SUGAR

Edible
Series Editor: Andrew F. Smith
EDIBLE is a revolutionary new series of books dedicated to food and drink that explores the rich
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Herlihy Whiskey Kevin R. Kosar Wine Marc Millon
 Sugar
A Global History
Andrew F. Smith

REAKTION BOOKS
 To Meghanne, Reilly, Ethan and Owen
– may you enjoy sweets in moderation

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2015

Copyright © Andrew F. Smith 2015

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and

Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780234786
 Contents

Prologue
1 Early Sugar History
2 New World Sugar to 1900
3 Global Sugar
4 Sugar Uses
5 Sweets and Candies
6 American Bliss
7 Sugar Blues
Epilogue

Recipes
Select Bibliography
Websites and Associations
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
 Prologue

From birth, humans are attracted to sweet-tasting foods, and for good
reason: all 10,000 taste buds in the mouth have special receptors for
sweetness. Sweet foods cause the taste buds to release neurotransmitters
that light up the brain’s pleasure centres. The brain responds by producing
endocannabinoids, which increase appetite. This may have an evolutionary
explanation: about 40 per cent of the calories in breast milk come from
lactose, a disaccharide sugar that is readily metabolized into glucose, the
body’s basic fuel. The sweetness leads infants to eat more, making them
more likely to survive.
Naturally bitter plants may signal toxicity, while sweet foods are
generally safe to eat and are usually good sources of simple carbohydrates.
Once we become conditioned to consume sweet foods, even the sight of
them will cause us to salivate; the saliva will help begin the process of
breaking down the carbohydrates, signalling to the digestive system that
nutrients are on the way.
For millennia, our ancestors cultivated and bred sweet fruits and
vegetables and sweetened foods with juice from fruit, berries, figs, dates,
nuts and carrots, saps from carob, maple or palm trees, nectar from flowers,
and the leaves and seeds of sweet herbs. Over the centuries humans have
learned to harvest, refine or concentrate sweeteners such as maltose from
grains, glucose from grapes, fructose from fruits, berries and corn, and
sucrose from sugar cane and sugar beet. Humans have even harnessed the
bee to provide honey, the Old World’s first important sweetener.
The most common sweetener for the past 500 years, however, has been
table sugar, or sucrose (C12H22O11), a disaccharide composed of two
monosaccharides – glucose and fructose – that are linked in chemical
combination. These separate during digestion; the glucose molecules pass
into the bloodstream through the small intestine and are distributed to the
organs, where they are metabolized into energy (any surplus not needed for
energy is stored in fat cells). Fructose, the sweetest natural sweetener, is
mainly metabolized in the liver, where enzymes convert it into glucose.
Most plants contain sucrose, but the greatest concentrations are found in
the Saccharum genus, a very tall bamboo-like member of the grass family.
The genus likely originated in South or Southeast Asia and it consists of
several species, each with numerous varieties. Only two species –
Saccharum robustum and S. spontaneum – can propagate in the wild, and
they contain comparatively little sugar. S. robustum originated on New
Guinea, and from it indigenous peoples domesticated S. officinarum or
Creole cane, which has a higher sugar content than other species. It was
such a success that by about 8,000 years ago it had been widely
disseminated to the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Southeast Asia and China.
In India, S. officinarum hybridized with S. spontaneum, a cane native to
South Asia, to create S. barberi, a common sugar cane cultivated in India.
In China, S. officinarum hybridized again with S. spontaneum, this time
creating S. sinense, a sugar cane commonly grown in southern China.
The ‘eyes’ or ‘nodes’ on sugar cane.
 Humans have cultivated and tapped the sweet juice of various members
of the Saccharum species for thousands of years, but S. officinarum has
dominated the sugar cane industry, although other species and varieties
have been used for breeding purposes since the late eighteenth century.
Growing and processing cane is a labour-intensive activity. All
domesticated canes are propagated asexually – sections of the stalk with at
least one bud (also called an eye or node) are cut and planted. The cane
fields had to be weeded and fertilized, and irrigated in many places. When
ripe, the canes had to be cut down. These tasks were accomplished by hand
until the invention of mechanical devices in the twentieth century.
Under ideal conditions, cane stalks can grow as much as 5 cm (2 inches)
per day for several weeks. When mature, they are about 2 inches thick, and
they grow to heights of 3.6 to 4.6 metres (12 to 15 feet). They reach their
optimum sugar content at anywhere from nine to eighteen months. When
the stem begins to flower, the sucrose is at its maximum level (ideally 17
per cent). The stalks are cut off just above the root in a process called
‘ratooning’. The root then grows a new stalk, which will be lower in sugar
content and less resistant to disease; still, stalks can be ratooned a few times
before it is more efficient to remove the roots and plant new stem cuttings.
Humankind’s dedication to the cultivation of sugar cane clearly
demonstrates our millennia-old appreciation of its sweet taste. Initially
people consumed the cane juice by simply chewing or sucking on pieces of
stalk. It is difficult to preserve or store cut canes for any length of time:
once cut, the stalk quickly deteriorates and turns into a brown mush. It is
possible to squeeze the juice from the cane, but once exposed to air, it
begins to ferment. This characteristic is a definite advantage if the desired
end product is alcohol, but not helpful if what is wanted is a sweetener that
can be preserved. How our ancestors worked out how to process cane juice
so it could be preserved, and how the implementation and improvement of
this process affected human history, is the subject of this book.
 1
Early Sugar History

