This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode The Curiously Strong Story of Mint, first released on December 3, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

SIA: [SINGING] Take a trip down candy cane lane with me, it’s the cutest thing I swear you’ll ever see, it’s the best, so get dressed, I’ll impress…

NICOLA TWILLEY: It’s coming up to Christmas and Sia is not wrong, that means… peppermint!

CYNTHIA GRABER: There aren’t that many seasonal flavors that I particularly look forward to! I’m not a fan of pumpkin spice,but I do truly love peppermint. And I’m clearly not the only one.

WOMAN: A little thing I love about the Chick fil-a peppermint chip milkshake is that first sip, when you taste the peppermint chip pieces. It’s like catching snowflakes on your tongue.

MAN: The holidays are here at Starbucks! Celebrate with a peppermint mocha.

VOICEOVER: Ghiardelli peppermint bark squares. Makes the holidays a bite better.

TWILLEY: Yep, everything is peppermint right now. So to help you embrace the season of red-and-white striped coolness, this episode, we’re also all about mint. We, of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and this episode: candy canes are peppermint flavored, but I know that’s not the only kind of mint you can find at the garden store. How did peppermint win out to become the candy mint?

TWILLEY: And why does it make your whole mouth cold in such a seasonally appropriate way? Just like catching a snowflake on your tongue! What’s going on there?

GRABER: This episode, we’re telling the story of how mint came to take over not just your garden patch—anyone who’s grown it knows what I’m talking about—but also how it rose to become one of the foundational flavors in the candy aisle. It’s not just candy canes: York Peppermint Patties, Junior Mints, Tic Tacs, the list goes on and on.

TWILLEY: There’s another seasonal tradition we need to talk about first, though, and that is our end of year appeal. Gastropod is me, Cynthia, and our producer Claudia. We are the tiny but mighty team that brings you every single episode, and we can’t do it without your help.

GRABER: You’ve heard us talk about foundation support for the show, and you also obviously have heard ads on the show, too. But the truth is that neither of these alone are enough to keep Gastropod going day to day. We say this frequently, but it really is true—we absolutely rely on listener support to make the show.

TWILLEY: We know the show means a lot to you. When we asked you earlier this year how you draw on Gastropod in your daily lives and jobs, we were literally floored by the response—honestly hearing you describe the impact of our show was the highlight of our year.

GRABER: And so if you enjoy the show, and if you can this year, we hope you’ll support us at whatever level makes sense to you. A one-time donation, ongoing monthly support—no amount is too small, or too big! And thank you.

TWILLEY: And thanks to those of you who already give so generously. We are eternally grateful. This episode is supported in part by you, as well the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

DAN ALLOSSO: I call him a king. Yeah, I think, I mean, because I think he was—he was so central to putting the product on the map.

GRABER: Once upon a time, in a land not very far away, especially from me, there was a king. A king of peppermint.

TWILLEY: And the man who anointed him king is Dan Allosso, historian and author of Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History.

GRABER: The guy Dan is talking about, his name was Samuel Ranney, and he was born in 1772.

ALLOSSO: He had grown up in Middletown, down on the Connecticut River. And Middletown was the northernmost navigable port on the Connecticut River.

TWILLEY: Middletown is not a cosmopolitan metropolis today, but at the time it was the biggest port between New York and Boston, and it did a roaring trade in rum from the West Indies. Which young Samuel’s family was involved in.

ALLOSSO: He learned a little bit about distilling, and he learned a little bit about business.

GRABER: Distilling was key here if you wanted to become a peppermint king, because you had to distill dried peppermint stems and leaves to get at the peppermint oil. Or as Samuel would have called it, the essence of peppermint.

TWILLEY: In those days, farmers would go through their peppermint fields with a scythe, and then let the stalks lie there till they became what was called peppermint straw. Then they would put them in a tank with water, kind of like making peppermint tea.

ALLOSSO: And you would boil it, and the steam would rise. And as it condensed, it would go through this, this still. And it’s a process of, you know, of heating the leaves to release the essential oils and then catching the oils and removing any leftover water.

GRABER: When Samuel was still pretty young, his family moved up the Connecticut River to Ashfield, Massachusetts. We don’t know why they decided to make that move, there really wasn’t much going on in Ashfield. It wasn’t easy to get there, it wasn’t as central as Middletown was, it had much longer winters—

ALLOSSO: And there isn’t a lot of great agricultural land in Ashfield.

TWILLEY: To each their own. What this move meant was that young Samuel couldn’t farm wheat or barley and make money that way. But what he could grow was peppermint.

GRABER: Other people in America at the time were growing peppermint. He wasn’t, like, the first person to grow peppermint at all, or even the first person to grow peppermint in Ashfield.

ALLOSSO: But Samuel Ranney was the first guy who said, I’m going to, I’m going to go into this as an actual business.

TWILLEY: Samuel’s big business breakthrough was to centralize production of peppermint oil in Ashfield and then build a huge distribution network using what were called essence peddlers.

