A Pink and Fluffy History Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sugar

Spun sugar was initially the reserve of royalty and the very rich. Without a machine to aid the spinning, it was a very time-consuming process and therefore not practical for the everyday cook. It is suggested that spun sugar was created in the 15th century when Italian chefs would melt sugar and then create intricate patterns by stretching the cooling sugar with a fork and wrapping it around broom handles.

It was popularised in the 19th century by the French chef Marie-Antoine Carême who created sugar sculptures such as windmills and fountains as architectural centrepieces for grand banquets.

Answer: Dentist

Because a significant part of candy floss is air, Morrison designed the confection as a healthier fairground snack compared to candy apples. As an example, a 50 gram bag of cotton candy contains fewer than 200 calories.

Answer: It melts

At 186 degrees Celsius (367 degrees Fahrenheit) the bonds that keep the crystalline structure of sugar intact break down and the sugar becomes liquid. The molten sugar is then released from the rotating drum via tiny holes and cools so rapidly on hitting the air that it doesn't have time to re-crystallise, solidifying in thin strands that can then be collected on a stick.

Answer: Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, more commonly known as the St Louis World Fair, was arranged to celebrate the centenary, albeit a year late, of the purchase by the government of US President Thomas Jefferson of the French territory of Louisiana. This Louisiana was not the current state but a vast area that covered modern day Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma as well as parts of many other states including Louisiana, the Dakotas, Texas and New Mexico.

The Fair saw the introduction of a range of inventions including the wireless telephone, the X-ray machine and the dirigible airship. Many foods were also debuted or popularised at the fair including Dr Pepper, the waffle cone and iced tea. The cotton candy machine of Wharton and Morrison was an enormous success selling nearly 70,000 units at 25 cents a pop, a price that with inflation would be well above the price it would sell for nowadays.

Answer: Daddy's beard

Cotton candy goes by a variety of names. As well as the original fairy floss name given by Wharton and Morrison that is still used in Australia, it is also known as candy floss in the UK and several of its former colonies, as Grandma's or old woman's hair in Israel and Greece, sugar spider in The Netherlands and ghost's breath in the Afrikaans language of South Africa. The name cotton candy was coined by another dentist, Joseph Lascaux, in 1921 when he invented a rival machine to Wharton and Morrison's.

In case you were confused by the choice of photograph, the men in it are dressed as Smurfs, the leader of whom, with the red cap and the beard, is Papa Smurf.

Answer: Raspberry

The second most common colour-flavour combination in cotton candy after the ubiquitous pink-vanilla, blue-raspberry was likely introduced sometime in the 1950s following the banning of the food dye, Red no.2 as part of the United States Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Certainly by 1958 it was being pushed as a flavour by the Gold Medal company, who were market leaders in the sale of the popular confection in the USA.

There is some debate as to whether the cotton candy got there first or whether the combination was first used in snow cones, but by the early 1970s its use became more widespread with Slush Puppie and Gatorade both adopting it. As a consequence the association of the colour and the flavour became stronger in public perception to the extent that when a study was conducted in 2010 to examine perceived taste by colour, the majority of participants from the UK assumed any blue drink to be raspberry flavoured.

Answer: Heston Blumenthal

As we've already discovered, cotton candy is little more than sugar, which makes the creation of a savoury version quite the challenge. Even Heston Blumenthal, the molecular gastronomy genius behind snail porridge and bacon and egg ice cream had to admit defeat.

However, cotton candy in its sugary form has appeared in savoury dishes in some fine dining restaurants. One example is a grilled fish swaddled in white cotton candy at Ferran Adria's El Bulli restaurant in Spain. Another molecular gastronomy master, Jose Andres, served foie gras wrapped in cotton candy in his Los Angeles restaurant, The Bazaar.

Answer: A cloud shape

The study by Charles Spence of the University of Oxford was published in "International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science" in 2019. Participants in the study were presented with four shapes and asked to order them by which they thought was bitter, salty, sour or sweet. They were also asked to grade how confident they were in each of their choices on a scale of one to five.

The dishes were;
a cloud-shape of cotton candy;
a salty square of ajo blanco, an almond, garlic and bread soup from Spain;
an asymmetric combination of small pieces of cod marinated in a sour sauce of lime juice and salt, and placed on an obulato crisp;
an amorphous shape of meringue, containing a beetroot and cocoa powder puree for a bitter taste.

The results showed that the cotton candy was most regularly and unambiguously associated with sweetness before tasting, even ahead of the item designed to look like a sugar cube. The meringue shape had some association with sweetness, but the asymmetric shape was not associated with sweetness at all.

Answer: As a fluorescent pink dye in cosmetics

Rhodamine-B is banned in Europe, the United States and India among other places because it is believed to be carcinogenic and has been linked to damage to the kidneys, liver and stomach of humans. It is widely used in industrial processes such as cosmetics manufacture and the dyeing of textiles such as leather as it is very cheap to produce.

However, as well as its potential toxicity to humans, the effluent produced by its industrial usage causes environmental danger, as it causes significant damage to aquatic ecosystems, negatively affecting the ability of plants to photosynthesise.

Answer: Sustainable artificial human organs

Bellan noticed that the strands of sugar produced by a cotton candy machine were approximate to the size of capillaries, the smallest of the blood vessels in the human body. To create sustainable artificial organs, the organs need to be supported by a complex network of capillaries to carry oxygen through the organ and to take waste away. Prior to Bellan's work, the approach to doing this was to insert cells into a hydrogel compound that forms the organ and to let a network of capillaries develop. This process takes several weeks and is challenging to achieve to the scale of a full-sized organ.

Bellan worked at creating a complex network of artificial capillaries using cotton candy machines that could be inserted entirely within a hydrogel organ. The networks were created using a polymer that was stable above a certain temperature so that the liquid gel could be poured around it and set. Then when the temperature was lowered, it would dissolve to form the channels within the structure required for the movement of oxygen and waste needed to keep the organs alive.