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Many of us favor recipes with minimal ingredients. Quick cooking can bring a meal to our table or a snack to our lips with little fuss. Entire cookbooks have been written on the subject of cooking with 5 ingredients or less. So, how does one deal with something that is the product of only one ingredient? That, in essence, is the definition of cotton candy.

Cotton candy is an enigma, really. It is sugar. That's it. Plain and simple, cotton candy is the definition of a high sugar treat because, in reality, it is nothing more than sugar, with a little air thrown in for good measure. For those of us with a sweet tooth, we may find ourselves addicted to chocolate, loving chewy caramels or savoring a tingling peppermint. But no matter how we may have arrived at our current favorite sweet treat, most of us had an encounter or two with the childhood favorite of cotton candy. We all have at least one childhood memory of creating a gooey, sticky mess on our face, in our hair and all over our clothing with the candy made famous at school picnics and community fairs throughout time.

It takes a cotton candy machine to make cotton candy. You can't whip sugar by hand with any real hope of creating the misty cone of cotton candy. The first electric machine for producing cotton candy was patented in 1897 by W. J. Morrison and J. C. Wharton in Nashville, Tennessee. The premise was simple. It involved a rotating pan which contained melted sugar. Through the use of centrifugal force, the melted sugar was spun around until the sugar formed thread-like filaments along the side of the pan. A cardboard cone was used to collect the sugar threads as they spun around and formed a beehive of airy sugar that could be pulled off, licked and simply eaten right off the cone.

Most of the elements necessary to create cotton candy involve everything except something that ends up being edible. To produce the spun threads of sugar you must start with heat to melt the sugar to a liquid form. The sides of the cotton candy machine must have a collection of very small holes. The centrifugal force operating on the spinning head of the machine in action will force the liquid sugar through the holes to form the thread-like strands. From here it is a simple matter of collected the sugar threads on the cone or in a bowl and handing it over to an excited child (or an adult who craves his sugar high) to devour with wild abandon.

It's not often a person can start with a single ingredient, in this case, sugar, and work with it in such as way as to create a new product, in this case, cotton candy. It is through its simplicity that cotton candy rose to such a level of popularity at fairs and circuses and neighborhood picnics.

It has been known by various names such as "Spun Sugar" or "Fairy Floss," but it all comes down to the basic, 100 percent injection of sugar. For this reason, cotton candy is a favorite of children, much less so of adults. At the point where an adult understands exactly what they are eating, common sense usually takes over and they reach for something with at least a modest amount of nutritional value for a treat. Nonetheless, cotton candy will hold its place in the childhood memories of generations of children for a long time to come.

Learn more about this author, Leann Zotis.
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