See twelfth night cake .
kisses , a century ago, referred to a broad range of sweets. In the United States a candy kiss was any soft, mouth-sized bite of candy. Europeans also used the word “kiss” for small sweet confections; Germans called meringue by the French word baiser, and many Americans used the English translation “French kiss.” See meringue. In northern Europe, variations on “kiss” have been used since the nineteenth century for small sweets, in particular, the “choco-kiss,” a foamy marshmallow-like confection dipped in chocolate.
Today, Americans think of candy kisses as almost exclusively Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses. Yet Hershey was a latecomer to the foil-wrapped kiss business. The most popular foil-wrapped chocolate morsel of the early twentieth century was Wilbur Buds, first sold in 1894. H.O. Wilbur and Sons secured the trademark to “Buds” in 1906, so when Hershey first started manufacturing its competing product in 1907, it settled for the more generic “Kisses.”
Despite Wilbur’s head start, Hershey had advantages in manufacture and distribution. Wilbur Buds boasted a distinctive petal design on the base of the cone that required each piece to be individually molded. In contrast, the Hershey’s Kiss was flat on the bottom. When manufacture became fully automated in the 1910s, this advantage meant a machine could simply deposit the chocolate onto a moving conveyor belt. In 1921 new equipment automated the foil wrapping and also allowed for the inclusion of the paper “plume” (trademarked in 1924) that set Hershey’s Kisses apart.
The Hershey Chocolate Company grew rapidly, and soon the distinctive Kiss overtook all competitors as the best-known chocolate morsel. But it was not until 2001 that Hershey overcame legal objections and successfully established a trademark on the word “Kiss” as it applied to candy.
The original milk-chocolate Kisses have been joined by variations, beginning with gold-wrapped Kisses with Almonds in 1990, white-coated Hugs in 1993, and dozens of limited-edition and holiday variations. Today, Hershey manufactures some 29 billion Kisses a year.
See also candy packaging; hershey, milton s.; and hershey’s.
Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) is the chief city of the Indian state of West Bengal and the undisputed sweet capital of India, thanks to the Bengali people’s passion for mishti (sweets). Job Charnock, an English trader who set up a trading post in the area at the end of the seventeenth century, is the putative founder of the city. Under the British East India Company, Calcutta became the administrative and political capital of colonial India. During the nineteenth century, Calcutta reached its apogee as a center of culture, education, and the arts, a period that historians have come to call the Bengal Renaissance. After India gained independence in 1947, Calcutta became the capital of the state of West Bengal. In 2001 its name was officially changed to Kolkata, to reflect the Bengali pronunciation.
The sweets purveyor Girish Chandra Dey & Nakur Chandra Nandy still occupies the site where it opened in North Kolkata in 1845, and it retains its reputation for making excellent sandesh, a popular Bengali sweet prepared from chhana (fresh curd cheese) and sugar or palm-sugar jaggery.photograph by michael krondl © 2008
Bengali cuisine is noted throughout India for the sheer variety of its sweets, a phenomenon anchored in a long tradition. See india and mithai. Medieval Bengali narrative poems, such as the Chandimangalkabya, are replete with descriptions of meals both epicurean and minimal, and most end with dessert, which could be as basic as a bowl of warm milk sweetened with cane sugar or khejur gur (sugar derived from the sap of the date palm tree). Items such as pitha (sweet dumplings), payesh (rice pudding), naru (round confections of sweetened coconut, sesame, or evaporated milk), kheer (condensed, sweetened milk), and malpoa (fritters made with flour and condensed milk, flavored with fennel and cardamom seeds, and soaked in syrup) feature recurrently. In modern times, the hallmark of Bengali hospitality is the offering of sweets to any visitor, even the unexpected one. Kolkata reflects this in the numbers of sweetshops that flourish in every neighborhood. Many of these have proprietary names, derived from the original confectioner who established the business.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the work of the professional sweet maker or moira who set up shop in Kolkata and nearby towns has dominated the world of Bengali confectionery. The demarcation between homemade and store-bought sweets coincided with the city’s rapidly growing population and the widespread use of chhana (fresh curd cheese) as the primary ingredient. Manipulating this medium to create sweets of a remarkable range of textures is easier for professionals than for home cooks.