Extracting the sweet juice from sugar cane and turning it into crystals of
sugar is a complicated process. There is little archaeological evidence to
indicate just where or when cane juice was first converted into a form that
could be preserved for longer periods of time. Most historians consider
eastern India, about 2,500 years ago, the point of origin for the sugar
industry. The main reason for this attribution is that many early Indian
written sources mention cane sugar and its sweet juice. The Mahābhāshya,
a commentary on Sanskrit grammar attributed to Patanjali and written some
time between 400 and 200 BCE, includes recipes for rice pudding, barley
meal and fermented beverages – all sweetened with some type of sugar.
Sugar is also mentioned in the Arthaśātra, Kautilya’s classic Sanskrit
work on Machiavellian statecraft dating to 324–300 BCE. This describes
different sugar products, from guda (the least pure) to khanda (the source of
the English word ‘candy’) to śarkarā, the purest sugar. The ancient śarkarā
probably resembled the Indian sweetener, still used today, called jaggery – a
coarse, solid sugar that retains some molasses as well as ash and other
impurities. (The Sanskrit word śarkarā has, ironically, ended up in English
as ‘saccharin’ – a sugar substitute.)
Early sugar products were made by crushing or grinding cane stalks
using animal-powered mills fitted with stone wheels similar to those used to
grind grain at the time. Crushing expelled the juice, which was then boiled
to concentrate it. What’s left is raw sugar, which is a sweet but dirty-brown
semi-solid that does not ferment. Over time, innovators devised ways to
filter out impurities, resulting in a whiter, sweeter and more crystalline
product. The crystals could then be removed from the surrounding dark
liquid and formed into soft balls. Later they were shaped into solid pieces of
hard sugar and eventually these were ground into granulated sugar when
needed. The coarse, dark liquid, later called molasses, was removed during
the milling process. It could not be further refined into sugar using the
technology of the time, but it, too, could be used as a sweetener and for
making alcoholic beverages.
The advantages of refined sugar are immense. It can be granulated,
pulverized, crystallized, melted, spun, pulled, boiled and moulded. It blends
smoothly with other ingredients, either in a home kitchen or on an industrial
production line. It can be used to mask the bitterness and enhance the
properties of medicines. It is possible to preserve it for a long period of
time, making a sweetener available throughout the year. Processed sugar
had many culinary uses, such as concealing or enhancing flavours, making
alcoholic beverages and preserving fruits and vegetables. Just as important,
it could be transported to those regions where sugar cane could not grow,
and thus became an important early commercial trade item.
Eastern India, where sugar cane was extensively grown and processed,
was also the birthplace of Buddhism. According to Sucheta Mazumdar,
author of Sugar and Society in China (1998), sugar cane was integrated into
Buddhist religious rituals, and many sayings attributed to Buddha (563–483
BCE) include references to sugar cane. Sugary juices were not forbidden to
monks observing a fast, and many Buddhist festival foods were made with
sugar.
Sugar also appears frequently in other early religious sources, including
Hindu works such as the Buddhaghosa; or, Discourses on Moral
Consciousness (c. 500 CE), which describes sugar cane mills, the extracted
juice, boiling the cane juice, raw sugar and lumps of sugar. Some sugar
historians believe that these lumps were pliable, like toffee, rather than
hard, while others consider this the first reference to crystalline sugar. Jain
literature also mentions a sugar candy, which was particularly important for
Jains, who do not consume honey because they believe that it consists of
millions of living beings that would die if the honey were eaten.
Presuming that India was the point of origin for sugar manufacturing, it
spread quickly to Southeast Asia and southern China. Little is known of the
Southeast Asian operations with the exception that sugar – possibly in the
form of sculptures – was exported to China by 221 BCE. There is more
information available about the early sugar industry in China, where, legend
has it, Buddhist monks introduced sugar cane and the process to make solid
sugar. If the monks were not the first to introduce it, they clearly
popularized it.
Sucrose, or cane syrup, was not China’s first sweetener. In northern
China, where grains were the dominant crops, a sweet syrup of maltose was
made, mainly from sorghum. Maltose, a disaccharide composed of two
glucose molecules, is much less sweet than sucrose. It was the most
important sweetener in China and it is still used in Chinese cookery today.
The process for manufacturing sucrose was introduced into southern
China by the third century BCE, but it was not commonly used in northern
China until centuries later. The Chinese used sugar in medications as well
as for sweetening food and beverages; they may have been the first to make
rock candy. Cane sugar, however, was not considered a necessity and
Chinese sugar processing did not evolve in the way it did in South Asia and,
later, the Middle East. According to Marco Polo, who probably visited
China at the end of the thirteenth century, the Mongol emperor of China,
Kublai Khan, imported Egyptian sugar artisans to help teach the Chinese
how to process sugar cane. Indeed, great progress on sugar growing,
processing and preparing was made in the Middle East.

