About the nastiest of all candies are the licorice and the chocolate
conglomerations. Glue, molasses, brown sugar, plaster, and lampblack, are
among their beauties, with, for the latter, just sufficient real chocolate
to give them a possible flavor. Licorice is cheap enough and nasty enough,
but the addition of refuse molasses, glue, and lampblack, which is no
unusual matter, makes it still more repulsive.
Metcalf & Company, extensive wholesale and retail druggists, kindly gave
me the figures of cost on the first, second, and lower grades of gum
arabic, glucose, etc. The first quality of gum arabic costs, by the cask,
about sixty to seventy-five cents per pound; the lowest about twenty-two.
There is a new manufacture in New York, with a "side issue," wherein they
necessarily turn out large quantities of glucose,--refuse from grain,--and
this is sold for eight to thirteen cents a pound, to confectioners. It is
much better than glue, but still the glue is used to-day, and I have on my
table at this moment a sample of "gum drops" made this week in Boston from
cheap glue, brown sugar, and a little Tonka bean flavor. The Tonka bean
represents vanilla. These cost thirteen cents a pound, and are sometimes
known, with the mucilage or glucose drops, to wholesale buyers, as "A. B."
drops, to distinguish them from pure gum arabic. The unfortunate consumer,
however, is not informed regarding the difference.