The two most famous Bengali sweets, sandesh and rosogolla, as well as a host of others like pantua, rajbhog, chamcham, and danadar are made with chhana. See rosogolla and sandesh. Sandesh, whose texture can be soft (narompak) or firm (karapak), is often enhanced with flavors like mango, lime, rose petals, date palm sugar, and even chocolate. Its creation is attributed to the confectioner Paran Chandra Nag, who opened a sweetshop in 1826 in the Bowbazar area of Calcutta. His son Bhim Chandra Nag added variety and flair to his father’s invention, and “Bhim Nag’s sandesh” remained an emblem of excellence for many years. He is also credited with creating a special sweet called ledikeni in honor of the then Vicereine, Lady Canning. See ledikeni. Soon, there were plenty of other confectioners to cater to the Calcutta clientele. The shop named after Girish Chandra Ghosh and Nakur Chandra Nandy is one such example. It still occupies the North Calcutta site where it opened in 1845 and retains its reputation as an excellent sandesh maker.
The other Bengali favorite, rosogolla (a literal translation being “a ball in syrup”), is said to have been created and marketed in 1868 by Nobin Chandra Das, who started business in the Calcutta neighborhood of Baghbazar. His son, K. C. Das, expanded the family enterprise and applied available technology to streamline the production process and ensure the safety of his products. Not content with that, he also created a new sweet called rosomalai, which is a rosogolla floating in a sweet milky sauce scented with saffron. Today, the K.C. Das logo from Kolkata is seen on tinned sweets exported to other countries. See nobin chandra das.
In the twentieth century, and especially after India’s independence, Calcutta expanded southward, and the growth of the middle class resulted in a demand for high-quality sweetshops in the newer neighborhoods. A new generation of entrepreneurs created fabled stores like Balaram Mullick & Radharaman Mullick, Sen Mahasay, Jalajoga, Banchharam, Jugal’s, and many others. Their confectioners, not content with simply reproducing traditional sweets or, in some cases, reviving items mentioned in early Bengali literature, experimented with new flavors and techniques to stir the increasingly globalized Bengali palate. The syrup for rosogolla, once made only with refined cane sugar, is now also created with date palm sugar, which is available in the winter. See palm sugar. Fruits exotic and native, like mango, raspberry, kiwi, peaches, litchis, and watermelon, lend their fragrance and flavor to sandesh. Bengal is the only region in India where mishti doi or sweet yogurt is part of dessert, and a shop such as Jalajoga was famed for its version, made with rich milk and sporting a dense, pinkish-brown top layer of cream. The great Bengali writer Tagore honored it with the poetic moniker payodhi.
The changing population of Kolkata is reflected in the ownership of some sweetshops. Non-Bengalis, especially Marwari traders from Rajasthan, constitute a significant community, and some of them have ventured into the sweet-making business with enormous success. Probably the best known is Haldiram, originating in Rajasthan and selling both sweet and savory products all over India. Ganguram, established in Calcutta in 1885 by a confectioner from Uttar Pradesh, is noted for both its sweets and savory items that can be eaten as a small meal. Stores like these not only sell the usual Bengali sweets, they also produce items originating in northern India—rich halvas and sweets made with flour, sugar, besan (chickpea flour), evaporated milk, and clarified butter instead of the ubiquitous chhana. Kolkata has welcomed them with open arms, and Bengalis have joyfully expanded their dessert universe.
kombucha is sugar-sweetened black tea fermented by a community of microorganisms into a tart, effervescent beverage, sometimes compared to sparkling apple cider. The fermented beverage kombucha is not to be confused with konbucha, a Japanese tea made from powdered konbu seaweed. Kombucha is typically produced by a symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY), generally referred to as a “mother,” which takes the form of a rubbery disk that floats on the surface of the tea as it ferments. The community of organisms can also be transferred via the kombucha liquid itself, which can generate a new mother.
