S'more

In reading Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, I came across a sentence to the effect that one part of the United States grew thick with marshmallows. I was taken aback, in that I never thought that marshmallows grew on trees (I’ve always thought money did). Which made me wonder, what are marshmallows? And, of course, this being summer, wondering about smores, since that’s where I consume the most of my annual intake of marshmallows.

So, today we take a summer break, gather ‘round the campfire, and consider the origin of one of camping’s favorite snacks, the s’mores.

First the marshmallow. It turns out that the original pastry confection was made from the root of the Althea officinalis plant, commonly known as a mallow plant, that proliferates near salt marshes. (We’ll cover Althea in an upcoming post on women’s names. Do you know about Althea Gibson?) The plant has been called a mallow since before 1000, although in Old English the words were mersc-mealwe. Etymonline.com says the confection has been called marshmallow since 1877. According to my dictionary, the confection is made from the “mucilaginous root” of the plant. Doesn’t sound so sweet now, does it? Today the confection is likely made with another type of gum or gelatin but retains the name.

Speaking of marshmallow confections, the noun peep, meaning a short chirp (both being onomatopoetic  words) has been used since the early 1400s in English. The meaning of the word as used in the phrase “…and I better not hear a peep out of you” in which the word means any sound or utterance is attested to from 1903. The confection was known as marshmallow chicks until Sam Born bought the company in 1953 and began mass-producing them. (They had previously been hand-formed.) He named them “peeps” and in a delightful eponymous pun promoted them as “Just Born.” The company is now incorporated as Just Born, Inc., and is based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

S’mores, or smores, are a contraction of the phrase “some more” and the recipe for “Some Mores” was first printed in a 1927 Girl Scout publication. The contraction “s’more” apparently didn’t make it into English usage until 1974, although in 1968 Clarice Nelms provided this recipe: “Place a square of milk chocolate on a graham cracker. Toast a marshmallow and put it on top of the chocolate, then a second graham cracker on top of the toasted marshmallow and squeeze and you will want ‘s’more’.” The word “s’mores” is not in my dictionary or on etymonline.com.

Speaking of creations without etymology, graham crackers are another eponymous creation. In 1829 Presbyterian minister Graham Sylvester created a cracker from graham flour (made from combining wheat bran and germ with unbleached wheat flour) as a healthy cracker. It was meant to help curb “carnal urges.” Of course, now s’mores can be a carnal urge. Sometimes the best laid plans….

One more ingredient to go: chocolate. Dictionary.com defines it as “a preparation of the seeds of cacao, roasted, husked, and ground, often sweetened and flavored, as with vanilla.” It does not use the word nirvana in its definition, as I would. The word chocolate came to English in about 1600 from an Aztecan word xocolatl. (The first Aztecan word this blog has covered.)

Chocolate was first brought to Spain from the New World prior to 1520, from where it made its way to Switzerland and Belgium and other parts of Europe. It was originally consumed as a drink made from the paste of the seeds. Pepys, in his “Diary”, wrote in Nov. 24, 1664 of going “To a Coffee-house, to drink jocolatte, very good.”

So there you have it. Is that enough, or do you want s’more?