Sugar in the Middle East and Mediterranean

The Greeks and Romans visited India in ancient times and became aware of
Indian sugar. Nearchos, Alexander the Great’s general who, in 327 BCE,
sailed from the mouth of the Indus River to the mouth of the Euphrates in
Asia Minor, reported in his Indika that ‘a reed in India brings forth honey
without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though
the plant bears no fruit.’
Small quantities of sugar made their way into the Mediterranean region
during Roman times. These imports were used for medicinal purposes.
Dioscorides, the first-century CE Greek physician and botanist, wrote in his
five-volume De Materia Medica, ‘There is a kind of concreted honey,
called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix’, which, he
added, has the ‘appearance of salt; and, like that, is brittle’. Galen, Seneca,
Pliny and others reference a kind of honey imported from India, and many
modern observers believe that this was in fact sugar. By the sixth century CE,
sugar was shipped from India to a port on the Somali coast and then
overland to Alexandria, and from there, small quantities were traded to
physicians, who used it for medical purposes.
Sugar cane was grown in Mesopotamia by 600 CE and commercial
production began shortly thereafter. The Byzantine historian Theophanes
recorded that blocks of zuchar were among the booty of great value
captured in 622 in the campaigns by Heraklius against the Sassanid Empire.
The Arabs had conquered Mesopotamia by 641, and through them sugar
cane and its manufacturing process spread westward to the Nile River, the
Nile Delta, the eastern Mediterranean and East Africa. It continued to be
disseminated westward to the Mediterranean islands – Cyprus, Malta,
Crete, Sicily and Rhodes – and sugar cane was widely grown in northern
Africa, reaching southern Morocco by 682 CE. It was later grown in parts of
southern Spain, southern Italy and Turkey.
In Mesopotamia the centre of the sugar industry was at the head of the
Persian Gulf in the Tigris–Euphrates Delta. Sugar became a very important
commodity in Baghdad, which at the time controlled an empire that
extended from what is today Iran to Spain. Baghdad, with its estimated
population of 1 million, was reportedly the largest city in the world. Ibn
Sayyar Al-Warraq’s tenth-century Baghdadi cookbook includes scores of
recipes that have sugar as an ingredient. The sugar industry thrived until the
arrival of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in 1258; the region fell into
political disorder and sugar production was devastated, but by this time the
sugar industry was well established in the Mediterranean.
Growing sugar cane and manufacturing sugar in the Middle East and the
Mediterranean entailed heftier investments than in India. The hot, dry
climates east of India required large irrigation systems to grow sugar cane.
As these systems frequently extended over great distances, governments or
very large landowners were needed to construct, maintain and regulate
them. Also needed were customers who were willing and able to buy sugar
– a very expensive luxury at the time.
Upper Egypt was particularly well positioned to grow sugar cane. With
its good warm climate, plenty of water and rich soil in the Nile Delta, sugar
became an important ingredient in Egyptian culinary life, at least among the
wealthy. On occasion, however, sugar was also distributed to common
people. Feasts often included sugar sculptures and guests, depending on
their rank, were given between 1 and 25 lb (450 g –11.3 kg) of sugar as
gifts. Sugar was sold in markets throughout Upper Egypt, which became the
major supplier of sugar to the Middle East and Europe. Sugar growers,
millers and refiners grew wealthy.
As Europeans re-conquered the Mediterranean lands, such as Crete and
Sicily, from the Muslims, they learned how to grow sugar cane and
manufacture sugar. During the Crusades Europeans conquered Jerusalem,
which they controlled from 1099 to 1187. Sugar production was a lucrative
business in this area and Tyre (today in Lebanon) was an important sugar
trading city. William of Tyre, who wrote a history of the kingdom of
Jerusalem, proclaimed that sugar was a precious product ‘very necessary for
the use and health of mankind, which is carried by merchants to the most
remote countries of the world’. Soldiers and pilgrims in the Near East were
introduced to sugar, which they carried back to their home countries. This
helped create a demand for sugar in Europe, where monarchs and other
nobles, at least, enjoyed it.

