Food History

JM of Write Anyway has introduced me to US Smarties. I was expecting something like Aussie Smarties; after all, our two countries are separated by a mere sliver of water. What I found was a bit of history. Food history, of course.

Firstly, the name of the sweet. Many Commonwealth countries have tended to have some overlaps in names for sweets. Not all, but enough so that Canadian Smarties and UK Smarties and Australian Smarties are virtually the same thing. Not quite, but close enough so that an Aussie traveling to London can buy them and feel less homesick. The closest thing to them in the US (as far as I can work out which – as we just discovered – is not always as much as I wish I could work out) are M&Ms. We also have M&Ms in Australia and they’re rounder and differently flavoured to Smarties. Also, you can’t get those really cute tubes of miniatures. (I love the miniature Smarties – the tiniest bit of chocolate in the thinnest and brightest crunchy shells.)

The difference between the naming is a mixture of the firms who make the confectionery and the splitting off from the Commonwealth that the US did a while back. Before it was the Commonwealth, in fact, way back in British Empire days. It has affected an extraordinary number of things, from paper sizes to football codes to confectionery.

The differences in flavours and ingredients is cultural – cultural links into the politics of rebellion, but the cultural differences were already marked when US independence happened. Australian tastes are different to UK, and we never rebelled. British sweets don’t quite taste the same as Australian, even if they’re named the same, so it makes sense that M&Ms and Smarties are different. Here’s a link to someone doing that analysis of difference.

Both M&Ms were introduced in the US in the 1940s, just when the US was beginning its amazing cultural outreach to the world. The UK Smarties were invented before then, in 1937. So they’ve never been the same thing, although I’d love to know if the US inventers used the UK sweets as a model. Or if it was a question of new technologies or other breakthroughs, like the ones that gave us many chocolate snacks in the 1800s.

US Smarties are equivalent to UK twizzles (I think), Canadian rockets and Australian fizzers. I don’t know if there never has been name overlap, or if the differences are just now. Jaime is going to conduct a formal tasting to check for overlap of the US with the Australian – I’ll let you know how it goes.

And why have I just skated over things without telling you more? Because this is a way big subject and I need to think about it. It’s not just a matter of matching names, it’s a matter of matching trade and travel and cross-influence. It’s a matter of matching the history of taste in several countries over a seventy year period.

This post is an alert, then, that the history of confectionery has some gorgeous side trails that I absolutely want to explore. Maybe I’ll do it in bits and pieces, as the data comes my way, in the post for instance, from understanding friends. Today’s big discovery is that our fizzers are very close to the US Smarties. Significantly closer, I suspect than our Smarties are with US M&Ms. Close enough so that when I opened my packet I expected to smell the chlorine of the swimming pool of my childhood*.

*For the record, it was the Harold Holt Memorial Pool. I never quite understood why it was so important to name a swimming pool after a Prime Minister who drowned.

food history, sweets, lollies, candy, confectionery, Smarties, M&Ms, fizzers, rockets, twizzles