The kombucha SCOBY incorporates yeasts that metabolize sugar into alcohol, and acetobacter, which metabolizes alcohol into acetic acid in the presence of oxygen. Lactic acid and other bacteria may also be present depending on the SCOBY. Because of its oxygen requirement, kombucha is always made in an open vessel with a broad surface area exposed to air. The alcohol and acetic acid levels in mature kombucha can vary widely, depending on time and environmental conditions. Most kombucha is classified as a nonalcoholic beverage, containing less than 0.5 percent alcohol, though some are now being made and marketed as alcoholic beverages with higher alcohol content. Sugar and caffeine levels also vary in mature kombucha.
Although its precise origins are unknown (it was likely first used in the region of Manchuria), kombucha has long enjoyed acclaim in many varied locales around Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, and has been widely promoted as beneficial to health. Its use has been growing in the United States since at least the mid-1990s. Originally, kombucha was not commercially available; it spread exclusively through grassroots channels as enthusiasts grew more mothers and sought to share them. Today kombucha mothers and kits are widely available in the United States, and kombucha has become a big business, with hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and dozens of commercial manufacturers, ranging from small local enterprises to multinational corporations.
Kool-Aid, an artificially flavored soft-drink powder, was invented in 1927 by American entrepreneur Edwin Perkins (1889–1961). Inspired by the success of the gelatin mix Jell-O and working in his mother’s kitchen, Perkins invented a method to remove the liquid from Fruit Smack, a beverage concentrate he had developed a few years earlier. See gelatin desserts. The story of Kool-Aid reads as the prototypical rags-to-riches narrative of American ingenuity and hard work. Perkins initially manufactured and sold Kool-Aid in his hometown of Hastings, Nebraska, moving the company to Chicago once the product was established. The family-held firm was sold to General Foods in 1953, and Kool-Aid now belongs to the Kraft Foods Group, which acquired it in 1995.
Although Kool-Aid has been sold in various forms, including liquid concentrates and presweetened mixes, its most popular guise is a paper-and-foil sachet containing an unsweetened powder composed of citric acid, salt, ascorbic acid, artificial (and sometimes natural) fruit flavor, artificial color, and additives such as maltodextrin, corn starch, calcium phosphate, and BHA. The consumer makes the beverage at home by adding water and either granulated sugar or a sugar substitute to the unsweetened powder. Although Kool-Aid is best known for its conventional fruit flavors like cherry, grape, lemon-lime, orange, raspberry, and strawberry, it has appeared in a number of exotic flavors with whimsical names and lurid colors, such as Purplesaurus Rex, Sharkleberry Fin, and Solar Strawberry-Starfruit.
Kool-Aid’s popularity comes from its vivid color and affordability. Perkins set the original price of the drink powder at 10 cents per package, and he reduced the cost to 5 cents during the Great Depression, keeping Kool-Aid well within financial reach of most American families. Sugar rationing during World War II limited both the production and sales of Kool-Aid, but the postwar era witnessed a boom that made Kool-Aid the generic name for any powdered soft drink in the United States. Kool-Aid’s appeal to the pocketbook and the eye has maintained its fame, and the beverage powder now has a global reach. Kool-Aid is currently manufactured in both the United States and Mexico, and the quintessentially American beverage is sold worldwide in flavors geared to local tastes.
As an unsweetened flavor powder, Kool-Aid can be used to make many things other than the soft drink for which it is intended, and Kraft Foods’s own website features recipes for popsicles, slushies, milk shakes, cakes, pie, and sorbet containing Kool-Aid powder. In addition, Kool-Aid’s concentrated acids and coloring suggest a surprisingly wide range of other uses. Cooks have developed delicacies such as deep-fried Kool-Aid balls (brightly colored doughnut holes) and koolickles (Kool-Aid pickles), which transform a savory, green dill pickle into a sweet, crimson treat. Outside the kitchen, Kool-Aid can be used for its artificial coloring to make lip gloss, brightly colored modeling dough, and inexpensive watercolors for children, as well as to dye Easter eggs, fabric, and even hair. Kool-Aid’s acidic composition lends itself to cleaning rust stains, removing chlorine from swimmers’ hair, and preventing the buildup of limescale in water systems.
