I have recently moved to Germany. This has entailed visiting German grocery stores in the hopes of finding subsistence. On one of these visits, I found the candy aisle. I bought…a bag of cheerful-looking chocolate covered moon sort of candies.
Friends, they were bad.
Imagine the sort of quasi-congealed material you find inside gumdrops. Not really hard, not really soft. Now, imagine that it were banana flavored. Artificial banana flavored.
Cover that in chocolate.
I do not believe in wasting food, so I managed to eat the entire bag, but in the course of discussing this experience with many Germans, I have come to learn that nobody seems to like them, and, indeed, everyone seems to find them absolutely revolting. Yet they seem to be found in every grocery store!
In short, I had stumbled across the circus peanuts of Germany.
Anyway, in light of my recent experience, I have to ask– what is your local/regional equivalent of circus peanuts? The candy that nobody seems to like, is conceptually horrifying, and is inexplicably ubiquitous?
UK reporting in, and welcome to the Dope, @Saphir. Here we have something called Liquorice Allsorts, which has the advantage of being many sorts of awful. Basically it’s like eating competition entries, where the brief was: “Take this sickeningly sweet paste and these sheets of liquorice and see how many different shapes you can make with them”. For variety, there are also solid chunks of liquorice, and sugar coated blobs of intensely aniseed-flavored gel.
As a child with a sweet tooth I used to try to peel the liquorice off and throw it away, So they’ve been around and ubiquitous for over half a century.
In the US South we have these candies that come in tins(well, used to).
All shapes and colors of hard candies. Flavors doesn’t matter so much..I’m told they all taste the same.
Nasty hunk of sugar. And always in Grammas candy dish, melted slightly and stuck together. If you have a more frou frou Granny you might get the fake strawberry ones that are twist wrapped in shiny red paper.
In China a common snack is salted dried plums, or “mui” (pr: “moy”). Often found individually wrapped. There are two main types: chan pui mui, and li hing mui. The latter is drier and has a salty powdered coating, and is sometimes even ground into powder itself and used as a seasoning. The former is more like just a wrapped preserved plum, it’s “fresher” and sweeter. People generally like them, or they hate them.
You forgot to mention “turkish delight”, which was a sad let-down for millions of younger Narnia readers when they actually tried it. But yeah Licorice Allsorts are pretty nasty.
I like Turkish delight okay. On the other hand, I wouldn’t sell my soul for it. There’s a shop in the Pike Place Market in Seattle that has many different flavors.
Hehe, if other cultures have something as wrong as circus peanuts, I fear for them.
And I like circus peanuts, but they make no sense. A peanut shaped candy, orange in color. Does it taste like peanut or orange? Nope, banana. Dadaist candy.
I recently bought some haw candy at a Chinese grocery. The packages resemble firecrackers but the fun ends there: the food inside is like chalky disks but pasty, lacking even the momentary little brittle crack of Necco wafers. And nothing to taste at all.
Yeah, haw flakes are also definitely an acquired taste.
My mother would give them to me when we went to the store when I was a toddler, because it’s very little kid sized, and involved careful unwrapping and separating the discs; it would keep me fully occupied for a solid 10 minutes. I’ve never once gotten any of my white friends, or my white wife, to like it, or mui.
I would also compare them to small Necco wafers. There are definitely different levels of dryness to them, depending on their age, and the older, drier ones definitely get chalky, but the “fresher” ones have some give and a pleasant, fruity, slightly sour, sugary flavor. I’ve actually got a pack of rolls in my drawer right here by my computer. Having one right now. I like it, but I get that other people don’t.
Aus has the same sweets, yellow, banana shaped, they are called ‘bananas’. Since they are the same candy, they have the same affect: unwanted, yet strangely a second one follows the first.
Apparently I can eat half a bag of despair in a sitting.
Ok, so if they’re banana shaped, they already make more sense than circus peanuts. If they’re also yellow, they’re wayyyyyy more sensible than the circus peanut.
Actually, it looks like more respondents have stronger negative reactions to the candied gourd chunks called petha, but I’m going with soan papdi because it seems to carry more of a circus-peanut vibe of being widely disparaged but nonetheless tenaciously ubiquitous (in gift sweets assortments, for example).