Egyptian sugar mill in the Middle Ages.

Sicilian sugar mill, c. 14th century.

Venice, an Italian city-state, had been importing and re-exporting sugar

from the eastern Mediterranean since the tenth century. When the Crusades
began in 1095, this trade became a very lucrative business. The Venetians
expanded their control over Crete and extended their influence over other
islands, such as Cyprus. Thanks in part to the sugar re-export business, the
small city-state soon became one of the most important powers in the
Mediterranean. Although Genoa would later become a central distribution
point for Portuguese sugar from the Atlantic islands, it was Venice that
dominated the sugar trade in the Mediterranean for almost 500 years.
A serious problem that restricted the growth of sugar production in
Europe during the Middle Ages was the lack of labour. This was
exacerbated by constant wars in sugar-producing areas of the
Mediterranean, followed by the arrival of the Black Death (bubonic
plague), which infected Europe from the 1340s. During the next several
decades an estimated 30 to 60 per cent of the population of Europe died,
creating a labour shortage. In addition, during this time there was an
increasing migration from rural areas to cities, which added to the labour
shortage in sugar-growing areas. Plantation owners in Sicily and other
Mediterranean islands paid premium wages for farm workers, and jobs
there were sought after by many Europeans. Still, there were not enough
labourers, so plantation owners turned to slaves. Both Christian and
Muslims used slaves to plant, harvest and process sugar. At first these were
prisoners captured during military campaigns in what is today Bulgaria,
Turkey and Greece, but slaves were also acquired from East and, later, West
Africa.
Besides a diminished labour pool, Mediterranean sugar manufacturing
had another serious limitation – climate. Sugar cane prefers tropical
climates. A freeze, or even just a spell of cool weather, could limit the
growth of the cane. A more serious problem was the lack of cheap, plentiful
fuel to stoke the boilers that converted cane juice into refined sugar. The
demand for firewood caused deforestation throughout the sugar-growing
areas of the Mediterranean. Deforestation reduced soil fertility and water
availability as rainwater flowed away, eroding unprotected soil. The sugar
industry began to decline in the eastern Mediterranean – Lebanon, Syria,
Egypt and Palestine – beginning in the fifteenth century; by the end of the
century these areas were importing sugar. The sugar industry continued to
thrive in Cyprus and Crete under Venetian control, and in the western
Mediterranean for another century, before it too began to falter.
Yet another change in the eastern Mediterranean sugar trade was the rise
of the Ottoman Turks. In 1453, they captured Constantinople, the capital of
the Byzantine Empire; they then conquered the Middle East and North
Africa and moved into Eastern Europe. The Turks controlled the overland
trade routes between the east and the west, and when the trade was
disrupted, European royalty and the upper classes were unable to easily
import sugar, spices and other riches from Asia. Europeans began to explore
ways of circumventing the Turks and Arabs.

Atlantic Sugar
Beginning in the fourteenth century, the Portuguese began exploring the
eastern Atlantic, where they found and colonized islands such as Madeira
and the nearby island of Porto Santo. Sugar plantations were established on
these islands, and sugar was exported from them to Portugal by the
midfifteenth century. Any excess not sold in Portugal was exported,
generating a considerable profit, which encouraged more exploration and
more sugar plantations.
Spain, too, explored the Atlantic and established a colony on the Canary
Islands off the coast of northwest Africa. These islands had the advantage
of a good climate for growing sugar cane and indigenous peoples who
could be enslaved to run the mills. Sugar was exported from the Canaries to
Spain by 1500. As was the case in the Mediterranean, lack of fuel was a
problem; when the islands were deforested, the sugar industry faltered –
and later collapsed due to stiff competition from cheap sugar producers
elsewhere.
Optimal locations for growing sugar cane were the uninhabited islands of
São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of tropical
Africa; the Portuguese had discovered them in 1470. They had an ideal
climate, easy access to slaves in Africa, lots of water to irrigate the cane
fields and plenty of fuel to run the mills. Sugar production ramped up, and
even with the expenses of the long, arduous sail back to Portugal, it
generated large profits for planters.
 2
New World Sugar to 1900

