Parma Violets
British confectionary
Parma Violets are a British violet-flavoured tablet confectionery manufactured by the Derbyshire company Swizzels Matlow, named after the Parma violet variety of the flower. The sweets are hard, biconcave discs, similar to the Fizzers product from the same company but without their fizziness. Swizzels Matlow have also released a line of Giant Parma Violets.
Ingredients include sugar, stearic acid, modified starch, glucose syrup, and anthocyanin.
Precursors
The petals of violets have long been used in herbalism for their medicinal properties, even mentioned by Dioscorides. "Violet tablets", sugary lozenges flavoured with violets, were made before 1620. During the eighteenth century, crushed violet petals, rosewater, and sugar were combined to make an early type of confectionery known as flower pastry. These could be used for flavouring a cake, or moulded into pastils and eaten as sweets. In the Edwardian era, violet-flavoured chocolate and liquor were used to relieve sickness.
Description
Parma Violets were created in 1946 by the Derbyshire company Swizzels Matlow.
“Parma Violets” enters the record as british confectionary. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Parma, Violets and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16966119. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1620 and 1946.
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