The mint with the hole

Occasionally folk ask me about different types of confectionery that they once enjoyed as children but no longer see. Top among the list are Olde English Spangles, Treets and Aztec Bars.  Quite a few were excited when Cadbury relaunched the Wispa Bar earlier this year.  I wasn’t quite so excited.  I rarely ate them and hadn’t known they’d gone away you know.
  One of my favourite sweeties  - the Polo mint - has recently passed its sixtieth birthday. The first packet of Polo mints rolled off the production lines of James Rowntree and Sons in April 1948.  At just tuppence a packet, Polo mints soon became Britain’s leading mint brand and remain so even today. Nothing seems likely to touch them in the forseeable future. They are a wee bit pricier today but these tasty sweets are still made to the same recipe.  Enormous pressure is used to stamp out each Polo mint. Nestlé  claim that it’s equivalent to the weight of three elephants!  
  Like a lot of early eighteenth century confectioners – Cadbury, Terry, Fox and Fry come to mind – the Rowntrees were Quakers, temperance campaigners determined to offer alternatives to strong liquor for the masses. Rowntree opened his first tea and coffee shop in York in 1725. Polo mints have  outlived the company that spawned them. Rowntrees first merged with rival brand Mackintosh before being bought out by the Swiss-based giant Nestlé twenty years ago.
  The mint with the hole actually imitated an earlier American sweet, the Lifesaver. These samll round mints resembled a life raft. Packets of these had been circulated in Britain during the war by American servicemen.
   How do you eat a Polo mint?  I like to suck them until they are smooth.  I am one of those folk who can curl his tongue so I can enlarge the hole.  When the mint becomes thin and brittle I then crunch it.  Other folk I know just prefer to crunch them like ordinary boiled sweets.  To me they’re missing the best bit!