Christopher Columbus was very familiar with the Atlantic islands and the
sugar industry that thrived on them. As an agent for an Italian firm in
Genoa, Columbus visited Madeira to purchase sugar in 1478. His first
wife’s father was the governor of Porto Santo. After Columbus’s wife died,
he married again, this time to a woman whose family owned a sugar estate
on Madeira. When Columbus returned to Spain after his first voyage to the
Caribbean, he was convinced that sugar cane would grow on the islands he
had explored. On his second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, Columbus
stopped in the Canary Islands and picked up seed cane, which he introduced
to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican
Republic). Columbus and other Spanish explorers established settlements
on other islands, such as Puerto Rico (1508), Jamaica (1509) and Cuba
(1511). Sugar cane was planted on these islands, as it would be later in the
Spanish and other European colonies of Central and South America.
Hispaniola was the most important New World sugar producer. Sugar
was exported from the island to Spain by 1516; within 30 years, the island
had ‘powerful mills and four horse mills’. Spanish ships picked up ‘cargoes
of sugar and the skimmings and molasses that are lost would make a great
province rich’, reported Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, the
contemporary chronicler of the island’s history.
No image of the real Christopher Columbus has survived. This print was made in 1892 to celebrate
the 400th anniversary of his discovery of America.

While the Caribbean had the perfect climate for growing cane and there
was plenty of fuel and water, there was a shortage of manpower. Few
Spaniards were willing to migrate to the New World to labour on sugar
plantations. Indigenous peoples, such as the Taino and Carib tribes, had no
interest in working on these plantations; when the Spanish enslaved them,
they were understandably less than industrious. What with constant wars,
and epidemics of communicable diseases brought over by the Europeans, an
estimated 80 to 90 per cent of the indigenous population of the islands died
off during the century following the first European encounter. The
Caribbean sugar industry languished.
Brazil was a different story. The Portuguese had landed there in 1500 and
later set up small coastal trading posts. It was also an ideal location for
growing sugar: the climate was perfect and there was an abundance of fuel
for the boilers, plenty of water and an unlimited amount of land. The
indigenous people provided a potential supply of slave labour. Small sugar
plantations called engenhos (the Portuguese word means ‘mills’, but was
applied to the entire sugar plantation complex – fields, mills and factories)
were established along the coast by 1520. By 1548, six engenhos were
operating in Pernambuco; by 1583, there were 66, plus another 36 in nearby
Bahia and still others in the southern region.
Portuguese sugar growers are credited with inventing or popularizing
several crucial technological improvements. During the early seventeenth
century, the engenhos adopted a new mill design that crushed cane between
three vertically mounted rollers or cylinders. Cane would be fed into two
rollers on one side, and then workers on the other side turned the cane back
around through other rollers. This was a much more efficient process than
the traditional mill press, which was promptly abandoned. The new style of
mill could easily be powered by animals, water or even, in some cases,
wind; it required fewer workers to operate it and much more sugar was
produced as a result.
Yet another important technological change occurred in the process of
refining sugar. Traditionally sugar mills had just one large cauldron, in
which the cane juice was boiled until supersaturation occurred. The
Brazilians created a multiple-cauldron system in which the liquid was
ladled from one large cauldron into a series of three successively smaller
vessels. This gave overseers much greater control over the process and
permitted them to operate on a larger scale.
Brazilian sugar production rapidly escalated, but the industry
encountered a major setback when its indigenous labour pool contracted.
Disease and wars decimated the native population, and then the Catholic
Church in Brazil began to oppose the enslavement of indigenous peoples. A
solution soon appeared: the Portuguese sugar colony on São Tomé, which
could not compete with the Brazilian sugar industry, shifted its business
plan to exporting African slaves to Brazil. Initially many slaves were skilled
workers who had worked in the sugar plantations on São Tomé. Later the
slaves were any people who could be acquired in Africa and São Tomé
served simply as a holding area and a point of departure for Portuguese
ships that crisscrossed the Atlantic, transporting slaves to Brazil and
elsewhere in the New World, and carrying sugar home to Europe. During
the seventeenth century alone, an estimated 560,000 African slaves were
shipped to Brazil and other European colonies in the Americas.
Brazilian sugar production intensified and large amounts were exported
to Europe. By the late sixteenth century, sugar was Brazil’s most important
export, exceeding the production of the whole of the rest of the Atlantic
world combined. Outpaced by Brazil’s output, the Mediterranean sugar
industry disappeared altogether and it rapidly declined on the Atlantic
islands. Brazil dominated world sugar production.

