Abel Hoadley was born on this day in 1844, and before he was a chocolate man he was a jam and sauce man — orchards, boiling pans, things in jars meant to survive a summer and a long cart ride. That's the instinct I love in him. A person who spends years thinking about what keeps and what carries is exactly the person who should be handed a sugar pot.

Honeycomb toffee is the loudest sweet in the kitchen. You boil sugar and glucose and a bit of honey or golden syrup up past the hard crack, and then you throw in bicarbonate of soda and it answers you — a hiss, a swell, the whole pan climbing like bread dough on fast forward. That's carbon dioxide, thousands of little bubbles trapped as the sugar sets. Pour it out, leave it alone, and it cools into a brittle gold sponge. Then you coat it in chocolate, which is the clever bit: sugar foam hates humidity, and chocolate is a raincoat. That's the Violet Crumble in one line — a jam-maker solving a shelf-life problem and accidentally making a noise everyone likes.

My own honeycomb batches split about even between glorious and a flat brown disc I scrape into the bin while pretending I meant it. Stir it after the bicarb goes in and you knock all the air out. Ask me how I know.