Cotton candy
confectionery
Cotton candy, also known as candy floss (candyfloss) and fairy floss, is a spun sugar confection that resembles cotton. It is made by heating and liquefying sugar, and spinning it centrifugally through minute holes, causing it to rapidly cool and re-solidify into fine strands. It usually contains small amounts of food flavoring and it naturally bears the color of the sugar it is made of, often altered with food coloring.
It is often sold at fairs, circuses, carnivals, and festivals, served in a plastic bag, on a stick, or on a paper cone.
It is made and sold globally, as candy floss in the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, New Zealand, and South Africa, and as fairy floss in Australia. Similar confections include the Chinese longxusu, the Korean kkul-tarae and the Iranian pashmak.
History
Several sources track the origin of cotton candy to a form of spun sugar found in Europe in the 19th century. At that time, spun sugar was an expensive, labor-intensive endeavor and was not generally available to the average person. Others suggest versions of spun sugar originated in Italy as early as the 15th century.
Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by dentist William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton, and first introduced to a wide audience at the 1904 World's Fair as Fairy Floss with great success, selling 68,655 boxes at 25¢ ($8.96 today) per box.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cotton candy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.