Organic violet-flavoured boiled sweets — one of the oldest and strangest flavours in European confectionery, and one that people either adore or find utterly baffling.
Violet has a trick no other flavour has. The scent of violets comes from a group of compounds called ionones, and ionones do something genuinely peculiar: they temporarily bind to and desensitise the very olfactory receptors that detect them. Smell a violet for a few seconds and it vanishes; wait half a minute and it comes back. Nothing has changed about the flower — your nose has simply switched off and switched on again. It is the reason violets have been described since antiquity as elusive, and the reason a violet sweet seems to appear and disappear as you eat it. No other common flavour behaves this way.
The French connection. Toulouse is the city of the violet: the violette de Toulouse was grown by the thousand in the nineteenth century, candied, made into liqueur, sold in Paris and shipped as far as Russia. The city still holds a violet festival. Crystallised violets and violet pastilles are among the last widely surviving traces of a flower trade that was once a serious regional industry.
What it tastes like, honestly. Floral, powdery, faintly sweet and slightly soapy to palates that are not used to it — something like eating perfume, which is precisely why some people love it. It is a divisive flavour and there is no point pretending otherwise. If you have never had violet confectionery, buy a small bag before committing.
And plainly: these are sweets. Organic sugar is still sugar. What organic certification buys here is the absence of synthetic dye — which matters, because the violet colour in conventional confectionery is almost always artificial.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
Sophie m
Hey Yum
Bonbon-France