Sugar Refining
Europeans separated the tasks of growing, processing and refining sugar.
Growing and basic processing occurred in their colonies in the Atlantic and
Americas, but the refining was accomplished in European cities. This
division between producing and refining sugar had several advantages.
First, it meant that colonial growing areas did not need local factories,
which required large investments, to complete the refining process. Instead
these refining centres could be centrally located in Europe’s large cities,
closer to their ultimate market. Second, transportation of sugar from
tropical latitudes by ship was slow, and it was difficult to prevent spoilage
en route to the home country. Shipping sugar in a less refined form reduced
the risk of spoilage and also allowed European refiners to turn out exactly
the kind of product their customers wanted. Finally, by completing the
process in European cities, refiners generated some profit for the home
country, rather than just for the colony. This final point reflects the
economic philosophy of the day – mercantilism. It viewed colonies as
places to supply raw materials to the home countries, where manufactured
goods would be produced and sold back to its colonies.
Europe’s premier refining city in the sixteenth century was Antwerp.
Initially it controlled the trade in and refining of sugar from Portuguese and
Spanish colonies. Thanks to sugar, Antwerp became Europe’s richest and
second largest city. It remained in this dominant position until 1576, when
Spanish armies sacked it. Antwerp’s sugar trade collapsed, as did the city’s
importance. Other European cities, such as London, Bristol, Bordeaux and
Amsterdam, jumped into the void. They launched sugar-refining operations,
and wealth flowed to them.

Caribbean Sugar
For almost a century, the Brazilian sugar industry dominated the Atlantic
world’s sugar trade, but it began to lose market share in the mid-seventeenth
century when British, French and Dutch colonists established sugar
plantations in the Americas. The Dutch established sugar plantations on the
northern coast of South America in what would later become Surinam and
the island of Curaçao. In 1630, the Dutch occupied Recife in Pernambuco
and other Portuguese settlements in Brazil, which they retained for the next
24 years. The Dutch permitted Sephardic Jews to live and practise their
religion openly in these settlements. The Dutch and the Jews became
intimate with the growing and production of sugar cane. When the
Portuguese retook the Dutch-occupied areas in Brazil, both the Jews and the
Dutch left. Some settled in Barbados, a British colony.
Barbados was unoccupied when the British began to settle the island in
1627. Early colonists were mainly small farmers who planned to make their
fortunes by growing and curing tobacco. Unfortunately Virginia and other
colonies produced more tobacco at less cost. It was the Dutch and Jewish
refugees from Brazil who introduced sugar cane to Barbados and taught
plantation owners how to convert the cane into sugar. Slaves were imported
from Africa to grow the cane and operate the rapidly constructed mills. The
island quickly focused on sugar production, as did St Kitts, the Leeward
Islands and, later, Jamaica, after its conquest by the British in 1655.

Planting and hoeing sugar field in Antigua, 18th century.

Martinique sugar plantation during the 18th century.

Similarly the French started sugar colonies on the islands of Martinique

and Guadeloupe in 1635, and established plantations on the western part of
Hispaniola. In 1697, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Ryswyck,
dividing the island of Hispaniola into French and Spanish territories. Over
the next 100 years the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today Haiti)
became the most productive sugar island in the Caribbean.
Large sugar-cane plantations emerged in the British West Indies. Growers
paid their expenses by selling molasses and rum to England or to the
English colonies in North America. The sale of these by-products made the
islands’ prodigious sugar production almost pure profit. Some growers
made such huge fortunes in sugar that they installed overseers to run their
plantations and then sailed home to England, where they purchased large
estates. Sugar also brought wealth to many merchants, refiners, shippers,
bankers, insurers, investors and distillers in Britain. By 1760, the city of
Bristol alone had twenty sugar refineries that annually processed 831,600 lb
(377,200 kg) of sugar cane. Sugar barons and their allies in England
emerged as a powerful political force that influenced Parliament throughout
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their financial self-interest
diverged from that of their counterparts in the British colonies in North
America. The economic and political conflict began with molasses.
Slaves cutting sugar cane, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua (1823).

