- Making colonial chewing gum.

I don't know why but I'm always surprised to find recipes for chewing gum in the candy sections of settlers' how-to books from the 1800's.

Somehow I can't connect the gum of today with anything that far back in time.  But the gum of today has little in common with traditional chewing gum.

Chewing gum has a very long history.

A pre-loved piece of birch gum was found in Finland with tooth marks still in it dating back 5000 years.

Archaeologists are still arguing over whether it had originally been stuck to the underside of a neolithic table or a park bench. 

Prior to the mid-1800's chewing gum was always some kind of tree gum.  In the US it was spruce gum.

The Native Americans taught the colonists how to find and process it, so chewing gum is as American as corn, squash and turkey.

If you are going to make your own spruce gum, it takes some special handling:

Try to collect it in the spring, before the tree's natural pesticides have started to be made.  Look for wounds on the tree where sap or resin has collected.  Scrape off whatever you can and don't worry too much about the bark that's mixed in with it. A couple hands full of spruce resin will be a good start.  

At home the gum needs to be cooked out of the resin.  Do it outside. A covered BBQ is ideal. Put the resin in a metal strainer over a metal pot and bake it for a while, check and stir the resin from time to time. Keep the pot at medium to low heat and avoid getting it close to direct flame.  

After a while the gum will begin to cook out of the resin, pass through the strainer and gather in the pot below.  That's why you don't have to worry about the bark and other stuff stuck to the resin.

When you think you've gotten all the gum your are going to get from the resin, you can take your pot of gum into the kitchen.  The gum will have the consistency and color of maple syrup.  Pour it into a pan or tray of some type.  You can break it into smaller pieces when it has cooled. Some people then roll it in icing sugar.

Be very careful of getting the hot gum on your skin, you'll get a nasty burn from it. 

Spruce gum tastes like spruce, not a hugely helpful description, but you get the picture. It tastes like tree.

The best measure of its taste is that when paraffin chewing gum hit the market in the 1850's, spruce gum went into steep decline.  A gum that tasted like nothing was better than a gum that tasted like tree.

It was soon discovered that paraffin gum could be flavored like a candy.

From the 1896 Home Mechanic book:

"Take one pound of refined paraffin, mix with half a pound of white sugar.  Melt it together and pour into a candy pan and divide it into squares when it has cooled".

Almost instant chewing gum.

Paraffin is quite flammable and you'd think that putting something flammable in your mouth and chewing it would be unsafe.  But it's a very common food additive and is so nonreactive that it will pass through your system unchanged.

Just the same, you should listen to your Mom - don't swallow your chewing gum.

Lots of free recipes from the pioneers and settlers can be found at the Pioneer Handbooks website.

Even if you never expect to make your own chewing gum, you can still hit the Facebook Like button below and save these how-to's from disappearing into history

It's easy enough to do and a great way to keep this knowledge alive.