I recently took a week off from my regular job to visit the beautiful city of Montreal, Quebec. But that doesn’t mean I also neglected my duties as staff writer for Candy Addict. No, I made sure to keep my eyes peeled for a truly Quebec-specific sweet. But at first, I found only the same overpriced gift-shop candy you can find anywhere in Canada: cheap chocolate-covered almonds packaged as “moose droppings†and hard candies “made with real maple syrup†(read: 90% regular sugar and 10% of the good stuff). But then, while exploring Montreal’s Chinatown, in a hole-in-the-wall storefront, I discovered something truly unique at last.
(Later, once I’d had time to do more shopping in areas that weren’t 90% tacky tourist gift shops, I also found some great candy stores and artisan chocolatiers. But that’s a subject for another review.)
The white, wispy objects in the photo above, believe it or not, are candy. They’re called Dragon’s Beard Candy, and they were apparently a favorite sweet in China’s Imperial Court, making them over 2000 years old. Dragon’s Beard Candy consists of fine, hairlike filaments of sugar surrounding a center of (according to the stall’s owner) peanuts, coconut, sesame, brown sugar and chocolate.
We’ve actually reviewed them once already. But those were expensive and had to be shipped all the way from China, and these were cheap and freshly hand-made – the stall prominently featured a bin of nutty filling and a big lump of brown rock sugar. How could I resist?
