Marsh Mallows

Have you ever wondered where those yummy little confections we know as marshmallows come from?  Well today they come from manufacturers and are usually made with things like sugar or corn syrup, dextrose, gelatin, and water.

But according to Wikipedia, the use of marsh mallow plants (which some claim have medicinal properties) to make candy dates back to ancient Egypt!  

The use of marshmallow to make a candy dates back to ancient Egypt, where the recipe called for extracting sap from the plant and mixing it with nuts and honey. (Another pre-modern recipe uses the pith of the marshmallow plant, rather than the sap. The stem was peeled back to reveal the soft and spongy pith, which was boiled in sugar syrup and dried to produce a soft, chewy confection.)^[2] Candymakers in early 19th century France made the innovation of whipping up the marshmallow sap and sweetening it, to make a confection similar to modern marshmallow. The confection was made locally, however, by the owners of small candy stores. They would extract the sap from the mallow plant's root, and whip it themselves. The candy was very popular but its manufacture was labor-intensive. In the late 19th century, French manufacturers devised a way to get around this by using egg whites or gelatin, combined with modified corn starch, to create the chewy base. This avoided the laborious extraction process, but it did require industrial methods to combine the gelatin and corn starch in the right way.

We have lots of marsh mallow plants near the waters edge on our property.  They love having their roots in very wet ground!  And each morning, their delicate pink and white blossoms open up to greet the day, but when evening comes, they curl up and say goodnight until the next day...

How fitting that something so pretty could be turned into something so yummy, and apparently even good for you too!  Maybe I'll have to find an old marshmallow recipe and try and make some the old fashioned way!