This candy brought up an interesting thought I had about the word “original”. I say this from the point of view of someone who has never had a Polly before. I have no history with this candy, and before a few weeks ago had no idea that there was one version of Polly, let alone many versions. I assume there was a time when the word “original” was not on this package, and these were just called Polly. My question is, when does a candy get to call itself the “original”? Does the candy have to sell enough, have to have enough variants, maybe have enough copycats? I’ve seen many candies labelled as “original”, “classic” and that sort of thing, but I imagine at one point all of them didn’t have this addition.

As for the candy itself, I was a little confused about what I was supposed to expect. The package implies that there are several flavours involved in each package, chocolate, arrack, butter toffee, and vanilla. I didn’t know what arrack was, but from what the internet tells me it’s some kind of booze. I can also see from the package that there appears to be dark chocolate and milk chocolate versions of these candies. My initial assumption was that this was some kind of variety pack containing multiple flavours of Polly. It doesn’t appear to be the case.

From what I can tell there are dark and milk chocolate lumps, but the filling seems to be the same in all of them. I would describe the filling as some kind of caramel/vanilla flavour nougat or marshmallow. If it’s marshmallow it’s very dense and very chewy, if it’s nougat it’s very whipped and chewy. I should also mention that they’re not as good looking as is depicted on the package. The lumps are much more glob like and full of wrinkles. The two types of chocolate don’t really make that much a difference, as both contain a lot of sugar, thus eliminating any bitterness from the dark chocolate.

I didn’t totally hate the texture of these, even though I’m not a huge fan of marshmallows. This is mostly because it felt like a marshmallow with a bit more strength. The flavour is hard to decide if it’s a strong vanilla or a weak caramel, but it wasn’t too bad. I’m still confused about all the flavours mentioned on the package, and I probably would have preferred if they were separated instead.