Sputar Permen

"Candy. A term derived from the Arabic qandi, meaning a sugar confection. In the USA it is a general term for sweets of all kinds; in Britain it is used in a more restricted range of meanings, notably to indicate sweetmeats coated or glazed with sugar."
---Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford Univeristy Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 129)
[NOTE: This source has much more information than can be paraphrased here. Ask your librarian to help you find a copy. It also contains separate entries for specific types of candies.]

"All of the peoples of antiquity made sweetmeats of honey before they had sugar: the Chinese, the Indians, the people of the Middle East, the Egyptians and then the Greeks and Romas used it coat fruits, flowers, and the seeds or stems of plants, to preserve them for use as an ingredient in the kind of confectionery still made in those countries today. Confectioner and preserves featured in the most sumptious of Athenian banquets, and were an ornament to Roman feasts at the time of the Satyricon, but it seems that after that the barbarian invations Europe forgot them for a while, except at certain wealthy courts were Eastern products were eaten...At the height of the Middle Ages sweetmeats reappeared, on the tables of the wealthy at first...In fact the confectionery of the time began as a marriage of spices and sugar, and was intended to have a therapeutic or at least preventative function, as an aid to digestive troupbes due to the excessive intake of food which was neither very fresh nor very well balanced...guests were in the habit of carrying these sweetmeats to their rooms to be taken at night. They were contained in little comfit-boxes or drageoirs...."
---History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat [Barnes & Noble Books:New York] 1992 (p. 565-6)
[NOTE: This book has an excellent chapter on the history of confectionery and preserves. Ask your librarian to help you find a copy.]

"Candy...The ancient Egyptians preserved nuts and fruits with honey, and by the Middle Ages physicians had learned how to mask the bad taste of their medicines with sweetness, a practice still widespread. Boiled "sugar plums were known in the seventeenth-century England and soon were to appear in the American colonies where maple-syrup candy was popular in the North and benne-seed [sesame seed] confections were just as tempting in the South. In New Amersterdam one could enjoy "marchpane," or "marzipan," which is very old decorative candy made from almonds ground into a sweet paste. While the British called such confections, "sweetmeats," Americans came to call "candy," from the Arabic gandi, "made of sugar," although one finds "candy" in English as early as the fifteenth century...Caramels were known in the early eighteenth century and lollipops by the 1780s..."Hard candies" made from lemon or peppermint flavors were polular in the eary nineteenth century...A significan moment in candy history occured at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, where "French-style" candies with rich cream centers were first displayed...But it was the discovery of milk chocolate in Switzerland in 1875 that made the American candy bar such a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century."
---Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, John F. Mariani [Lebhar-Friedman:New York] 1999 (p. 54-5)
[NOTE: This source has much more information than can be paraphrased. Ask your librarian to help you find a copy. It also contains separate entries for specific types of candies.]

Why are confections sometimes called "sweetmeats" in England? Laura Mason, British confectionery history expert, explains:

"The anamolies in our own language are due to the origin of sweets or sweeties...as diminutives of sweetmeat. This word, still not entirely obsolete, was in common use for over 400 years to the end of the nineteenth century. The suffix-meat has an archaic meaning of food in the widest sense (surviving in the phrase 'meat and drink'), so sweetmeat simply means a sweet food...To the inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England, sweetmeats were sugary foods in general, including pieces of flavoured candy and sugar-covered nuts and spices, products of medieval theories on the medicinal value of sugar, as well as dishes which used sugar as one ingredient amongst many, for structure, sweetness and an air of the exotic...Medieval feasts had provided several roles for sweetmeats."
---Sugarplums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets, Laura Mason [Prospect Books:Devon] 2004 (p. 22)
[NOTE: We highly recommend this book if you need details on the history of all sorts of English candies.]