Watch a Vintage Candy Maker Churn Out Old-Fashioned Sweets

In the Victorian age, people satiated their sweet tooth with drop candy. Today, we still have lemon drops (and, if we’re sick, cough drops). However, confectioners once churned out a variety of flavors using a machine from the late 1800s called a fruit drop roller.

A sheet of candy was cooled to a pliable, clay-like consistency, and fed through the gadget’s interchangeable brass rollers. As This Is Colossal reports, once the sheets were fully cool, they were lifted and “dropped” to break them into tiny pieces. (Fun fact: This process is how lemon drops and cough drops got their name.)

Today, fruit drop rollers are hard to come by—possibly because many of the brass candy makers were donated to scrap metal drives during World War II. However, Lofty Pursuits, an artisan candy store in Tallahassee, Florida, managed to acquired a vintage fruit drop roller from a candy store in Cincinnati. The machine hadn't been used since the 1940s, but the shop's workers restored it to working condition, and filmed it cranking out a confection called “nectar drops,” which reportedly taste like pound cake or almonds.

Watch a candy maker whip up a large batch of the sweet treats using the retro gadget.

Banner image courtesy of iStock.