“As a rule it is better and less costly to purchase marshmallows than to try to make them”

—Ida Baily Allen, Cooking Menus Service (Doubleday: Garden City, 1935)

“Marshmallow” is one of those fantastic words that sounds like its referent—round with open vowels that get sort of squashed by that middle sibilant. Saying the word almost feels like eating something fluffy and sticky. But as it turns out, that’s just a coincidence. The “marsh” in the word does actually refer to a marsh, as in that soggy place between a body of water and land  that can’t seem to decide which one it would rather be a part of—a sort of alluvial purgatory. Because that’s where the flower called the “marsh mallow,” whose extract was originally used in the confection, likes to grow.

The plant itself, Althaea officinalis, apparently has all kinds of medicinal uses—it’s a diuretic and  expectorant and seems to help with some digestive and skin problems. The Latin name Althaea apparently comes from the Greek root altho, which means to heal or to cure and it was also a part of traditional Chinese medicine. The young plants can be eaten raw, and the mature stem and roots can be boiled and fried, but since antiquity, the main delivery method has been candy. The ancient Egyptians boiled pieces of the mallow root with honey and used it to soothe sore throats. In the Middle East, it was sometimes used as a poultice and applied directly to wounds but also added to halva, the dense, sweet nut or seed paste. 

The type of candy we associate with the name “marshmallow” today was developed in mid-19th C. France. Some sources claim the candy was designed as a sort of advanced marsh mallow extract delivery system. According to Skuse’s Complete Confectioner (via foodtimeline.org), French confectioners added the medicinal extract to beaten egg whites to give it lightness dry it out, sugar to make it palatable, and gum to bind the ingredients.

However, other sources claim that it was marsh mallow’s unique culinary properties, not its medicinal properties, that prompted the development of the candy that now bears its name. Marsh mallow contains an abnormally large amount of a thick gluey substance called mucilage. Most plants contain some mucilage, and succulents and flax seeds contain a lot of it—that’s why cactus is so gooey and flax seeds mixed with water can be used as a vegan egg substitute. According to this version of the story, French candy makers used the mucilage extracted from mallow root as a binding agent for a mixture of egg whites, corn syrup and water. A book published in Philadelphia in 1864 called The Complete Confectioner actually mentions mucilage in the instructions for how to make a syrup of marsh mallow root:

It does seem to make more sense that the candy would keep the name “marshmallow” even after actual marsh-grown mallows ceased to play a role in its production if the plant’s role was more about texture than flavor. By the end of the 19th C., gelatin and starch substitutes were developed that could stand in for the mucilage and industrial manufacturing methods made it far cheaper and more efficient to produce them in factories than by hand. Even the famous cookbook author Fannie Farmer, writing just before the turn of the century, calls for purchased, ready-made marshmallows in her “Marshmallow paste” and doesn’t include any recipes for making them yourself (again via foodtimeline.org).

Despite what Fannie Farmer and Ida Baily Allen would have you believe, there are a couple  of  advantages to making your own marshmallows at home. One is the freedom to flavor them however you want. Most commercial marshmallows are flavored with vanilla, although you can occasionally find gourmet versions flavored with peppermint or cinnamon (flavors seemingly chosen for their potential to enhance hot cocoa). But why limit yourself to those?  I made some with almond extract to accompany jars of homemade spiced cocoa mix I gave as gifts last Christmas. The chocolate-covered eggs I made are flavored with both almond and orange extracts, which is awesome especially with the chocolate. Other tempting possibilities: rosewater, cinnamon-almond, cinnamon-orange. Of course, vanilla’s good too. The second perk is that they’re divinely soft—as different from store-bought marsh mallows as fresh Peeps are from stale ones. I know some people prefer the latter in Peep form but who likes stale un-sugared marshmallows? (If you prefer your Peeps sacrilicious, see DoriaBiddle.com’s “Stations of the Peeps, which for some reason will not show up here in image form: http://www.doriabiddle.com/Stations1.html).

They’re also really easy to make if you have a stand mixer and you’re willing to live with squares or some other really simple shape. You basically just bloom some gelatin in a mixing bowl, heat some sugar and/or corn syrup and water to 240F, add it to the gelatin, and then let the mixer run for 10 minutes or so until it’s really fluffy. The whole process takes less than 30 minutes, and you don’t even have to do anything while the mixer is running. After my successful Christmas marshmallow experiment, I thought making homemade Peeps for Easter would be no big thing, but it turns out the difficulty is not in the making of the marshmallow, but in the shaping of it.

For every Peep I produced that was even vaguely cute-in-a-homely-sort of way, I made at least three horrifying turd-beasts that seem to look at you plaintively, as if to say, “Please kill me.”

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