Bonbons

bonbons, or bon-bons, are small candies. The name is French, a duplication of the word bon, meaning “good.” Spanish uses bombon and Portuguese, bombom.

The term “bonbon” originated at the French royal court in the seventeenth century. The earliest bonbons may have been seventeenth-century Jordan (sugar-coated) almonds and small candies based on fruits. By the eighteenth century, the use of the term “bonbon” had spread to other European countries. Bonbonnières or drageoirs, ornate boxes or dishes for serving the morsels made of porcelain, glass, or metal, began to appear in Europe by mid-century. See serving pieces. At first they came in pairs. In France, a particularly popular bonbonnière was in the form of a pair of fancy shoes. Bonbons would be presented as gifts in such containers on holidays and at festivals, particularly on New Year’s Day.

By the nineteenth century, bonbons that could be contained in individual wrappers were being marketed. In 1827 the London confectioner William Jarrin wrote of bonbons, “The various envelopes in which they are put up, display the ingenuity of this gay and versatile people: fables, historical subjects, songs, enigmas, jeux des mots, and various little gallantries, are all inscribed upon the papers in which the bon-bons are enclosed, and which the gentlemen present to females of their acquaintance.” See jarrin, william alexis. In 1866 Johann Strauss II composed the waltz Wiener Bonbons for an event to raise money to construct German hospitals in Paris. On the title page, the composition’s name was spelled out in twisted bonbon wrappers.

Today in France, bonbons generally are based on fruits and fruit essences including candied fruits, nuts including brittles and nougats, boiled sugar sweets such as dragées and caramels, and chocolate-based morsels. The nineteenth-century invention of solid chocolate that could be melted and used to coat sweets before drying to form a hard shell promoted the proliferation of chocolate truffles with chocolate ganache centers and other small, chocolate-covered bonbons. In Belgium, ubiquitous chocolate bonbons with soft fondant or ganache centers are known as pralines. See belgium and fondant.

In the United States, Bon Bon is the Hershey Company’s trademarked name for a frozen sweet consisting of a dome of vanilla ice cream with a hard chocolate coating. They are sold in elongated rectangular boxes in movie theaters, and they also come in buckets elsewhere. However, in the United States as elsewhere throughout the Western world, “bonbon” continues to refer to small candies, which at their best can be produced in small lots by artisan confectioners. Some feature regional ingredients and flavors and iconic shapes and appearances, such as the whole candied fruits of Provence and Louisiana pralines. See candied fruit. The bite-sized morsels also present opportunities for confectioners’ most creative flights of imagination, offering a never-ending range of flavors, ingredients, shapes, and decorations.

See also brittle; caramels; chocolates, boxed; nougat; and praline.

1. Hopkins, Kate. Sweet Tooth: The Bittersweet History of Candy. New York: St. Martin’s, 2012.
2. Mason, Laura. “Bonbon.” In The Oxford Companion to Food, 2d ed., edited by Alan Davidson, pp. 93–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.