The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets

947 Pages·2015·35.09 MB·English

by  Darra Goldstein

THE OXFORD COMPANION TO SUGAR AND SWEETS
EDITORIAL BOARD
EDITOR IN CHIEF Darra Goldstein
Willcox and Harriet Adsit Professor of Russian, Williams College,
and Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and
Culture, Williamstown, Massachusetts
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Michael Krondl
Author of Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert and The Donut:
History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin, New York, New York
AREA EDITORS Ursula Heinzelmann
Food and Wine Writer and Author of Beyond Bratwurst: A History of
Food in Germany, Berlin, Germany
Laura Mason
Food Historian and Author of Sugar-Plums and Sherbet:
The Prehistory of Sweets, Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Jeri Quinzio
Author of Food on the Rails: The Golden Era of Railroad Dining,
Pudding: A Global History, and Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice
Cream Making, Boston, Massachusetts
Eric C. Rath
Author of Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan, Professor,
History Department, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldstein, Darra.
The Oxford companion to sugar and sweets / edited by Darra Goldstein.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-931339-6 (alk. paper)
1. Sweeteners—Encyclopedias. I. Title.
TP421.G65 2015
664'.1003—dc23 2015000402
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Foreword vii
Introduction xv
Topical Outline of Entries xix
The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets 1
APPENDIX Films 797
APPENDIX Songs 802
APPENDIX Pastry Shops 807
APPENDIX Museums 815
Directory of Contributors 819
Index 831

FOREWORD
I can remember easily the first time I stood deep in There is a great deal aesthetically pleasing about
a field of sugarcane in full bloom, a field already sugarcane. Each stalk is a tiny living photosynthetic
marked for harvesting. It was the spring of 1948, factory, transformed by human effort to maximize
and I had just begun fieldwork in Puerto Rico. The its yield. But the history of these beautiful grasses,
field lay in a rural barrio on the south coast of the and of the people who have looked after them during
island, only about a hundred yards inland from the these last 2,000 years or so, is not so much beautiful
beach. The well-irrigated soil in which the cane was as profoundly tragic.
growing was clayey, black in color. It looked cool After 30 years’ study of sugar and the countries
under a blinding sun, but the air in the field was in- that grow sugarcane and sugar beet and produce
tensely hot. sugar in the New World, I started to write a book
The cane was the kind called gran cultura (liter- about it. I aimed to uncover the part that sugar played
ally, “big growth”), a term that means only that it in world history during the first chapter of the eco-
was left to grow for 15 months or even more before nomic system called capitalism. I knew something
being cut. Topped by the pale, wheat-like, lavender about the history of sugar. I realized that I would
sugarcane blossoms they call guajana, the cane was have to do what I could with this one thin thread,
thicker than a man’s wrist. Standing more than 12 of sweetness and violence, embedded in the thick
feet tall, these plants are bred to be one of the most fabric of the past and stretching far back, long before
substantial and important economic grasses in the anything like capitalism could even have been
world. They were full to bursting of their intensely dreamed of. I found unexpected masses of data, much
sweet green sap, guarapo, which is drunk by the of it fascinating. What kept me afloat in a sea of al-
cupful nearly everywhere that cane is grown. luring description was the simple hunch that sug-
That sap is not won easily from the cane. Once it arcane was not merely a “dessert crop,” as scholars of
is cut and stripped of its leaves, it must be delivered tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar were wont to de-
to the mill as soon as possible to be crushed, ground, scribe it. Far more than desserts, I thought, the his-
and soaked to extract its juice, before it begins to tory of sugar’s production and consumption might
dry out or to sour. When freshly extracted, guarapo shed a bright light on the everyday unfolding of the
is definitely an acquired taste, even among sweet- capitalistic system.
crazed humans. Gray-green in color, lukewarm and Since it was linked for at least five centuries to
cloying, and, if not strained, full of bits of cane fiber the pain and suffering of millions of human beings,
and other even less pleasant stuff, it also brims over I have long thought of sugar’s sweet thread as red in
with calories. The cane on a single acre of good color—the color of blood. During the long struggle
tropical land can supply about 8 million calories. To against the slave trade and slavery, blood was in fact
get that many calories in wheat requires 9 to 12 the liquid the abolitionists came to invoke to depict
acres. (And how many acres to get that many calo- the terrible work of men and women in chains: a tea-
ries in beef? Don’t even ask.) spoonful of sugar for so many drops of blood.
