I just read a reference to this in a book that I am reading – an odd fashion I have encountered in Rio de Janeiro in the past:
They eat Halls cough drops like candy. They even have local candies that have the same strong eucalyptis flavor of Halls. I’m certain that the local varieties would treat a cough nicely, but they weren’t made for that.
Teenaged girls carry the stuff around with them and offer it to friends.
Advertisements push the product as a candy and not as a cough remedy.
Yuck!
Are there other places where cough drops are candy?
Maybe my suburbaban Pennsylvania high school was just weird, but yes, to a lot of people cough drops were candy. They got passed around all the time to people who clearly didn’t need them. Then again, cough drops are little more than hard candy anyway, so it’s not surprising.
I knew a guy who would dissolve Hall’s in his coffee when he had a sore throat. BLEAAAH!
I’ve never known anyone to eat Hall’s as a candy, but I had relatives who traveled a lot, and they once brought me a bag of eucalyptus candy - I want to say it was from Holland. It didn’t taste at all like cough drops to me, though. There’s something else besides eucalyptus in Hall’s that makes it nasty.
I had a friend who did that. She even hooked me into doing it for a while but then it was like the eucalyptus built up in my system and I got this eucalyptus sinus headache thing. Apparently that doesn’t happen to her.
I like cough drops. When I was in school, a lot of people ate them because the teachers couldn’t really argue – they weren’t considered candy per se because how is a teacher supposed to tell on sight that you don’t have a sore throat?
Anyway, I adore menthol. I had a bug last week and a big bag of cough drops I got, and I’m eating the occasional one even though I’m over the bug.
I’ve gotten addicted to Hall’s while I’ve had some sort of cold and then couldn’t give them up afterwards, kinda turning them into a candy-type necessity for a while.
However, there are other occasional uses for them that I highly recommend. Or rather, I say someone else can definitely benefit from their application in certain circumstances where they aren’t really needed.
We didn’t use cough drops as candy in high school, but I did have one friend who carried around an Altoids container full of fennel seeds and passed them out liberally. Ahh, the rush of chomping down on a mouthful of fennel!
Smith Brothers (Wild?) Cherry Cough Drops were generally eaten like hard candies when i was a youngster. i faintly recall that was partly due to the very pleasant, non-mediciney taste, and also because a box of cough drops was sometimes cheaper then buying a candybar or bag of hard candies. (pennies counted, when you were a child way back then.)
I knew a kid in grade school who used to eat Halls all the time. This was a fairly strict Catholic grade school which banned gum and candy in general, but most teachers generally let him pop Halls all day long, so long as he didn’t share with the class. Wonder if he has any of his real teeth left these days…
Fennel seeds taste much like licorice. It is the defining flavor of Italian sausage. It’s also a popular ingredient in various kinds of curries. Some Indian restaurants have small bowls of both plain and candy-coated fennel seeds near their entrances for diners to use as after-dinner breath fresheners.
Eating Halls as candy is common in Spain, also. This is different from just eating a lot of cough drops. It’s like 2 friends will go into a candy store, one gets M&Ms and one gets Halls, and they both think they got a snack, if that makes sense. Halls are culturally considered candy, not medicine.