The widespread use of Kool-Aid as beverage, dye, and household chemical attests to its firm foothold in American culture. Roadside Kool-Aid stands, for example, have been just as popular as lemonade stands in the United States in certain regions and periods. Unsurprisingly, Nebraska has chosen Kool-Aid as its state drink, and since 2007, Perkins’s hometown of Hastings has held an annual weekend festival called Kool-Aid Days, which boasts the world’s largest Kool-Aid stand and sponsors a Kool-Aid drinking contest and the Miss Kool-Aid Pageant. More broadly, Kool-Aid has gained notoriety in popular culture from several disparate sources. Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test documents the birth of the hippie movement by following countercultural figurehead Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. The book’s title refers to parties at which Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and their guests drank LSD-spiked Kool-Aid to induce a group trip in search of intersubjectivity. American college students continue this tradition, albeit in a less hallucinogenic way, by partying with punch that combines Kool-Aid with vodka or grain alcohol. More sinisterly, the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” a metaphor for unquestioning groupthink, arose from the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in which some 900 followers of cult figure Jim Jones committed mass suicide in Guyana by drinking a toxic punch composed of Kool-Aid (or, as many contend, its less popular competitor Flavor Aid), cyanide, and prescription sedatives. Kool-Aid is also famed for its marketing icon, the happy-go-lucky Kool-Aid Man. First introduced in 1954, the 7-foot-tall anthropomorphic pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid typically bursts through walls on hot summer days to the refrain of “Oh, yeah!” to offer refreshment in the form of Kool-Aid. The brand’s mascot has undergone several transformations over the decades, including a digital makeover in 2013 that introduced a Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram accounts, and a smartphone app that lets users insert the Kool-Aid Man into their own photographs.
Korea is a peninsular country located in northeast Asia, bordering China and Russia to the north with Japan across the sea to the east. While at present the peninsula is divided into the two states of South and North Korea, historically the peninsula has been governed by a single polity since at least the early tenth century c.e. Sweets in premodern Korea (before the twentieth century) held an important function in both rituals and entertainment. The primary sweetener was honey—often referred to as yak, meaning “medicine.” See honey. Fruit, glutinous rice, and azuki beans were also utilized for sweetness. See azuki beans. Some representative confections are ttŏk (rice cakes), yakkwa (fried honey cakes), suksilgwa (boiled candied fruits), and yakpap (medicinal rice). Presently, Koreans use the term han’gwa (Korean sweets) to refer to confections, with the exception of rice cakes.
Records of confections date back to the Three Kingdoms period (57 b.c.e.–668 c.e.), when an account was written concerning an ancestral rite held by King Suro (42–199) that included offerings of rice cakes and fruits. The subsequent Greater Silla (668–935) and Koryŏ (918–1392) periods saw two important developments that led to an increase in the number of confections and sweets. First, agriculture was greatly advanced, with more grains being produced, and second, Buddhist culture became prominent along with prohibitions against eating meat. Thus, more energy was put into specialized dishes, such as vegetarian fare, and confections. Buddhist practice also promoted the development of tea culture, and with that a class of confections known as tasik (foods for tea) became prominent. See buddhism and tea. The final premodern age was that of Chosŏn (1392–1910). This period was largely dominated by Confucianism, which emphasized the performance of various rites (especially marriage and ancestral rites) that required specific foods, including many sweets and confections. Sweets were generally consumed only during rites or on special days, although many exceptions existed. It was during this period that extensive records about sweets were kept, including recipe books that describe the types of sweets consumed and guidebooks that demonstrate precisely which sweets were offered in specific rites.
First among Korean sweets are rice cakes. They can be prepared in numerous ways and with many ingredients. Most commonly pounded glutinous rice is coated with azuki or roasted soybean powder; other varieties are made from steamed rice or glutinous rice wrapped around bite-sized pieces of fruits and nuts such as persimmons, apricots, chestnuts, or walnuts. A representative example is songpyŏn, glutinous rice cakes steamed on a bed of pine needles and stuffed with various ingredients such as sweetened chestnuts, honey, or sweet red azuki paste that yield different tastes and colors. Commonly made for the Harvest Moon Festival (the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, which falls in September or early October), these cakes were shared with neighbors as a means of extending goodwill and fostering communal harmony.
