Sesame seed candy

The term "sesame candy" may also refer to sesame halva or ufuta.

Sesame seed candy is a confection of sesame seeds and sugar or honey pressed into a ball, bar or wafer. It is popular across East Africa, Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, as well as in some European countries and Australia. The texture may vary from chewy to crisp. It may also be called sesame (seed) candy/bar/crunch; sesame seed cake may refer to the confection or to a leavened cake or cookie incorporating sesame.

By location

Ancient Greece, Rome and Byzantine Empire

Similar foods are documented in Ancient Greek cuisine: itrion (ἴτριον) was a thin biscuit/cake made with sesame seeds and honey, the Cretan koptoplakous (κοπτοπλακοῦς) or gastris (γάστρις) was a layer of ground nuts sandwiched between two layers of sesame crushed with honey. Herodotus also mentions "sweet cakes of sesame and honey", but with no detail. The kopte sesamis (κοπτὴ σησαμίς), or simply κοπτὴ, was a cake made from pounded sesame; the ingredients suggest that it was similar to the modern Greek pasteli.

In the Byzantine Empire, a sesame sweet, regarded as the ancestor of the modern Greek pasteli, was mentioned by various writers such as John Tzetzes and Theodore Prodromos, who called it sesamous (σησαμοῦς), stating that it was ordinarily eaten. John Choumnos says that this sweet was eaten at weddings, for fertility and good offspring, just like it is eaten today in Greece.