Sugar plum

A sugar plum is an old English name for a small sweet that was a sugar-coated nut or seed, not a plum. The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets says the word sugarplum had roughly the same meaning as comfit, an old English term for spices or nuts coated repeatedly in thin layers of sugar syrup that build a shell around the center. Sugared almonds are a key example, along with caraway comfits.

The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture explains that this kind of sweet is made by panning. Nuts and seeds such as caraway or aniseed are coated with small amounts of syrup and tumbled until the sugar dries on the surface, building up thin shell on thin shell. It lists sugarplums among the sweets that confectioners were making in the fifteenth century, along with marzipan, cordials, and light cakes.

Both sugarplum and comfit have almost vanished from everyday English, and the modern industry name for such sweets is panned sweets.