viii • Foreword
This essay is not the place to examine that link a tree, enveloped in a cloud of insects. The insects
at length. One aspect of it should be pointed out, are bees. This ancient evidence of our species-wide
however. North Americans in particular associate love of intense sweetness probably attests to what
slavery with cotton, not sugar, because of the Amer- must have been a practice or custom among those
ican Civil War. But the crop that benefited the slave people who depicted their experience on a cave wall.
owners in the Americas most, and the one that used Such quests for sweetness are characteristic of mem-
the largest number of slaves, was sugarcane. Plan- bers of our species. Chimpanzees and bonobos, pri-
tation slavery in the New World lasted more than mate relatives with whom we share nearly 98 percent
three and a half centuries, and it was involved with of our DNA, also rob beehives. So far as can be told,
the killing or enslavement of an estimated 13.5 million wherever humans coexisted with bees, they went to
Africans and African Americans. These people, and great lengths to obtain the sweet gooey syrup. Many,
their descendants, were the victims of this institu- including this writer, are persuaded that this lust has
tion during 375 years of profit-taking by some, and been part of primate nature for countless millennia.
weighty discussions of the ethics of enslavement by Honey is the sweetness of the Bible. Samson’s
others. During the first half of those 375 years, the riddle (Judges 14) turns on bees’ honey. There is no
West’s much-touted admiration for the idea of uni- sugar in the Bible. But today all the honey on earth
versal human freedom remained a terrible mockery. amounts to a figurative spoonful when compared to
New World slavery simply grew more customary, the world’s sucrose, or “table sugar,” as it is generally
and more important. known. While honey has always been treasured for
It has been sugar’s singular virtue for humans that its great variety of distinctive tastes and odors, re-
the taste of sweetness can seem almost timelessly fined sugar, for so long now honey’s greatest rival,
exciting, by which I mean that its taste is so intense tastes of nothing—that is, of nothing beyond sweet-
it can nearly drown our senses. That taste, unlike salt, ness itself. All artisanal honeys have distinctive tastes.
sour, or bitter, seems, when experienced, to evoke a They are justly prized for those differences, as are
desire for more of the same in nearly everyone. And wines, hams, and coffees, among other food prod-
the memory of sweet is easily awakened; the desire ucts. But because of sugar, the history of sweetness
can become patterned, habitual. One thoughtful became a history of the so-called democratization
scholar has wondered whether our memories of of taste, a gigantic broadening of access to the mass
food are qualitatively different from the rest of human production of factory food that has marked the
memory (Sutton, 2001), and he may be on to some- emergence of the modern world. Sugar’s triumph
thing. But I’d claim for sweetness a memory that was not that it was sweet, or even that it became so
may be qualitatively different from all other food. cheap. Beyond these facts, and unlike all its rivals,
Sweetness is unlike any other taste to the tongue, sugar was nothing but sweet. It could be made pure
and as sweet as mother’s milk. white; it could be used in any dish, any beverage,
Sugar’s easy acceptance into nearly all cuisines any cake, pudding, or candy (and at one time any
occurred because its taste was so singularly pure. prescription)—while providing a taste of sweetness
I want to contemplate that taste, and its uses and alone, to which any other taste could be added.
manifold meanings, from a perspective I never had Honey has not disappeared. But cane and beet
before: 65 years of looking at what today is a cheap sugar, which, for culinary purposes, are the same,
and banal food, but was once unimaginably rare and have gradually pushed aside the many other caloric
costly. Behold the substance that would one day sweeteners, such as maple syrup, palm sugar, sor-
overcome the sweetness that permeates the Bible, ghum syrup, carob, and so on. These sweeteners have
that other ancient sweetness we all know as honey. not disappeared; each has its own taste, and most of
them enjoy specialty markets. But sugar’s market is
the world, and for that market it is one product. The
Honey
specialty markets of these other sweet foods are
Eight thousand years ago, a Mesolithic artist painted measured only against each other, not against sugar.