GRABER: Obviously the idea of peddling, wandering around with some goods to sell, that’s pretty much as old as—well, as old as anyone’s had anything to sell. But Samuel’s essence peddlers focused mainly on these essences. They sold peppermint but also ones like bergamot and wintergreen.

TWILLEY: Essence peddlers were young men, typically, and they operated on kind of a freelance basis. They’d scrape together ten or twenty bucks, buy a bunch of essences, and other handy things, and head out with a tin trunk full of useful stuff to sell.

ALLOSSO: And so, things like needles, silk thread. Light stuff, luckily that that had value, you know, for these people who were sewing their own clothes and stuff. Ribbons, horn combs.

GRABER: Samuel created a whole network of these guys and he sent them out into the nearby states.

ALLOSSO: They went far, actually. They went up into New Hampshire and Vermont, and northern Massachusetts and Maine and western New York.

TWILLEY: Samuel’s essence peddlers became a fixture of rural American life in the early 1800s. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne mentions them in his diary, marveling at the vast quantities of peppermint essence concocted in Ashfield and sent all over.

GRABER: Apparently Samuel’s essence peddlers did a bit of political canvassing as well. They were going door to door, and so Dan says they also happened to mention that maybe it’d be a good idea to get rid of slavery.

ALLOSSO: They also brought news of the rest of the world back east. And a lot of that had to do with politics, and in the long run, a lot of it had to do with abolitionist politics.

TWILLEY: At its peak in the 1820s, all this peppermint peddling made Ashfield really rich. According to government data, the value of peppermint oil made in Ashfield was four times the value of all the land and buildings in the town.

ALLOSSO: I was… really surprised. It was difficult for me to kind of wrap my head around how much money Ashfield was actually making on peppermint. Ashfield was incredibly rich.

GRABER: This is all great for Ashfield. But why in the world was mint such a big deal?

TWILLEY: To answer that, we have to back up a little bit. Mint, or at least what we think of as mint, it’s just one member of a very large family of fragrant, sun-loving plants. The mint family is kind of a kitchen dream team: basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, shiso, they’re all part of the mint family.

GRABER: This explosion of deliciousness came about for a couple of reasons. Many of these mint relatives grew up in dry areas around the Mediterranean where they didn’t have a lot of other plants around them, so they produced a lot of chemicals to keep animals away. And they also grew like mad and easily interbred with each other. So in the end there were a lot of very fragrant plants that we found tasty.

TWILLEY: True mints, the minty ones in the mint family, are pretty varied just within themselves. There are something like two dozen different true mint species—so that’s like spearmint or water mint but also horsemint and pineapple mint. But what makes something a true mint, you might ask?

GRABER: Gary Allen has written a bunch of books about herbs, and he told us that mint gets its mintiness, its coolness, mainly from a chemical called menthol.

GARY ALLEN: But they have many other flavoring compounds. The proportions of those vary from species to species and cultivar to cultivar. So, one mint might taste very cool on the tongue at first and then have a burning sensation. Or it might taste a little bit like, like, caraway.

TWILLEY: Either way, all that flavor definitely made mint seem special.

ALLEN: Anything with a strong taste was always, always used as medicine. Because they figured it must be doing something, right?

GRABER: And that’s been going on for thousands of years. One of the oldest medical texts in the world was written on a papyrus in ancient Egypt about 3500 years ago, and the authors suggest you use mint to help soothe your stomach problems and to help relieve flatulence.

TWILLEY: Mint was something of a cure all in the era before modern medicine. It was also prescribed for oral hygiene problems, for coughs and colds, as a stress reliever, to boost concentration and mood when you were studying, anything really.

ALLOSSO: Well, the things that people were diagnosed with were very odd at the time too, right? There were a lot of remitting fevers, and seasonal, seasonal fevers and, and things like that. And so it was supposed to be effective against those. It was also effective for griping, which was stomach cramps. And any kind of gastrointestinal complaint, mint would be a go to.

GRABER: Samuel Ranney may have become America’s first peppermint king in the 1820s, but the herb had been brought over a long time before then. It got to America pretty much as soon as English colonists started moving here.

ALLOSSO: In early Boston, John Winthrop, he was governor of Massachusetts Bay five times before 1650. Apparently there’s a letter—one time he was sick and a friend of his sent some mint along with the letter, as a—said, hey, take this. It’ll be good for you.

TWILLEY: Some of this medicinal mint was imported. But early on, Americans started growing it themselves, too.

ALLOSSO: So they would have been in kitchen gardens, people would have been dispensing them both, you know, to their families for cures and then also, there probably would have been a little commerce in them.

GRABER: By the 1760s there were already ads for peppermint essence. And then peppermint got a big boost in popularity in the 1790s because of an epidemic.

ALLOSSO: When the yellow fever hit Philadelphia, Benjamin, Dr. Benjamin Rush actually copied a prescription for a cure from another doctor named Curry. And it included peppermint oil or peppermint essence, because that made the whole horrible thing something that someone could get down.

