“They melt in your mouth, not in your hand.”
M&M’s that is. I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid and a big-time sponsor of many of the shows were M&M candies. We would break out a bag and grab a handful and grasp them tightly, to see if it was true. Would they melt or not? They usually didn’t and when the commercial finally came on, we gulped then down. I always liked the brown ones (chocolate) best.
Interestingly, the idea behind these sweet and hugely popular candies came from their military use.
In the 1930s, Forrest Mars Sr. (the son of Mars founder Franklin Clarence Mars) was traveling in Europe. According to confectionary legend, it was during this time that Forrest Mars observed soldiers eating chocolate pellets surrounded by a sugar shell during the Spanish Civil War. Inspired, he took the concept back to the United States where, in 1941, M&Ms were born.
With World War II already underway, M&Ms were initially made specifically for the U.S. military, providing an ideal way for soldiers to carry energy-rich chocolate in tropical climates without melting. In 1947, the candy was made available to the public, and its popularity has blossomed over the years.
The original colors included brown, yellow, green and red. Red was replaced by orange for a spell because of the concern of red dyes, but red reemerged a few years later. The color blue was selected in a popularity contest in 1995 and is now a staple. I remember peanut M&Ms, but they were never as good as the original chocolate candies, each personalized and stamped with the letter “M.” And they really do melt in your mouth.
