Fun fact of the day: lemon drops aren’t called ‘drops’ because they’re precipitation-shaped. (Though we’re still waiting for the day all the raindrops turn into lemon drops and gumdrops. Oh, what a world it would be!) In actuality, lemon drops are named after…well…do you want us to ruin it for you or not? Because truly — as Tallahassee-based candy company Lofty Pursuits demonstrates in the video posted on their YouTube channel — candymaking used to be a pretty involved process, and the name is connected to that process in a kinda boring way.
The machine above, called the Fruit Drop Roller, is from the late 1800s. Each roller pair weighs about 10 pounds, and is made primarily of brass — in fact, the video speculates that the rarity of remaining Fruit Drop Rollers is because of that brass, and the fact that many of the rollers were melted down as part of the war effort in the 1940s. That rarity hasn’t kept Lofty Pursuits from collecting over 100 roller pairs, though.
But enough history, the real joy of the video is watching the process of the candy being made from beginning to end.
- The first step is to pour the colored, flavored sugar syrup onto the candy cooling table. From there, it’s hand-kneaded on a hot table to even out the temperature and get it to a workable consistency.
Then comes the fun. The sugar “dough” is passed between the rollers in small batches, where it’s both pressed into its final form and cooled.
After a final cooling on the candy cooling table, the sheets of pressed drops are ready to be — that’s right — dropped into their final form. Literally dropped, from a height. It’s the traditional way to break the individual pieces of candy away from what the video calls the “flash” connecting them. “Cough drops, lemon drops, fruit drops,” the narrator says, “it’s just named after the action of how we separate the pieces.”
Check out the full video of the process below. And if you’re intrigued by the Nectar flavor that the video’s narrator describes as sometimes tasting like pound cake and sometimes almond, you can buy the actual drops at Lofty Pursuits’ online store. Certain fancy internet writers ordered a bag the second they finished the video, because it’s like they say, “there’s a sucker born every day.” Pun intended. Mostly.
