans
For most of their history, jelly beans only had flavour in their sugary shell, with a plain, neutral centre. That changed in 1976, when Los Angeles candy distributor David Klein pitched Herman Rowland, president of the Oakland-based Herman Goelitz Candy Company, on an idea: a "Rolls-Royce" of jelly beans, small and intensely flavoured all the way through, made with natural ingredients. The company ran with it, and that northern summer, eight new flavours hit the shelves: Very Cherry, Tangerine, Lemon, Green Apple, Grape, Liquorice, Root Beer and Cream Soda.
Klein named the new line "Jelly Belly" as a nod to blues musician Lead Belly, and designed the brand's now-famous red and yellow logo. The very first bags were sold at an ice cream parlour called Fosselman's in Alhambra, California. It was a small beginning for what would become one of the most recognisable jelly bean brands in the world.
The Jelly Bean President
No history of the jelly bean is complete without Ronald Reagan. Back in 1966, while running for Governor of California, Reagan took up jelly beans as a way to help him quit pipe smoking, and the Herman Goelitz company began sending a monthly shipment to his office. When the Jelly Belly brand launched in 1976, it was folded into those shipments, and by 1978 Reagan's supply was Jelly Belly through and through. His personal favourite? Liquorice.
Once Reagan reached the White House, the association exploded. A specially developed blueberry flavour completed a patriotic red (Very Cherry), white (Coconut) and blue (Blueberry) trio, and around three and a half tonnes of these were shipped to Washington, D.C. for his 1981 inauguration. Jars bearing the Presidential Seal became a signature gift for visiting dignitaries, and a jar of Jelly Belly beans still sits aboard the retired Air Force One on display at the Reagan Presidential Library today.
Fun Jelly Bean Facts
- Making a single jelly bean the traditional way takes anywhere from six to twenty-one days, thanks to the many layers of sugar syrup applied during panning.
- According to National Confectioners Association research, strawberry is America's favourite jelly bean flavour, followed by cherry, grape, lemon and liquorice.
- About two-thirds of jelly bean eaters happily mix all their flavours together in one handful, while the other third sorts by colour first.
- The word "jelly bean" was slang for a stylish but shallow young man in the 1920s, long before it was purely a lolly.
- Jelly beans didn't get their Easter association until the 1930s, decades after they first appeared as a candy.
A Sweet Ending
From a mysterious Ottoman sweet-maker to a Boston candy man, a Californian distributor with a big idea, and a jelly-bean-loving American president, the jelly bean has picked up an unlikely cast of characters on its way to your lolly jar. Next time you tip a handful into your hand, spare a thought for the centuries of confectionery tinkering that got it there. And if you can't decide whether to sort by colour or just dive in flavour-first, don't worry, there's no wrong way to enjoy a jelly bean.
References
- National Geographic. A Bowl Full of Jelly Bean History.
- WBUR News. For Easter, a Trip Back to the Jelly Bean's History in Boston.
- National Confectioners Association. Trend Watch: Jelly Beans.
- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. Jelly Belly® Jelly Beans and Ronald Reagan.
- Wikipedia. Jelly Belly.