Yakkwa are part of a larger group of sweets known as yumilgwa, which are made from a mixture of kneaded grain flour, honey, and sesame oil that is pressed into various shapes and then fried in oil. The cooked cakes are sprinkled with various toppings such as pine nuts or sesame seeds. These fried treats were made in conjunction with auspicious occasions like marriages or sixtieth-birthday celebrations.
Suksilgwa are made by boiling fruits, nuts, or roots and then sweetening them with honey. There are two basic varieties of this treat. Ran refers to either fruits or roots that are boiled and then pounded until malleable before being covered in honey and sprinkled with coarsely ground pine nuts. Common examples include boiled chestnuts, jujubes, and ginger root. Ch’o are fruits boiled in honey-water and then sprinkled with either cinnamon powder or coarsely ground pine nuts, the most popular being boiled chestnuts and jujubes. Because they are so labor-intensive, suksilgwa were largely reserved for highly important occasions.
Yakpap also has a history dating to the Three Kingdom period: legend says that this sweet was offered to a crow that saved a king’s life by informing him of an assassin lying in wait. To make yakpap, glutinous rice is steamed thoroughly; before the rice cools, jujubes, chestnuts, sesame oil, honey, and soy sauce are mixed in. Yakpap was a staple for the celebration of the first full moon of the lunar New Year, but like many of the treats just described, it was not necessarily consumed by the family alone, but rather shared with neighbors. Sharing confections was commonplace in premodern Korea and reveals the importance of harmonic relations within the village. Even in today’s cosmopolitan Korea, an occasion such as moving into a new apartment is often marked by sharing ttŏk or another treat with one’s new neighbors, a custom harkening back to premodern Korea when reciprocity and mutual assistance were prominent cultural traits.
The twentieth century has brought tremendous change to Korean cuisine in general and to sweets as well. During the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), foodstuffs began to be commercially produced, and Western-style confections and candies were introduced. Following liberation and the Korean War (1950–1953), Western influence became even stronger thanks to the American presence in South Korea as well as to the foods—including both wheat flour and granulated sugar—that the United States provided as aid. In terms of sweets, the use of granulated sugar became common, and sweets began to mimic those in the West. One of the most well-known examples is the Choco Pie that was introduced in 1974 by the present-day Orion Confectionery Company. Interestingly, the Choco Pie is now said to be the most highly sought-after sweet in North Korea, perhaps demonstrating the dire situation of mass-produced sweets in the North. Traditional sweets remain popular and are frequently given as gifts and used in major life celebrations, such as marriages and birthdays.
See also chestnuts.
Krispy Kreme is a chain of doughnut shops based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Despite their name, these southern pastries are neither crispy nor creamy, but rather are sweet, yeasty, and light. Although Krispy Kreme is maligned in some places for the high sugar and fat content of its doughnuts, in the company’s home state of North Carolina, Krispy Kreme means more than just sweet indulgence; it is a cultural icon.
The company’s signature neon HOT NOW sign flashes red when an Original Glazed doughnut slides out of the fryer and down a conveyor belt through a sugar-syrup bath, signaling that the doughnuts are ready for customers. Even just the phrase HOT NOW causes Krispy Kreme lovers to salivate. Yet the doughnuts need not be hot and fresh to be loved—a few seconds in the microwave returns them to their original, sublime state.
The Krispy Kreme Doughnut Company began in 1934 when nineteen-year-old Vernon Rudolph and his uncle left their general store in Kentucky to sell doughnuts in Nashville, Tennessee. A river barge cook is said to have created their recipe, likely related to New Orleans’s yeast-raised beignets or German Fastnachts. In 1937 Rudolph opened his own Krispy Kreme shop in Winston-Salem and built it into a chain of family-owned stores, inventing an automated doughnut-making system. To ensure consistency, his proprietary recipe is still prepared only in the Winston-Salem mother plant; the dry mix is sent to more than 800 franchises in 23 countries around the world.
The basic recipe calls for a yeast-raised batter, which can include milk, butter, yogurt, eggs, vegetable shortening, and soy-based lecithin, as well as a plethora of chemical stabilizers. The Original Glazed doughnut, with 49 grams of sugar, weighs in at 190 calories, 100 from fat. However, many of the company’s more than 50 varieties include ingredients that boost the calorie count of each doughnut to a whopping 300 or 400 apiece. See doughnuts.