GRABER: This medical demand for mint is why Samuel Ranney the peppermint king became so rich. But as is clear from his title, he wasn’t selling any old mint. He was selling peppermint.

TWILLEY: When he got started, the big source of peppermint was England. Specifically a little town called Mitcham, not far from where I grew up.

GRABER: People had been growing lots of different species of mints for thousands of years. But in around 1690, some people on the other side of London, in Essex, they discovered an entirely new breed of mint: peppermint, growing by the side of a stream.

ALLOSSO: And they discovered this new mint, that was much spicier and they started growing it in secret.

TWILLEY: No one would have known this at the time, but the reason peppermint was so much more intense than other mints is because it contains a lot more menthol. It has something like 30 times more menthol than spearmint. So it’s not surprising that people were pretty excited about peppermint.

GRABER: But everyone else was stuck with regular old-school mint, until someone stole some of this spicy new peppermint.

ALLOSSO: And that was the beginning of, a more widespread use of peppermint. Because up to that point whoever it was that had first discovered it was using it as kind of a trade secret. So it became more widespread, especially around Mitcham, England, which was at the time a kind of a rural suburb of London.

GRABER: We now know that peppermint was a random and lucky cross between two mints called spearmint and watermint. And someone needed to steal it to be able to grow it, because this new hybrid couldn’t reproduce on its own. You had to get a new baby plant growing out from the same roots and take that and grow it somewhere else.

TWILLEY: That’s still how new peppermint plants are grown today. All the peppermint in all the world is basically a clone, it’s all from the same original plant.

GRABER: So we’ve now figured out two things: one, why mint was in such high demand in early America, and two, why peppermint in particular had come to be the most prized mint of all.

TWILLEY: But this all does beg the question: was the peppermint actually doing anything other than making Samuel Ranney rich? Did it work? We’ve got the answer to that, after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: To find out if mint could be helping cure what ails us, we turned to Pam Dalton. She’s a scientist at the Monell Center in Philadelphia. She told us that any potential medical effect is probably due to that chemical menthol, and to its effects on our body.

PAM DALTON: It has a taste, and it also has somatosensory characteristics. Feels, when it’s in our nose, in our mouth, in our eyes, even on the skin of the body.

TWILLEY: Pam told us this is called chemosensation, and its what makes menthol pretty cool, literally. We experience it as a flavor, yes, but also as a physical sensation—specifically, cold.

GRABER: We’ve talked about food that we also feel as a physical thing before, Pam told us about it in our chile episode. Like menthol, the chemical capsaicin is a flavor, but it also is a chemosensation, it also triggers receptors in our mouth for literal heat.

TWILLEY: Turns out, and this is something scientists only discovered in 2002, we also have a family of receptors for cooling. They’re called TRP, “trip” receptors and they’re triggered by cold temperatures and also by menthol and some other chemicals that are found in say wintergreen or eucalyptus.

GRABER: They all trigger the cold channels, but all these chemicals do it a little differently. For instance, eucalyptus is a little milder than menthol in terms of cooling.

DALTON: But it’s, it also is, I think, a little bit more anesthetic than, than menthol.

TWILLEY: Like with chiles and heat, stimulating this cold receptor with menthol can be enjoyable—or, not so much.

DALTON: Higher concentrations, it can become very unpleasant. Can be at the point where it’s very irritating. And in fact, we’ve often had to stop studies where we were going too high with the concentration of menthol because initially it makes people very uncomfortable. And then it actually desensitizes the receptors, so that they can’t really detect it anymore.

GRABER: And it’s not just in our mouths—we have these cold receptors all over our bodies. On our skin, that cooling sensation can be pleasant, it’s why aftershave and body wash companies might use some menthol for a little tingle.

DALTON: It’s also the case that you can go a little too far with using menthol compounds in personal care products. Like, people want to use them to wake you up in the morning when you take your shower. But there are certain types of mucosa on the body that are very sensitive to menthol, and cooling. And it’s not such a pleasant sensation.

TWILLEY: You definitely don’t want it in your eyes, for example. Like most aftershave.

GRABER: People in Ashfield back in the late 1700s, early 1800s, likely weren’t using their mint essence primarily as an aftershave, in part because it was too valuable to them as medicine. So is there any science there?

TWILLEY: Like Dan said, one of the main things mint was prescribed for throughout history was stomach cramps, nausea, bloating—basically any kind of gut problems. And actually, even today in Western medicine, peppermint oil capsules are still prescribed to people with these kinds of issues, like people with irritable bowel syndrome.

GRABER: Pam says we do have those cold slash menthol receptors all along our digestive tract.

DALTON: We can sense cold as you know, foods move down the mucosal pathway, you know, in the esophagus. And, internally, our interoceptive ability to detect it may be pretty high. In terms of sensing coldness in other organs in the body.

