How jelly beans came about

Sunday will be a big day for candy lovers. According to the National Confectioner's Association, Easter is the second-greatest candy-eating day in America, edged out just barely by Halloween. Not even Valentine's Day comes close.

This year Americans will spend $2 billion on Easter candy, principally chocolate bunnies, marshmallow Peeps and jelly beans. Even though I'm partial to Peeps, and chocolate rabbits are the biggest sellers, the jelly bean is clearly the quintessential Easter treat. After all, its shape suggests an egg, a symbol of renewal and rebirth, which, the Oxford Companion to Food tells us, has played a significant role in Eastertime celebrations since even before Christianity.

More than 16 billion jelly beans will be manufactured this season, enough to fill a plastic Easter egg the size of Cape Girardeau's Hirsch Tower. It's almost as if Easter Sunday were National Jelly Bean Day, except there already is an official day set aside for that observance — April 22.

Perhaps surprisingly, the association of jelly beans with Easter goes back only to the 1930s. The origin of the jelly bean itself, however, goes back much further, more than 200 years in fact, to a confection called Turkish Delight, a national institution in Turkey. Made of starch and sugar, its soft, gummy consistency pretty clearly was the inspiration for the interior of a jelly bean.

The candy was invented by Bekir Effendi who set up a sweet shop in Istanbul in 1776. It's still there, not far from the New Mosque, dispensing the confection he created, which became so popular that it has spread around the world, though in Greece, I discovered, they call it Greek Delight. The name Turkish Delight, by the way, was given to the confection by an English traveler who took it back to Europe.

But unlike a jelly bean, Turkish Delight is merely dusted with powdered sugar. It does not have a firm shell. The hard coating of a jelly bean comes from a separate process called panning, which has been used for centuries in France to coat Jordan almonds. Leave it to an American to come up with the idea of combining the Turkish recipe with the French technique. That was William Schraft, a Boston confectioner who promoted jelly beans as the perfect candy for the Union Army during the Civil War because they had a long shelf life, were energy boosters and could be conveniently carried around in soldiers' pockets.

Before long, jelly beans became a mainstay of the penny candy counter, and because they were sold by weight have the distinction of being the first bulk candy. Like many simple foodstuffs, they have gone "gourmet" with the advent of the Jelly Belly line of exotically flavored jelly beans adored by Ronald Reagan, who kept a jar of them on his White House desk. He maintained you could glimpse something of a man's character by the way he eats jelly beans. He was probably right. I like them by the fistful.

Jelly Bean Biscotti

Dipped in coffee or, better yet, wine, these crunchy cookies make the perfect ending to an Easter dinner. The dough is based on a recipe from "The Joy of Cooking."

3 1/3 cups flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup corn or canola oil

1 1/4 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup miniature jelly beans

Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Beat together oil, sugar, eggs and vanilla until blended. Stir in flour mixture and jelly beans to form dough. Divide dough in half and on lightly floured surface form each half into a log approximately 11 by 2 inches. Place logs, well spaced, on a greased cookie sheet and flatten slightly. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes. Let cool and cut each log into 1/2-inch thick slices, cutting on the diagonal. Lay slices flat on cookie sheet and bake another 10 minutes. Turn slices over and bake another 5 to 10 minutes until lightly browned.

Tom Harte's book, "Stirring Words," is available at local bookstores. A Harte Appetite airs Fridays 8:49 a.m. on KRCU, 90.9 FM. Contact Tom at semissourian.com or at the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699.