As a kid, I always imagined
the marshmallow to be some kind of plant. I remember being surprised to
learn that that stuff in the rocky road ice cream, that I just dropped in my
hot chocolate, that I’m roasting over the fire, was not actually from a plant. Later on I was surprised again to learn that the marshmallow is indeed a plant,
no matter what it is that we eat as a confection.
Althaea officinales, aka the marshmallow plant
The marshmallow is a
nice looking green plant with white flowers, indigenous to the Mediterranean
region. The first people to use it for anything were the ancient
Egyptians, who found it to make nice decorations, and who also mashed up its
flowers, roots and leaves for herbal medicine. It was used to deal with
irritated mucous membranes and different kinds of ulcers. There was also a kind of ancient confection
that they Egyptians developed, made from the roots of the plants, that evolved
into the common Middle Eastern confection called halva, as well as what we know
as the marshmallow today.
The ancient Egyptian
idea was to boil down the pith contained within the stem of the plant until it
turned into a syrup. When it was dried out, you had something resembling
the modern marshmallow. A 19th-century
French recipe added egg whites, following a resurgence in the candy’s
popularity. The egg white recipe produced more of the product with less
work, so sales boomed. Another method
used gelatin, and still another brought in corn starch. This was industrial food-making, and the
method was easy to copy. Marshmallow’s popularity was reborn in the
industrialized world.
Industrialization further
changed the process. After World War II, Greek-American confectioner Alex
Doumakes came up with a process to produce even more marshmallows. His
mechanized process is where the candy we think of as the marshmallow today came
from. These were the first cylindrical,
puffy marshmallows, sometimes colored, sometimes flavored. They could be
shaped into anything, and found their way into all kinds of candies. The most popular ones are the marshmallow
peeps, which are so common during Easter.
A more familiar marshmallow, these days
This new marshmallow
marked the point where they no longer used the marshmallow plant anymore.
Instead of sap from the marshmallow flower, Doumakes’ marshmallow recipe
involves only gelatin, egg whites and sugar. The classic marshmallow was
strictly vegetable, but the modern one includes animal products, though there
are vegan marshmallows that use agar (a jelly-like substance derived from
algae) instead of egg whites and gelatin. Without the addition of
thickeners like gelatin or xanthan gum, the spongy marshmallow is not possible,
and you’re left with marshmallow creme, which also has its uses, often in ice
cream or the famous Marshmallow Fluff.
The modern marshmallow plant?
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