GRABER: But it’s not like once menthol gets to our guts we feel like there’s an ice cube there. Instead, the same receptors that allow us to sense cold, and also menthol—triggering them can trigger other activities in our cells as well. Using these same receptors, menthol seems to stop muscles from spasming.

DALTON: And that sort of, you know, response that we would have where, you know, the motility of the gut starts to churn up when we’re nauseous. Is it tamping that down, and therefore reducing the sensation of nausea? I think that’s fascinating.

TWILLEY: This is one of the mechanisms scientists have come up with for why peppermint oil actually seems to help with stomach discomfort. But also, menthol is a relatively effective topical analgesic: in other words, it has a numbing effect, which also would likely reduce pain.

GRABER: Pam has studied how all of this might affect coughing, because tobacco companies were interested in finding out if menthol could keep smokers from hacking up a lung.

DALTON: We actually showed in another study where having people inhale menthol before we gave them a cough stimulus really reduced the number of coughs.

TWILLEY: Pam and her colleagues have concluded that menthol is actually pretty effective at reducing coughing. Like in the gut, it seems quite probable that what’s happening is the menthol is stopping the muscles from spasming, and also having that numbing effect.

DALTON: So basically, what we’re assuming happens with the menthol is that it is desensitizing the receptors that are capable of picking up this irritant. And therefore, people cough less.

GRABER: Menthol could also be masking the taste of tobacco. And finally, it seems to be increasing the receptors for nicotine in the brain, so maybe people who are smoking menthol cigarettes get a more intense effect. All of this is good for tobacco companies, and bad for public health.

DALTON: And it’s obviously one reason why the FDA has been looking to get it out of—it’s, it’s one of the only flavor compounds that still remains, but it’s going away. Because it obviously is, it’s almost like a gateway to being able to tolerate cigarette smoking.

TWILLEY: But menthol’s anti-coughing powers are also used for good, in cold medicine. Pam told us that menthol seems to be the part of your cough medicine that’s helping, rather than the pharmaceutical cough suppressant that’s in there.

DALTON: And this may be why most cough medicines actually work even when the active drug in them is not very effective. Because they do incorporate a lot of minty compounds into cough medicine.

GRABER: But in a weird twist, Pam told us that sugar syrup works almost as well as menthol for reducing coughing. Maybe it’s a placebo effect.

DALTON: It could also be a more cognitive effect, because there’s no reason that sweet taste would have a similar effect, right? I mean, you’re just giving people a taste of sugar in the mouth before they get the cough stimulus, and it has the same effect.

TWILLEY: This idea that menthol is also doing something in your brain, rather than necessarily physically, that’s something that’s been shown in another kind of cold medicine: the decongestant. So that’s things like Vicks Vapo-rub, a staple of my childhood sniffles.

DALTON: It turns out that many years ago, and still to this day, people think that menthol decongests the airways. And a very prolific researcher by the name of Ron Eccles, who started out studying viruses and colds and things in the nose, discovered that menthol doesn’t actually do anything physically to the airway. In fact, if it does anything, it congests the mucosa. The mucosa starts to increase and swell a little bit. But people will report that they breathe much more easily.

GRABER: This is odd, because basically it sounds like in theory menthol should make you feel more cloggy. But Pam said, that sensation of coolness that menthol kicks off, it helps us feel like there’s more air flowing over the same passage.

DALTON: And so the brain is then tricked into thinking, my nose is decongested.

TWILLEY: That fake cooling sensation, it’s also likely why mint was prescribed for fevers throughout history. It just provided some relief, a cooling sensation, like putting an ice pack on your forehead. So ultimately, it’s not like mint is actually an incredibly potent cure-all, but it does have a lot going for it.

ALLOSSO: It wasn’t bad for you, in and of itself. It had some positive effects, and it made everything else much more palatable.

GRABER: And during the many years before modern medicine, having something that did a little bit of good, and tasted good, and didn’t cause serious harm, that was kind of a win.

ALLOSSO: It was probably the most benign thing in the materia medica. You know, there were all kinds of crazy things, there was mercury and, you know, just. People were routinely poisoned, to try to balance their humors

TWILLEY: Back in the early 1800s, people didn’t know all the science we know now. But they did know mint was a pretty good thing. It was a medicine cabinet must-have. And like we said, that made Samuel Ranney, our original peppermint king, quite rich. It also put the otherwise not-so-notable town of Ashfield, Massachusetts on the map. But from about 1835 onward, the peppermint boom left town. And so did Samuel.

GRABER: Samuel was an old man but he went west, following his son Henry. They moved about 250 miles away into western New York, to a town called Phelps that’s relatively close to Rochester. And the peppermint industry moved to Phelps as well.

TWILLEY: This pretty much put an end to Ashfield’s wealth and prosperity. Lots of Ashfielders ended up moving to Western New York with the Ranneys.

GRABER: This was part of major changes going on in America in general. Phelps was on the Erie Canal, and canals and railroads were being built to help move people and goods around the country.