Krispy Kreme doughnuts have become a cult treat. They are featured at the North Carolina State Fair as a sandwich base for hamburgers or sloppy joes—a concoction that obviates the kosher certification of the Winston-Salem plant. They also provide a new sweet and salty take on ham biscuits when used as a vehicle for country ham.
The company advertises its mission as “To Touch and Enhance Lives through the Joy That Is Krispy Kreme” and sells that experience as much as the pastry. Since 1955 Krispy Kreme has provided sales kits for group fundraisers, and its green dotted boxes with a dozen doughnuts brought in over $32 million last year for schools, churches, and civic groups. The annual Krispy Kreme Challenge licenses the trademark for a charity run benefiting the North Carolina Children’s Hospital. Now in its tenth year, the race attracts more than 8,000 runners, who start at the North Carolina State University bell tower, run 2.5 miles to Raleigh’s downtown Krispy Kreme store, consume one dozen Original Glazed doughnuts, and run the 2.5 miles back.
Krispy Kreme doughnuts are so beloved in North Carolina that they feature in bucket lists. After being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Chris Rosati of Durham, North Carolina, decided to fulfill his long-time dream of hijacking a Krispy Kreme truck to toss out free doughnuts. The company provided its 75th anniversary Krispy Kreme Cruiser and 1,000 doughnuts for a day; as Rosati distributed doughnuts from the bus, he said each box offered “12 chances to make somebody happy.”
See also dunkin’ donuts.
kuchen is the German word for cake in general; within that term are many other designations for particular types of cakes. The menus of the German café-pastry shops known as Konditoreien traditionally offer small booklet menus listing Kuchen in subdivisions, depending on ingredients such as cheese, fruit, and cream. See café. Some cakes, simply because they are round and especially if they were prepared without any flour or artificial leavening, are classified as Torten. See torte. In Bialystok, Poland, Bialystoker kuchen was the name for the poppy seed and onion bread roll we call a bialy, probably the result of that city’s long commercial and political interaction with Germany, which added words to the local vocabulary.
In the United States, where so many classic baked treats have German origins, kuchen gradually has come to mean what we consider coffee cake or Danish (and which the Danes call Wienerbrød, Vienna bread). See coffee cake. These are most classically yeast-risen and moderately sweet cakes or buns accented with nuts, raisins, and aromatic spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. For some specialties, the yeast dough is folded with butter, as in puff pastry. See pastry, puff. Cinnamon rolls, crumb-topped flat twists known as bowties, braided pecan or almond rings, and what we call crumb cake (Streuselkuchen in German or, with apples, Apfelstreusel) are typical examples. See streusel. For convenience and time-saving, these coffee cakes are often leavened with baking powder or baking soda instead of yeast. Depending on the quality of other ingredients and care in preparation, these quick kuchen-coffee cakes-Danish-Vienna breads can be very good, although they are generally disappointingly dry and bland, since they lack the winey aroma and lasting moisture that yeast imparts.
See also breads, sweet; cake; germany; and scandinavia.
See gugelhupf.
See india.
Kyoto, Japan’s capital from 794 to 1868, enjoys special distinction for its traditional Japanese confectionery (wagashi). See wagashi. Tea masters recognized the excellence of Kyoto confectionery in the early 1600s: the term “Kyoto Sweet” (Kyōgashi) first appeared in 1627 in the tea diary Matsuya kaiki (Matsuya Record of Gatherings). Within a decade, when many Portuguese-inspired recipes were included in lists of the city’s “local products,” Kyoto had become a center for “Southern Barbarian Sweets” (nanbangashi), rivaling Nagasaki. See nanbangashi and japanese baked goods. By the end of the century, when the confectionery trade was fully established in Japan, Kyoto’s sweet makers had opened branch shops in Edo (Tokyo).