Molasses and Rum

To sustain the rapidly expanding slave populations in the West Indies, food
and other essentials had to be imported, mostly from British colonies in
North America. In return molasses, raw sugar and rum were shipped from
the West Indies. Molasses, a by-product of the sugar refining process, was a
much cheaper sweetener than crystallized white sugar. It could also be used
to make alcoholic beverages, and plantation owners and merchants used it
in the production of high-quality rum, which they exported to England or
sent to Africa in exchange for slaves.
Rum was also made on the French islands in the Caribbean, but French
brandy producers objected to the importation of rum into metropolitan
France. The French West Indies sugar industry ended up with a massive
excess of molasses. Rather than dump it into the sea, the French
government permitted its colonies to sell molasses to anyone who would
buy it. The obvious market was the British colonies in North America.
Since molasses from the French West Indies cost 60 to 70 per cent less
than the product from the British West Indies, New England colonial ships
acquired it in bulk from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. New
England was ideally suited for rum production: it had skilled workers
needed to make the stills, an abundance of ships to transport the bulky
molasses and plenty of wood for fuelling stills and making barrels. Rum
quickly became the distilled beverage of choice in North America. By 1700,
New England was importing more molasses from French colonies than
from British ones. In exchange for the molasses and raw sugar, American
merchants sent lumber, fish (mainly salt cod for slaves) and other
provisions.
As a result of this trade, British West Indian sugar growers lost business,
so much so that from 1716 they began to urge the British Parliament to
restrict New England’s imports of sugar and molasses from French and
other European colonies in the Caribbean. Their proposed laws would give
the British West Indies a complete monopoly on the molasses and sugar
trade, allowing sugar-cane growers to set their own prices and make
substantially greater profits. Parliament finally passed the Molasses Act in
1733. The law placed a duty of sixpence per pound on sugar, molasses, rum
and spirits imported from non-British colonies.
Had the Molasses Act been enforced, it would likely have crippled New
England’s fishing and lumber businesses, because these products were
traded to Spanish, French and Dutch West Indian possessions. Enforcement
would also have hindered the slave trade, in which some New Englanders
were involved. But passing the Molasses Act and enforcing it were two
different things. The only enforcement provision in the law required the tax
to be collected by local customs officials, who were often friends of those
engaged in the molasses trade. Customs officials were also few in number
and could easily be bribed to look the other way as smugglers shipped in
molasses through the thousands of coves along the New England coastline
where goods could be landed undetected.
In the 1730s, Parliament permitted growers in the British West Indies to
trade sugar directly with countries in Europe. The growers’ fortunes
improved and they stopped pressing for enforcement of the Molasses Act.
Even so, the act remained on the statute books for the next 30 years, during
which time molasses was openly smuggled into North America. It was a
major misstep to pass the Molasses Act and not enforce it – a blunder that
would have serious repercussions later.

American Sugar
In 1725, New York launched its first sugar refinery, and sugar producers in
the Caribbean began to ship raw sugar to the city. This partially refined cane
sugar was sweeter and more expensive than molasses, but unlike molasses
it could be refined into pure sugar. Other refineries were soon established in
New York, where they were the largest buildings in the city, and sugar
refining became one of the city’s most lucrative industries.
As a result of the Seven Years War (1756–63), England acquired vast
new possessions in North America – and the ongoing expense of defending
them. To generate revenue, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which lowered
the levy on imported molasses to its American colonies that had been
imposed 30 years before. As this was a decrease on the existing duty, no
one in the British Parliament thought there would be any concern in its
American colonies. But the act also included strong enforcement
provisions, such as stationing British warships to patrol the coast and
sending British custom officials to American ports to enforce the collection
of duties.
By the time the Sugar Act was passed, New Englanders had been
smuggling molasses and other contraband for 30 years. Enforcement of the
Sugar Act made smuggling much more risky. Americans protested the
Sugar Act and, in support, many merchants in Boston and New York agreed
to stop buying British imports. The Act was repealed, but the colonial
resistance set Parliament on a course for more laws to enforce its taxing
authority in British North America, and these in turn created even bigger
colonial protests. The result was a military conflict, which broke out in
1775.
The American sugar trade and refining businesses collapsed during the
war, since the British Navy sporadically controlled the oceans. New York
City, the centre of American sugar refining, was occupied by British forces
for eight years, and sugar production collapsed. When the war ended, the
sugar trade resumed. New York’s sugar-refining industry quickly revived
and then expanded as raw sugar flooded in from the Caribbean. In 1803, the
United States purchased from France the vast tract known as Louisiana.
Sugar cane had been grown in the southernmost tip of the Territory –
around the Mississippi Delta – since the 1750s, but it was at the northern
fringe of the crop’s growing range; rainfall was irregular and the growing
season was relatively short for sugar cane – only ten months. The cane had
to be harvested in the autumn lest freezing temperatures destroy the crop. In
1795, Jean-Etienne Boré, a Frenchman, imported Haitian slaves who were
knowledgeable about growing and processing sugar cane. With their help,
Boré’s plantation did well, and other sugar refineries were constructed. By
1812, the territory had 75 sugar mills in operation. The industry received a
major boost in 1817, when ribbon cane was introduced; this plant matured
faster than the variety that had previously been planted. The 1820s saw a
tremendous growth in sugar-cane cultivation, exploiting the ample supply
of slave labour and supported by federal tariffs on imported sugar. Thanks
to cheap sugar, America’s annual consumption per capita rose from 13 lb
(5.9 kg) in 1831 to 30 lb (13.6 kg) by mid-century.
Throughout the nineteenth century, most American sugar was refined in
New York, which was an ideal location for the industry. Its port facilities
were the best on the East Coast, facilitating the shipping of raw sugar from
the Caribbean and Louisiana. New York itself had a large market for sugar,
and the city’s road, canal and later train connections meant that refined
products could easily be shipped north, south and west. The German-born
William Havemeyer, who had been an apprentice at a London sugar
refinery, immigrated to America and in 1799 began running the Edmund
Seaman & Co. sugar refinery in New York City; six years later, he opened
his own refinery with his brother. It was only one of several refineries
operating in the city at the time – and more were soon to be launched. In
1864, the Havemeyer family built the largest and most technologically
advanced sugar refinery in the world in Williamsburg on Long Island.
As manufacturing methods improved and production rose dramatically,
sugar prices dropped steeply. In 1887, the Havemeyers and seven other
sugar industry leaders formed the Sugar Trust; their intention was to curtail
production in order to raise prices and profits for all the companies.
Following the acquisition of more companies, the resulting conglomerate
was named the American Sugar Refining Company. Inefficient plants were
closed while others were combined, and American Sugar Refining
unofficially but effectively fixed the price of refined sugar. In 1900, the
company created a subsidiary, Domino Sugar, to market the parent
company’s refined sugar. By 1907, the American Sugar Refining Company
controlled 97 per cent of all production of refined sugar in America.
Domino sugar was the largest-selling sugar brand in America during the 20th century.