TWILLEY: Which meant that the era of door-to-door peddlers was drawing to an end, and the era of wholesale peppermint and national commerce was about to begin.

GRABER: And the second peppermint king was the first one to create a national American peppermint brand. His name was Hiram Hotchkiss.

ALLOSSO: Hiram Hotchkiss was originally a grocer or a merchant, a local merchant and miller.

TWILLEY: Hiram got into the peppermint business in 1839. But it was kind of by accident, thanks to his mill customers and their shortage of cash.

ALLOSSO: People started paying for, apparently, mercantile debts with peppermint oil. And so he took it, and then he accumulated it, accumulated, accumulated it until he had, you know, a thousand gallons, the story goes, of peppermint oil. And he didn’t know what to do with it.

GRABER: Hiram decided to take advantage of being on the Erie Canal, and he floated that peppermint down the canal and then down the Hudson to New York City.

TWILLEY: But when Hiram’s representatives tried to sell this peppermint oil from Western New York in the city, they didn’t have much luck. Cosmopolitan New Yorkers wanted the best, and at the time, the best was British.

ALLOSSO: Which even after we got over the idea that something and anything from Britain was better, we still had this Idea that the Mitcham stuff was really, really good.

GRABER: So in a counterintuitive stroke of what turned out to be genius, Hiram decided to try to sell his oil in Europe, competing with Mitcham. He sent his peppermint to Germany, and it was labeled ‘Peppermint Oil from Wayne County, USA, guaranteed pure by H.G. Hotchkiss.’ Hiram even got it tested by some German chemists.

ALLOSSO: And he got a communication back from them, from the chemists of Hanover saying this is pretty good stuff. And so he made the most of that. And then he thought, well, if I’ve got, if I’ve been validated by Europeans, that’s a good thing. I can say, you know, I can advertise that.

TWILLEY: This was a turning point. Hiram realized that he could set his peppermint oil apart from all the rest by making a very big deal about its quality. At the time, the quality of peppermint oil was often hit or miss. If you don’t weed your peppermint fields super rigorously, other plants get in the mix and cause off flavors. So Hiram got everybody who grew for him out there with hoes before harvest time.

GRABER: And then even once the oil was made, it wasn’t always the highest quality.

ALLOSSO: You can mix it with turpentine even, and, and people did that. And so part of his early success came from blowing the whistle on that sort of thing. And saying yeah, this isn’t real oil, or this is adulterated oil, or you know, you don’t you don’t want to use this.

GRABER: But it wasn’t enough to just claim his was the best, he wanted to prove it. As it happens, in 1850, a guy from England wrote to Hiram and sent him some Mitcham peppermint oil. He asked Hiram to enter it into the American Congress exposition. Hiram declined to do the guy the favor, but he got an idea.

TWILLEY: According to Dan, this was on brand for Hiram: he was, it seems, sort of a jerk. But quite smart too. So Hiram decided to steal this English guy’s idea, and send his own Western New York oil to London to compete in the peppermint oil category at the very first World’s Fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, organized by Prince Albert.

ALLOSSO: Hotchkiss won. And so they started marketing their stuff as prize medal oil of peppermint. With Prince Albert’s face on their labels. And Hotchkiss was a great marketer. He went—the American banknote company was located in New York. So he went to them and he had these elaborate engraved labels made for his bottles.

GRABER: He also bought a supply of special blue bottles to make sure his oil was always recognizable. And remember, this was in the days before branding and trademarks and all of that—before Coca Cola had burst onto the scene. He’s one of the pioneers when it comes to creating a national brand.

TWILLEY: All this export and branding made Hiram into a true peppermint king. But the peppermint business had also changed. Samuel Ranney was selling to peddlers for home remedies, but Hiram was selling wholesale, in bulk, internationally. And he had a new target market: candy.

ALLOSSO: This was also another transition where it went not only now to apothecaries and medicine manufacturers, but also to bakers and confectioners and that sort of thing. That’s about when that—the commercial, kind of high volume use of peppermint oil in, in cooking and candy making becomes a thing.

GRABER: This wasn’t yet the days of mass-produced brand name candy, not like we have now, but it was a time when sugar production and processing had really ramped up so sugar was more affordable. And so a lot of small businesses got started making candy. Peppermint candy was one of the top flavors.

TWILLEY: Hiram carried on making peppermint oil for the rest of his life. He died in 1897, and his family took over the business after him. But the peppermint crown had already been passed on, to peppermint king number 3.

ALLOSSO: Albert Todd was the most scientific of them. And he grew up in a, in a little village near Kalamazoo called Nodawa.

GRABER: Albert Todd was in Michigan, not New York. And in fact even though Hiram bragged that he only used pure New York peppermint, he actually bought Michigan peppermint too. Because the Ranney’s had moved out there and brought peppermint farming with them, and Michigan peppermint was becoming a big thing.

TWILLEY: Michigan itself was also becoming a big thing.

