The History of the Jelly Bean

With Easter right around the corner, being the curious sort about what jellybeans had to do with the holiday, I looked into their history.

No Easter basket is complete without a sprinkling of jellybeans—though, to be fair, these chewy little tidbits aren’t America’s top pick in Easter basket candy. Number one is the chocolate bunny, of which 90 million are produced every year, and number two is the appalling, but popular, marshmallow Peep, now available in the form of chicks, rabbits, and eggs. The jellybean trails behind in third place, but it’s still a pretty hefty third. Collectively, every Easter, we munch up 16 billion of them.

Jellybeans have been a year-round treat for well over a century—though no one knows just exactly when they first arrived on the American candy scene. They’re believed to be the offspring of a pair of classic candies: Jordan almonds—those tooth-cracking, sugar-coated goodies so popular as wedding favors—and Turkish Delight, the sugar-powdered jelly candy that was Edmund’s downfall in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Jordan almonds, originally in the form of nuts coated with honey, are believed to date back to ancient Rome. By the 15th century, after the introduction of sugar to European kitchens, the nuts were coated instead with a hard, shiny sugar casing—by way of a prolonged process called panning, in which up to 30 different layers of sugar syrup are applied one on top of the other, each only about a tenth as thick as a human hair. (See What Are Sugarplums Anyway?)

The origin of Turkish Delight is a mystery. However, a common story attributes it to Bekir Effendi, an 18th-century Turkish confectioner, said to have invented a jelly-like candy flavored with rosewater and dusted with powdered sugar. And as for who first got the bright idea of combining the almond’s hard sugar coating and the Delight’s squishy innards to produce the jellybean, nobody knows that either.

One commonly cited (but unconfirmed) story claims that jellybeans were around by the time of the Civil War, when William Schrafft, a Boston candy maker, encouraged families on the home front to send them as treats to the Union troops. While the Civil War connection is in doubt—it’s more likely that the Yanks got Necco Wafers—we do know that jellybeans were a popular penny candy by the late 19th century, and were common enough by 1905 for the word “jellybean” to have made it into Webster’s dictionary. By 1915, it had even made it into slang as a pejorative term for a weak and worthless male. The star of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 short story, “The Jelly-Bean,” is lackluster Jim Powell, an aimless pool-hall loafer.

If you’re going to pick one color from the handful of beans in your basket, chances are it’s red. Everyone, it turns out, likes red and pink candies best, and jellybeans are no exception. According to University of Oxford psychologist Charles Spence, this is most likely due to the way food color affects our sense of taste. Red jellybeans may have an edge because we tend to see red foods as sweeter than they actually are – unlike green foods, which we tend to view as sourer. (For more on food color and taste, see The Plate’s What’s the Matter With Blue Chicken?)

Sweet though it may be, red isn’t for everybody. Ronald Reagan, a famous jellybean fan, took up jellybean-eating in the 1960s in an attempt to wean himself away from smoking. For his 1981 presidential inauguration, the grateful Jelly Belly company sent a congratulatory 2 1/2 tons of jellybeans to Washington, D.C., patriotically colored red, white, and blue. Perversely, the president’s favorite jellybean was none of the three. It was black. Reagan liked licorice.

Credit: The History Channel