Humbug (sweet)

Humbugs are a traditional hard-boiled sweet available in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They are usually flavoured with peppermint and striped in two different colours (often black and white). In Australia, the black-and-white-striped humbugs are flavoured aniseed and sold at all major supermarkets. Humbugs may be cylinders with rounded ends wrapped in a twist of cellophane, or more traditionally tetrahedral formed from pinched cylinders with a 90-degree turn between one end and the other (shaped like a pyramid with rounded edges) loose in a bag. Records of humbugs exist from as early as the 1820s, and they are referred to in the 1863 book Sylvia's Lovers as being a food from the North.