Note: ‘Natural’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘safe’. A surprising number of herbal products can harm or kill you, used improperly. This stuff is no exception. So if you are mad enough to make your own horehound candy, be careful and don’t overdo it, either in the making or the eating.
These are horehound candy ‘sanded’ lozenges from a company called Claeys. They’re readily available online, at candy shops, or kitschy folk-life/food outlets like Cracker Barrel. Their characteristic bitter flavor is well balanced by the cane sugar candy, and they are nicely soothing for sore throats and stopped-up sinuses.
But they are made to a modern American taste. I find them rather wimpy and mild.
Horehound itself, good old Marrubium vulgare, is an odd plant. Kind of the coyote of the mint family: drought tolerant, tough, opportunistic, and so bitter most sane animals won’t nibble it. It probably originated around the Mediterranean, but has spread as a colonizing weed nearly everywhere. (My given name comes from the same root word as this plant, so I have several dimensions of fondness for it.)
My first taste of ‘real’ horehound candy came in my early teens. My local community college had a great wintertime presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and my junior high English class got to attend.
The college made a Renaissance Faire thing of it. My local historical re-enactors/Faire folks added flavor by dressing up in garb while running sales booths. I most clearly remember one selling blackberry tartlets (damn those were so good), and one selling horehound candy.
The candy had been poured into dark brown glassy sheets looking like medicine-bottle glass, then broken into irregular shards. This comes close, from sugarontheweekend.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103019910209032333/
Clients bought it by weight. A shop matron in full merchant-class Tudor garb weighed it out on a shiny brass suspension scale somewhat like this one.
I’d heard of horehound candy in novels, and knew what the commercial versions tasted like. This stuff? In a class by itself. First I tasted the brown sugar, then the deep herbal bite like the funkiest of mints. I enjoy strong, bitter flavors, especially if they have complex layers. Coffee, tamarind, grapefruit, even bitter melon: bring ’em on!
The candy did something else: my usual persistent winter sore throat, legacy of childhood illness, hayfever, and some seriously polluted air, vanished for the rest of the show.
I snuck out at intermission and used the rest of my spending money on brown chunks of miracle candy, which I doled out carefully until spring. Especially after our family doctor told me I could give myself high blood pressure or heart failure if I over-ate it.
Commercial horehound candy has been a mainstay in my house ever since, but I’ve missed the rich bitterness of the Ren Faire version.
I decided to make my own.
There are recipes. You can find them online. I do not recommend this. It takes a bloody long time, and it reeks up the whole house. Not quite as bad as cannabis, but damn close.
I, however, am a bit insane. Possessed of a candy thermometer, brown sugar, maple sugar, vanilla extract, some excellent spearmint, and a nearby herb & tea shop selling very fresh dried horehound leaves from a quality supplier…I spent last Saturday making my own horehound candy.
Once I slowly boiled off the water from the decoction, I didn’t take it to the ‘hard crack’ candy stage. I wanted easy-to-break sugar crystals, and I’d already spent most of a very stinky afternoon.
The result, 5 hours after the initial herbal steeping, was a revelation: soft, luscious crystals that look like dark-honey quartz drusy. The taste is better than I remembered: first the cane and maple, then hints of vanilla and spearmint, then SLAM the bitter glory of the horehound.
Works on my throat, too.
I just have to remember that this is much stronger than the safe old Claeys drops.
If I keep it cold and dry, I figure I have a couple of years’ supply at least. Which will give me enough time to try out online suppliers, because I am probably not making this stuff again. (The reek!)
That candy looks mighty good to me. My hat is off to you for making it. Making candy of any kind is in the “too hard” basket for me. Where I come from in Southern Australia, horehound grows as a weed. It was introduced in the 1840s as a medicinal herb and like so many introduced plants that do well in our dry hot conditions, it’s gone feral. You can find patches of it where not much else will grow.
We have it growing feral in New Mexico.
The candy came out amazing. I don’t dare eat too much, but it was a good experiment.