Liquorice allsorts, super-sweet, vibrant and precision-cut, have always been a favourite candy of mine, those tongue-tingling cubes, discs and cylinders the result of 20th-century advances in food colouring and flavouring, the liquorice spirals inspired by the Watson and Crick discovery of DNA in the 1950’s, perhaps? On any day of the week, I can dive into a plastic pocket of the lovely things and ENJOY. It all begs the question: how came the liquorice allsort about? Liquorice is a gummy by-product of Glycyrrhiza Glabra, a type of flowering bean plant, native to Africa, Asia and southern Europe. The flavour is the result of the addition of anise or aniseed, to the sweet gum. Legend has it that in 1899, a Bassett's sales representative tripped over and dropped a tray of sweet samples he was showing a client. In his haste to re-sort them, the client was intrigued by the idea of a mixture of sweets and the Bassett company began to produce a variety of allsorts, liquorice among them.
Possibly a food historian somewhere has charted the exact route from these ignominious beginnings to the varieties of LA we know today? Redolent of the colour-palettes and brushwork of Kandinsky and Mondrian, the functional forms of Bauhaus furniture and Lloyd-Wright architecture, these were truly the candies for the new century, as far from twee, lavender-scented Victoriana as Westminster is from the moon. By the 1930’s, advertising copywriter Frank Regan had created Bertie Bassett, a smiling, child-friendly version of writer Karel Capek’s machine man, ready to woo the kids of the 1900’s with. Whatever, all these thoughts of sweets has set my mouth a-watering, so I am off the purchase today’s plastic pocket and ENJOY.
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