DrPhill wrote:I would not eat the other either. What is it with this 'cover everything in sugar' theme? They look like nice ingredients until the 'candy coating'...
We don't cover everything in sugar; that would be ridiculous. But I'm sure we've tried. It's been said that the US propensity for sweetening things (if it's really all that true) can be traced to settler contact with northeast woodland tribes who widely eschewed salt: they deemed it bitter and even poisonous, using maple sugar instead as a seasoning. The idea caught on, and Boston Baked Beans is without a doubt a direct inheritance of that exchange. To be fair, one of my favorite pork roasts involves apples and sweet-and-sour sauce, with a hint of garlic - pork has an affinity for sweetness and for fruits like apples, plums, pears and peaches - but I wouldn't dream of doing that with beef.
But on a practical level alone it takes sugar if you want those nice clumpy nuggets. In the US, candied popcorn itself probably started in the early 19th century. The commercial popcorn-and-peanuts product Cracker Jack is the classic, emerging at the end of the 1800s. It was the dominant - perhaps the only - brand of its kind for a long time, and it's still around; I knew it well as a kid, back when the Earth's crust was cooling. Unless they've changed the recipe, Cracker Jack is less sweet, more molasses-flavored. At home we would make popcorn balls on special occasions, and these were held together with a slightly sticky but light candying. Those and Cracker Jack were considered mainly kids' fare (with every box of Cracker Jack you got a free toy!), and they were pretty much the whole game for candied popcorn, so far as I was aware; otherwise popcorn was, and typically still is, simply eaten buttered. Then in the 60s came Screaming Yellow Zonkers, which heralded the downfall of the counterculture by monetizing it as pop fashion: its marketing themes were inspired by shades of Sgt. Pepper, Peter Max, and all that - "Psychedelic Lite", if you like. I myself never encountered the brand until the early 70s, I think. Anyway, the product inside the box changed the commercial game not only in confining itself to refined sugar - quite the change from the venerable and molasses-driven Cracker Jack - but also in having a distinctly buttery thing going on as well. It was an unusual flavor combination for the time and
very addictive, and since the general concept was now acceptable adult fare, with that the floodgates were opened, and the variety of commercial offerings has increased ever since. Again, though, it's not all sugar-coated; there are plenty of savory-flavored commercial products as well, but in that case of course the popcorn is dry and loose. My personal preference would be for the savory, but I'm not much of a snacker.
It just occurred to me that Screaming Yellow Zonkers was very probably an insidious backlash aimed at those of us discovering brown rice, granola and miso for the first time. As someone once snapped at me, "I'm not paranoid; I'm simply in possession of the facts."
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Balochi musician