Aniseed sweets and barley sugar are both proper old-school boiled sweets, and both have histories a lot older than most people assume — one starts as a digestive served after medieval banquets, the other as a French convent recipe. We're grouping them together here as two related classic boiled-sweet categories, and being upfront that our stock doesn't line up exactly with the most obvious search term for either.
Aniseed sweets: from digestive to sweet shop staple
Aniseed's use in sweets goes back further than most confectionery does. In medieval Europe, aniseed was one of several spices used in comfits — sugar-coated seeds served at the end of a banquet, valued for aniseed's carminative, stomach-settling properties as much as its liquorice-like flavour. That digestive habit is the direct ancestor of the aniseed sweet: post-dinner comfits gradually became a standalone confection in their own right by the 18th century, and by the Victorian era, hard-boiled aniseed sweets with their distinctive red-and-white swirl were an established Christmas fixture, helped along by sugar becoming more affordable through the 19th century as industrial refining scaled up.
We stock two Dobsons lines built around that same aniseed flavour: Dobsons Aniseed Humbugs Jar 2.72kg, a striped boiled humbug with an aniseed flavour rather than the more common mint, and Dobsons Aniseed Pips Jar 2.72kg, a smaller pip-shaped aniseed boiled sweet. We also list Kingsway Vegan Aniseed Balls 3kg — the classic round red-and-white ball most people picture when they hear "aniseed balls" — but it's currently out of stock, so if that specific shape is what you're after, the Humbugs or Pips are the closest genuine alternative we can actually supply right now.
Barley sugar: a French convent recipe that became a British Christmas classic
Barley sugar's story starts a long way from a British sweet shop. It's generally traced to at least the 17th century, reportedly first made by Benedictine nuns at a monastery in Moret-sur-Loing in France, by boiling sugar in water that barley had previously been simmered in — a process that produced a hard, amber-coloured sweet and gave it its name. It crossed into Britain and became genuinely popular as a Victorian Christmas treat, traditionally shaped into long twisted sticks (a shape distinctive enough that "barley-sugar twist" became an architectural term for spiral-turned columns) and, in more elaborate Victorian versions, moulded into decorative shapes using metal candy moulds.
We stock two barley sugar lines: Bonds Barley Sugar Jar 1.7kg, a jar of individually twist-wrapped barley-flavoured boiled sweets, and Kingsway Vegan Barley Sugar 3kg — though the Kingsway line is currently out of stock, so the Bonds jar is the one you can actually order today.
Frequently asked questions
Do you stock plain round Aniseed Balls?
We list Kingsway Vegan Aniseed Balls but it's currently out of stock. Dobsons Aniseed Humbugs and Aniseed Pips are the aniseed sweets we actually have in stock.
Why were aniseed sweets originally made?
They descend from comfits — sugar-coated seeds served after medieval banquets as a digestive — and became a standalone hard-boiled sweet in Britain by the 18th and 19th centuries.
Where does barley sugar actually come from?
It's traced to at least 17th-century France, reportedly first made by Benedictine nuns using water that barley had been boiled in, and later became a popular Victorian British Christmas sweet.
Is barley sugar actually made with barley?
Traditionally the recipe used barley water for colour and character, though modern versions are generally boiled sugar sweets made to the same style — check the specific product's ingredients.