ALLOSSO: Because, this was a period when, there was a, a lot of settlement. Once the Erie Canal was finished in 1825, then, you know, you could easily get to Lake Erie, and then you could take a steamboat across it to Detroit. And so settlement in Michigan was already exploding.

GRABER: Albert Todd was educated and he was well-traveled, and he wanted to take a scientific approach to the peppermint business.

ALLOSSO: He was very curious. As a young man, he, when I guess what, what we would call public school, he went and he did a kind of a tramp around Europe and, and developed some interest in European culture and art. The thing that was different about Albert Todd was that he became a scientist. And very early on, he wanted to be understood as a manufacturing chemist.

TWILLEY: Hiram was big on purity as a marketing device, but Albert was the real deal. He had planted his first peppermint field in the 1860s, but then he went to Northwestern to study chemistry in the 1870s. And that’s when he had his peppermint distillation breakthrough.

GRABER: Most peppermint oil at the time was kind of a light yellow color. Albert discovered that it was impurities, resins, that caused the color, and they also damaged the oil’s final flavor. So he developed a double distilling process to get rid of the resins and create a pure, clear oil.

ALLOSSO: He had a product that he called crystal white. So he sort of becomes known as the guy that you go to for quality and consistency. And actual documentable science rather than, my—you know, I’m Hiram Hotchkiss. I say this smells the best. He was also a really… he was easy to get along with. He seemed to be kind of a straight shooter.

GRABER: Albert bought a lot of peppermint from farmers and paid a steady price for that peppermint. And he founded these massive mint farms complete with schools and housing for workers.

ALLOSSO: One of the things that Albert Todd did was he created these mint growing communities, out in the middle of nowhere. He would just, you know, create a town called Mentha, where it was dedicated to growing mint. And, you know, and he created, he kind of created a community. He created a community center. He, you know, donated his, you know, his artwork to them and stuff like that.

TWILLEY: Side note, Mentha which was just outside Kalamazoo, is now a ghost town. But at the time, it was peppermint central. During the reign of Albert the peppermint king, an estimated 90 percent of all the world’s mint flavoring was grown within a 90 mile radius of Kalamazoo.

GRABER: Albert was also the king of the spearmint renaissance.

ALLOSSO: One of the stories that I think is, is accurate is that, that he found a variety—or somebody working for him and brought it to his attention—found a variety of spearmint in a kitchen garden. And he looked at it and he, you know, they had test beds, of course, for all kinds of different varieties. And they, they raised up, you know, a little bit of this spearmint and it was better than everything else that they had seen.

GRABER: This was important because peppermint’s main claim to fame at the time was that it was the strongest, and that was great if you wanted strong medicine. But for candy and gum, it’s nice to have a variety of different flavors to play with. Peppermint is a little one-note, while spearmint is a lot milder and greener tasting.

TWILLEY: Which were qualities that mattered to the companies Albert was selling all his peppermint and spearmint essence to.

ALLOSSO: Because that was sort of the time when, when packaged, stable products like chewing gum emerged. And then toothpastes as well. So people had previously used, you know, tooth powders and things like that. But, you know, that was the era when Colgate and people like that were beginning to make toothpaste. And so it became the big, the big flavoring. And so those were the kind of the markets that they dominated that really put them on the map.

GRABER: These markets started to pick up in the 1890s, but then by the early 1900s, Albert’s company had a huge new market that was about to really take off, and that was the wide world of commercial mint candy. That’s coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: The line between candy and medicine has always been blurry. Sugar was seen as medicinal for a lot of history. But even after sugar became just a sweetener, it was still used in almost all medicine to—you know, help the medicine go down.

GRABER: And because apothecaries had great machines for making little pills, they also could use those machines to make early candies, so there was a lot of overlap between what was supposed to make your taste buds happy and what was supposed to make you feel better.

TWILLEY: Altoids, AKA the curiously strong mint—they’re a good example of this category confusion. The first Altoids were made in the late 1700s as peppermint lozenges to take when you had digestive troubles

GRABER: Even through the 1920s this was how they were marketed, as something to help ease your stomach discomfort. Then they became a breath mint, and today they’re kind of a breath mint candy.

TWILLEY: The breath mint category exploded in the early 19 teens and 20s. It’s not like people had the freshest of breath before, but oral hygiene had become big business at this point. Companies like Colgate and Listerine were doing a little breath shaming to help sell their wares.

GRABER: Plus cigarettes started to become really popular in the 1910s and 1920s. This is when they started to take off in America, and smoking does not improve the smoker’s breath. Smokers were one of the first markets for an early American mint candy.

JASON LIEBIG: You know, when Lifesavers first came out, they were marketed. As an after-smoking offering.

TWILLEY: Jason Liebig is a candy consultant and brand historian.

LIEBIG: Peppermint was the, by the way, is the original Lifesavers flavor. It wasn’t wintergreen, it was peppermint.