a scene that imparts drama to an inveterate human An epitome of sugar’s conquest was the manu-
greed. The painting is still there, on the wall of a facture of a semi-refined sugar syrup and its subse-
cave in northern Spain. It portrays a human figure in quent naming as “golden syrup,” thus reducing before
Foreword • ix
the consumer’s eyes the apparent differences between relevant, similar to the ways that they had long treated
honey made by bees and a cane sugar derivative alcohol and then tobacco. Fondness for sugar, on
processed by men. The crowning touch was to dis- the one hand, and the rich (but cheap) harvest of
play on its label a dead lion surrounded by bees, calories from tropical lands, on the other, help us
along with the answer to Samson’s riddle—a bib- understand why sweet things please not only con-
lical touch, courtesy of modern advertising. Though sumers, but also governments and corporations.
there is manifestly no honey in it, Golden Syrup has Sweet calories from sugar (not honey), then, are
been eaten by generations of Englishmen as if they cheap and versatile calories, deliverable in many
were eating honey. Golden Syrup is touted as Eng- forms. Those of us who were around during World
land’s first brand, a sugar syrup that replaced—and War II may remember how a nation accustomed to
for most users, supplanted—the taste of honey. plentiful alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and sugar (not to
It was cheap; it came in two “flavors,” light and dark; mention beef) would turn uneasy and sullen when
and it always tasted exactly the same. As noted confronted with food rationing.
earlier honeys are different from each other. The Sugar did not begin to be treated as an everyday
virtue of manufactured products is that they always pleasure before about 1800. For the poor, sugar
taste the same, unlike the tastes of nature. became a necessity in popular European taste mostly
as a companion to the novel hot stimulant bever-
ages—coffee, tea, and chocolate. Tea and coffee
The Nature of Sugar, Culturally Speaking
reached Europe as drinks; sweetening them with
Several characteristics of sugar stand out, the most sugar was a European addition. Before the nine-
important being that it is sweet. (Saying so is not teenth century, chocolate was also known in Europe
quite so vacuous as it sounds.) Our species’ diligent only as a drink, and it became a sweetened drink as
quest for sweetness appears to be universal, or nearly well. Only after the invention of conching in 1879,
so. Though in some interesting cases, sugar has been which made possible the even distribution of the
tabooed, there is no evidence of any human group cocoa butter in the chocolate, was it possible to
wholly uninterested in foods that taste sweet. Food begin mass-producing chocolate candy bars. In a
taboos on the eating of a specific plant, animal, or later era, it would be flavored soda, notably Coca-
other food (e.g., salt, eggs, blood) are common, but Cola, that became a vehicle for sugar and caffeine.
there is no taboo for sweetness. Nor has it been Such foods may become so popular that a scarcity
proven that a predisposition toward sweetness in of sugar could prove to be as urgent politically as a
humans and other primates is only determined ge- shortage of caffeine or alcohol. Like those others,
netically. Yet the evidence pointing to just such a and maybe more so, sugar is good to keep plentiful,
structurally determined, species-wide, inborn liking and good to control. Internationally, the United States
for sweet is powerful. Many humans worldwide react discovered, sugar is also a good tool to control other
positively to sweetness, and human infants every- nations with, by using quotas and tariffs to reward
where exhibit signs of pleasure when given sweet- and to punish.
tasting liquids. The Eskimo and Inuit people of Alaska Our affinity for sweetness permeates our lan-
and Canada liked sucrose the first time they were guage. Sweet words become loving words: honey,
given it, and they apparently chose to continue honeybunch, sweetie, muffin, sweetie pie, lollipop,
eating it even though it caused them digestive dis- sugar daddy, sweetheart. But there is more to this
comfort (Bell et al., 1973; Jerome, 1977). If this than terms of endearment. An engine runs sweetly.
liking is indeed structurally determined, it may have A tenor sings sweetly. Sweets for the sweet. Think of
evolved in relation to the sweetness of ripe fruit—a the running back Walter “Sweetness” Payton, or of
sign of edibility, as some writers have suggested. the boxers Sugar Ray Leonard and, earlier, Sugar
But there are significant differences in worldwide Ray Robinson. Money can be “sugar,” too. We do
consumption of sucrose (and other sweeteners). not ask how come; it seems too obvious. “It mus’ be
Whatever the role played by genes and sweet tooths, jelly ’cause jam don’ shake like dat” is notably sug-
economic and social factors profoundly affect sugar gestive about what sweetness can stand for. Both
consumption. Where sugar does become significant, symbolically and metaphorically, sweetness is easily
governments are disposed to treat it as politically transferred to bodily activities beyond digestion.