For me, I was a wee lad of under 3. I was visiting a great aunt, and she had a bag of them on a table. I tried one and it hurt my teeth and tasted horrible. Never had another, and that was well more than 10 years ago.
My mother liked them, along with those vile jelly spearmint leaves. I’m sure that part of the appeal must have been that my sisters and I would not touch them after trying once!
Sometime in the last 10 years. I don’t know why, I’ve known since I was a kid I don’t like them; I suppose I just need a once-every-couple-of-decades reminder of how gross they are.
Many years ago I found a recipe that incorporated circus peanuts into an innocuous-seeming gelatin dessert. I gleefully whipped up a batch and brought it to the family Thanksgiving celebration, but didn’t tell anyone the “secret ingredient” until they’d tried it.
:dubious: “This tastes…familiar…but I can’t quite place it…”
I don’t have a particularly great memory most of the time, but for some reason, random, seemingly unimportant memories stick in my brain sometimes. The last time I ate circus peanuts is one of those. I was watching the film “The Falcon and the Snowman” in the theater with my brother. We’d stopped at a drugstore on the way to grab some munchies, and circus peanuts were one of the snacks we got. I have a very clear memory of eating a few of them during the film, thinking to myself, “I don’t really like these very much”, and then eating a few more to be sure. I was a kid, and it was candy after all, so it didn’t make much sense. But no, I definitely did not like them and stopped eating them. So, since “Falcon and the Snowman” was in the theater, it would have been 1985. Again, no idea why this memory has stuck in my mind; it wasn’t particularly traumatic or anything.
I would guess that Circus Peanuts are a very, very distant second/third to things like marzipan and licorice. But I can’t remember the last time I had a CP – probably as a kid.