“My first experience was walking around Flower Mart when I was 25.

“I thought it was weird, seeing this peppermint stick stuck into a lemon,” says Jayce Flickinger, who owns local bars Grand Cru and Market Bar, and grew up outside of Washington DC. The snack is so regional, in fact, that people who grew up only 30 minutes away had never heard of it. It’s definitely a regional thing and, until the past couple of years, was something that 99 percent of people associated with being at the Flower Mart.” “But accounts of them really started picking up in the 1930s and ’40s, and it seems to have come from this carnival-type experience of what you would do on a fun day in the summer. “It doesn’t get much clearer than that,” says MVPC executive director Lance Humphries. The article states that a group touring the Chesapeake Bay “sucked the peppermint stick stuck in lemons until they were as sticky as fly papers.” According to the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy (MVPC), which puts on the Flower Mart festival, one of the earliest documented records of the treat came from a newspaper clipping in 1913, two years after the festival began. In fact, accounts of when the first lemon-peppermint stick was crafted are a little fuzzy. “I just remember having them when I was little, getting sticky hands, and figuring it out from there.” “I think I was just born knowing about lemon sticks-I can’t recall the first time I heard about them,” says David Alima, who owns Baltimore ice cream shop The Charmery. But thanks to social media and some local makers putting their own creative spin on it, the secret is out on this Mid-Atlantic summer treat. The lemon-peppermint stick, as it’s known colloquially, is a spring and summertime treat that started being sold at the city’s annual Flower Mart festival many decades ago. But the idea of sticking a peppermint stick straight into the flesh of a halved lemon and using it like a straw to suck up citrusy juice? Well, until recently, that was a memory reserved for a select few who grew up in Baltimore. When most people think of summer treats, dripping ice cream cones, sugar-dusted funnel cakes, and sticky snow cones come to mind.

Peppermint sticks