Many of the nation’s oldest confectioners are located or originated in Kyoto, including the venerable Kawabata Dōki, which has served the old capital for more than half a millennium. Kawabata Dōki, which began as a rice cake shop (mochiya), gained distinction after becoming a purveyor to the court in the late 1500s. Dōki produced chimaki (rice cakes or kudzu jelly wrapped in bamboo grass), and the shop became famous for its Flower Petal Cakes (hanabira mochi), which consist of a thin white rice cake folded over a small red cake next to a sliver of sweetened burdock root and white azuki bean paste (an) flavored with miso. Hanabira mochi are eaten at the New Year and are favored by tea masters for their celebrations (hatsugama) in the autumn. After the turn of the seventeenth century, sweet maker Toraya joined Kawabata Dōki in the ranks of court purveyors. Records show that Toraya supplied Southern Barbarian Sweets to the court as early as 1635. The same year Toraya was already producing its trademark yōkan, a sweet made from steamed azuki bean paste, sugar, flour, kudzu starch, and flavorings. See azuki beans. Novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) mentioned Toraya’s yōkan along with Kawabata Dōki’s chimaki in his hit publication Nanshoku ōkagami (The Great Mirror of Male Love), published in 1687. A branch store of Toraya opened in Edo by 1714; the main store moved to Tokyo in the Meiji period (1868–1912), although the confectioner still maintains two shops in Kyoto.
Kawabata Dōki, Toraya, and other confectioners serving the court, tea masters, and wealthy patrons crafted “superior confectionery” (jōgashi) using high-quality ingredients, particularly refined sugar, which was imported through Dutch and Chinese intermediaries in Nagasaki. In 1775 makers of jōgashi in Kyoto established a trade association (nakama). In return for making twice-yearly payments to the warrior government (from which the court purveyors Toraya and Kawabata Dōki were exempted), the association gained control of all the imported sugar brought into the city. By 1777 there were 284 Kyoto confectioners in the association, which sought to prevent nonmembers from producing or selling superior confectionery and prohibited its members from selling molds for sweets to outsiders. The association lasted until the Meiji government ended all such trade groups in 1868. However, Kyoto sweet makers understood the value of collectively promoting their trade, and they reorganized during the Meiji period to include 500 member stores. In 1900 they sent a delegation to the Paris Exposition.
Evidence of the technical skills of the city’s confectioners is found in the cookbooks for sweets printed in Kyoto in the early modern period. Although there were hundreds of culinary texts dating from this time, many of which contain recipes for confectionery, the first entirely devoted to sweets was the anonymous Kokon meibutsu gozen gashi hidenshō (Secret Writings on Famous Japanese Confectionery New and Old), published in Kyoto in 1718 and followed by a sequel, Kokon meibutsu gozen gashi zushiki (Schema of Famous Japanese Confectionery New and Old), in 1761. Written for professionals, the texts describe how to make a variety of dry, moist, and Southern Barbarian Sweets. For their elite patrons, some confectioners created hand-painted pattern books to showcase the varieties of sweets they could produce. Kyoto sweets are distinctive for drawing on the long history, cultural milieu, and natural setting of the ancient capital, and the names of the sweets provide the main clue to these references. Kyoto confectioners sought out members of the aristocracy and tea masters to give their sweets artful designations. For example, Toraya claims that Emperor Kōkaku (1771–1840) gave the names “Belt of Jewels” and “Mountain Path in Spring” to two of its sweets and Emperor Ninkō (1800–1846) styled another confection “Garden of Autumn Leaves.”
In addition to the elite tradition of sweets, many religious institutions in Kyoto have nearby sweet makers who created humbler confections that became nationally famous. Near the entrance to Imamiya Shrine are two confectioners specializing in Toasted Cakes (aburi mochi) made from soybean flour, grilled on a charcoal fire, and then glazed with sweet white miso. Shimogamo Shrine is said to be the birthplace of Mitarashi Dango, dumplings drizzled with soy sauce and syrup and served on a stick.
There are too many notable confectioners in Kyoto to list, but a few that are especially noteworthy include Chōgorō Mochihonbo, Kamesuehiro, Kameyamutsu, Matsuya Tokiwa, Suetomi, Shioyoshiken, Tsuruya Yoshinobu, and Tawaraya Yoshitomi (which operates a Kyoto confectionery museum, the Kyōgashi Shiryōkan), and Uemura Yoshitsugu.
See also japan and portugal’s influence in asia.