Organic boiled sweets in passion fruit, from Saint-Ange — a small French confectioner working in the old way: sugar boiled, flavoured, cooled and cut, with nothing else going on.
The fruit has one of the most misunderstood names in the kitchen. Passion fruit has nothing to do with romance. Spanish missionaries in sixteenth-century South America looked at the extraordinary flower of Passiflora and read the Passion of Christ into its anatomy: the fringed corona became the crown of thorns, the three stigmas the three nails, the five stamens the five wounds, and the ten petals and sepals the ten faithful apostles. They named the plant flos passionis, and the fruit inherited the name. It is possibly the most elaborate piece of botanical symbolism ever to survive into a supermarket.
Why passion fruit works so well as a sweet. Because it is genuinely acidic — far more so than most tropical fruits — and acidity is what stops a boiled sweet from being merely sugary. The sharpness cuts through and makes the sweetness readable rather than flat, in the same way lemon does in a cake. Of all the flavours in the Saint-Ange range, this is the most bracing.
Honest about what they are. These are sweets. Organic sugar is chemically identical to any other sugar, and the certification is about how the cane and the flavourings were grown, not about what the sugar does in your body. What the organic label genuinely buys you here is the absence of synthetic colours and artificial flavourings — which, in brightly coloured confectionery, is not a trivial difference.
One real piece of advice. Sucking a boiled sweet slowly is worse for your teeth than eating it quickly, because what damages enamel is the length of time the mouth stays acidic, not the amount of sugar. If you are going to have one, do not make it last an hour.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
Sophie m
Hey Yum
Bonbon-France