TWILLEY: Clarence Crane of Cleveland, Ohio, is the man to thank in this case. He also made chocolate candies, but they melted in summer. And so he came up with a new minty ring shaped candy that did not melt.

LIEBIG: There’s a lot of urban myth and mythology as to how, why they had the hole. You know, there’s an urban myth, which is not true, that his daughter had choked to death. And then, so he created a mint that you couldn’t choke to death on. Not really true.

GRABER: The truth is that, like we said, pill makers made early candies, so candy makers copied that—Clarence bought a pill making machine.

LIEBIG: So the reason why lifesavers essentially look like they do is because he used a pill press, and that was the way it came out. And so, he loved the way it looked, you know, it looked like a little life preserver. And that’s how they got the name.

TWILLEY: If you’re British like me, right now you will be thinking, no: the mint with the hole is a Polo

VOICEOVER: For years, we’ve demonstrated how to create the perfect mint. With pure white smoothness, sublime shape, and the refreshing cool air—[SCREAM] supplied by the hole. And yet other mints still model themselves on the bit Polo remove!

TWILLEY: I now realize this is kind of a lie, because sure lots of other mints are just round, but Lifesavers were first! Really, Polo is the copycat.

LIEBIG: You know, usually America was ripping off the UK, but I think with Polo, they were, they were knocking off America’s lifesavers. But yeah, so Lifesavers started out, you know, as this thing and they just grew and grew and they became hugely popular. And really launched this sort of roll candy, mint and roll candy thing in America.

GRABER: Life Savers didn’t have a huge number of national candy competitors at the time—some of their early competition was actually chewing gum.

LIEBIG: When I look back at the brand of Lifesavers, to me, their biggest competition was BeechNut. And BeechNut, you know, made chewing gum as well.

SINGER: Beech Nut peppermint gum, the pep- pep- peppiest one, pep- pep- peppiest, pep- pep- peppiest, Beech Nut peppermint gum!

LIEBIG: And so, you know, because the other people who were going after that after-smoking market were the Wrigley Spearmint Gum, Wrigley DoubleMint. And so, that was, that was who their competition really was.

WOMEN: [SINGING] Double your pleasure, double your fun—with double mint, double mint, double mint gum!

TWILLEY: Wrigley’s got their mint essences from peppermint king number three Albert Todd, and that’s how spearmint got back in the game. DoubleMint is of course peppermint and spearmint, two great mints that go great together!

GRABER: Two other tastes that go great together are chocolate and mint. And one of my favorites in this category is the York peppermint patty.

TWILLEY: By the 1950s, there were many chocolates with mint fillings and they were quite gooey and that really bothered Henry Kessler of York, Pennsylvania.

LIEBIG: Apparently the guy was like, obsessive and was trying to get this right kind of crisp snap of the peppermint patty.

GRABER: He originally opened something called the York Cone Company, yes it was an ice cream cone company, but this ideal peppermint patty snap, that was his greater contribution to the world. That of course and the inspiration for the Peppermint Patty character on Peanuts, and the amazing ads from the 1980s.

MAN: When I eat a York peppermint patty, I get the sensation of being at the top of a cold and wintry mountain!

WOMAN: When I eat a York peppermint patty… [SIGH] I get the sensation of a cool breeze billowing through my hair—and across my long, white dress. [GASP] Oh! Oh!

VOICEOVER: York peppermint patty. Get the sensation.

TWILLEY: That cooling sensation is apparently really something. Jason told us that the 50s were a boom time for mint candy. And by this time even plain mints were owning their candy status. Yes, they were still breath mints, but they were also a good time.

TWIN 1: Certs is a candy mint!

TWIN 2: Certs is a breath mint!

VOICEOVER: Stop! You’re both right! New Certs is two mints in one. Stops bad breath in seconds, tastiest mint of all!

GRABER: The inventor of Junior Mints—they’re these little bite-sized soft peppermints cloaked in chocolate, that guy thought that the movie theaters were an underserved market. His box was invented specifically for the theater, so you could just pour some out into your hand.

LIEBIG: You know, the thing about junior mints, they’re great, they’re a great poppable treat.

TWILLEY: I hate to be a bummer but all of these mints mean nothing to me. I grew up on Trebor mints, the minty bit stronger, and for special occasions, an After Eight.

BRITISH WOMAN: Brandies, cigars, and… After Eight. Pure, unashamed luxury. Cold, creamy peppermint in rich dark chocolate, wafer thin.

TWILLEY: Nothing to be ashamed of. But the one American mint that did rock my world was a Tic Tac.

GRABER: Tic Tacs were introduced by the Italian company Ferrero. It was really different from the other mints out there. It was a smooth oval shape, each one takes 24 hours and 100 layers of candy to make.

LIEBIG: And it was unlike anything we’d ever seen before. It had this clear plastic case, with this really modern logo on it. This Tic Tac logo. Which—the modern logo, the current logo is very similar, it’s not—hasn’t changed that much. But with this gold little foil. It had a flip top case, you could reseal it.

