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You’ll love the firm-but-tender texture, the toothsome bite, and the earthy sweetness of Jellied Beans. But you may still ask yourself why we chose to candy beans, to which we say: Why not?The principle is easy: Soak cooked beans in simple syrup for several hours until the sugar replaces all the water in the beans, and you end up with a firmer version of the original bean, with remarkably well-preserved color and shape. For the scientists among us, it’s called solvent replacement. For the foodies among us, it’s called candying. (And for the clever among us, it’s called Jellied Beans.)Candying fruit is fairly simple and goes back to at least the ancient Romans, who wrote instructions for the preservation of whole quinces in concentrated grape juice and recorded them in an ancient cookbook called Apicius. People have perfected the process over the years, developing new ways to preserve various fruits, vegetables, and legumes in sugar, and, most importantly, working to eliminate the gritty texture that comes with poorly made syrup.Indeed, the secret to perfect candied beans (and candied anything) is keeping the simple syrup from crystallizing. When sugar dissolves in water, individual sucrose molecules break away and bond with water molecules, creating a thick, clear liquid that we call simple syrup. But the more concentrated the recipe (ie the higher the sugar-to-water ratio), the more likely that the sugar molecules will re-bond and crystallize. Since a highly concentrated simple syrup works perfectly for Jellied Beans in particular, the trick is to achieve optimal viscosity while avoiding crystallization. One way to do this is to add glucose, a type of sugar that crystallizes much less readily than sucrose. In this recipe, we add 260 g of glucose to 1000 g of granulated sugar (sucrose)—just enough to keep crystallization in check.