TWILLEY: So shiny, so glossy, so space age. Very very exciting.

LIEBIG: And so I always like to say the Tic Tacs, it’s easy—we take them for granted now. But put yourself in 1969 and where we were, you know, we were putting the first man on the moon. These did look like something that were made for the moon shot. Everything about them was so much more modern. I think they really blew people’s minds.

GRABER: Mint has really changed over time, we don’t think of it as a medicine anymore, although certainly as we said it can be. And it’s not just for breath freshening either, although of course people do still use it for that. But even as candy, it’s still got that peppy vibe to it.

LIEBIG: You sort of move to where mint isn’t just a thing to freshen your breath. It’s going to freshen your spirits, you know. And sort of lift you up and wake you up. Which I think is very clever marketing.

TWILLEY: And although the days of the peppermint kings are long gone, mint itself is still very much a big deal.

LIEBIG: I think mint accounts for about a half a billion dollars in sales in the United States, or nearly that much. So it’s still a big part of the sector of a big business in this country. Mint is big.

GRABER: And not just in candy, breath mints, and toothpaste. We haven’t really talked about this, but mint was and still is big around the world when it comes to food and drink, too. You can find mint tea all over North Africa and the Middle East, although kind of everyone these days loves mint tea.

TWILLEY: Minty soda is popular all over, pretty much anywhere but the English speaking world, which—honestly we’re the ones missing out.

GRABER: Mint is an incredibly important ingredient in herby mixes in the Middle East and in Asia. Minty yoghurt is hugely popular in India. Mint sauce for lamb is a big deal in the UK.

TWILLEY: And the list goes on. But these days the biggest producers of mint are not in the US or indeed in Mitcham—it’s mostly grown in India and Morocco. And since the 70s, we’ve been able to make synthetic menthol, so there are now big factories doing just that. Mint producers are struggling to keep up with demand.

GRABER: Especially this time of year. Yes, that brings us back to the candy cane. Candy canes are the second most popular candy this time of year, second only to chocolate, and the most candy canes of all are sold the second week of December.

TWILLEY: Like all good minty candies, there are a handful of delightful yet fictitious origin stories for the candy cane. The most popular one has been reverse engineered to give the candy cane more of a Christmas connection: there’s this legend of a choirmaster in Cologne, Germany, giving out mint-flavored sugar sticks to the kids to keep them quiet during the nativity play.

LIEBIG: Some try to attribute it to Christianity, you know, and, and making it look like the J in Jesus. That was one. One was of course, to make it look like a shepherd’s cane. And other stories, you know, is, it’s, you know, it’s to dress up Christmas trees.

GRABER: That last one does have some basis in fact, because the only thing we know for certain is that the first mention of a hook-shaped candy cane was in 1847, when a German-Swedish immigrant in Ohio decorated his Christmas tree with them.

TWILLEY: Those candy canes were likely plain white, because the red and white stripe didn’t come along till the 1900s. Credit for that is typically given to a candy maker named Bob McCormack, the leading candy cane producer of the day.

LIEBIG: But Bob’s was really the company that was doing in the early part of the 20th century. I think in the 20s they came out with their first candy cane.

GRABER: It’s unclear whether Bob really invented the red stripes, but his company did come up with at least one important innovation. Originally candy canes were twisted and bent by hand, and that took a lot of work. So Bob’s uncle, who was a Catholic priest, he invented a machine that could do it for you, and candy canes took off.

LIEBIG: Peppermint sticks, candy canes, they became so linked to Christmas and so that was the thing. They became really a Christmas treat, a winter treat. And so they’re tied to that, that part of Americans—the sort of American Christmas ideal.

SIA: Take a trip down Candy Cane Lane with me, it’s so magical, let’s go there in your dreams; it’s the best, so get dressed, I’ll impress, you with the lights in all their windows…

[GASTROPOD MUSIC]

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to Dan Allosso, Pam Dalton, Jason Liebig, and Gary Allen, we have links to their research and books on our website gastropod.com.

GRABER: We wanted to give a special birthday shoutout this episode to Berke Gold, his brother Sami also wanted to thank him for taking care of his cat Cebollita.

TWILLEY: And a huge thanks to our supreme fans: Jasmin Jata from Medford Mass, Abi Velez, Jon Yurek, Jordan Bar Am, Marissa Finer, Monica Dongre, Risa Turcotte, Adam Berns, Dylan Friedgen-Veitch, Kim Behzadi, Tami Parr, and Nadia Berenstein. We are so grateful for your incredible generosity. And please forgive me for any names I’ve mangled.

GRABER: Both birthday shoutouts and being thanked on the show are one of the many perks we offer to our supporters, another one is the special supporter newsletter we talk about a lot, and any and all donors at any amount can get their very own Gastropod sticker. Go to gastropod.com/support or to our Patreon page to find out more. And, really, we can’t thank you all enough.

TWILLEY: Without you, there is no Gastropod—truly—and we’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode entirely inspired by listener questions.