Sugar and Slavery

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the entire sugar industry in the Americas
was based on slavery. Slaves were acquired from Africa and transported to
the Americas to be exchanged for sugar, which was exported to England,
where the ships then took on goods to be exchanged for slaves in Africa.
The slaves were then transported to the Caribbean to work on sugar
plantations. This became known as the ‘Triangle Trade’.
Slaves on sugar plantations were subjected to long hours of strenuous
work in cane fields, mills and factories. Their lives were cut short by heavy
workloads, poor diet, rampant diseases such as yellow fever and the lack of
medical care. Some slaves, particularly in Brazil and Jamaica, escaped and
formed their own communities in the interior. Workers who died or
disappeared had to be replaced, and in the first 75 years of the eighteenth
century, the West Indies alone absorbed 1.2 million African slaves. An
estimated 252,000 slaves arrived in Barbados and another 662,400 in
Jamaica during the period from 1700 to 1810. Slaves soon outnumbered
Europeans, particularly on the Caribbean islands. In the French colony of
Saint-Dominique, in 1789, a white minority numbering only 32,000
controlled an estimated 500,000 slaves.
Slave revolts, a regular occurrence in Brazil and the Caribbean, were put
down violently, with the rebels usually put to death in a gruesome manner.
The only successful slave revolt, in Saint-Dominique, began in 1791.
Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the
Rights of Man, which proclaimed that all men were free and equal, slaves
on Saint-Dominique rebelled against their masters. France sent armies to
the island to quell the revolt, but the soldiers were defeated by yellow fever
and the guerrilla tactics of their opponents. The rebels finally prevailed in
1803, and on 1 January 1804, Haiti became an independent republic, the
second in the Americas. Throughout the rebellion, white plantation owners
and overseers who were not killed outright fled the colony, some to
Louisiana, others to Cuba. Haiti’s sugar industry, previously the most
productive in the Caribbean, never recovered.

The remains of a sugar factory in Haiti, c. 1830, which was destroyed during slave uprisings in the
early 19th century.

Opposition to slavery grew in Europe and North America in the late

eighteenth century. Quakers and others abstained from consuming sugar
made with slave labour, but abstention remained an isolated and individual
tactic. When Parliament failed to pass the slave trade abolition bill in 1791,
British abolitionists joined together to boycott slave-grown sugar. Since one
obvious place where sugar was consumed was the tea table, women took an
active role in the abstention movement. It developed a broad base of
support, attracting as many as 400,000 supporters. Slavery opponents were
not just abolitionists: there were also liberal economists, such as Adam
Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), who argued that the costs of
slavery far outweighed any financial gain. Others were concerned with the
undue political power of West Indian planters, who had skewed
Parliamentary bills in their favour to the detriment of the British economy
throughout the eighteenth century.
The growth of the abolition movement in England encouraged the
importation and consumption of slave-free sugar from India. At the time,
little Indian sugar was transported to England, but as the abolition
movement picked up steam more orders were placed and by the early
nineteenth century sugar from India was generally available in England.
Quakers established ‘Free Produce Societies’, which sold Asian sugar.

Isaac Cruikshank, ‘The Gradual Abolition off the Slave Trade, – or Leaving of Sugar by Degrees’,
1792.

Abolitionist broadside promoting Indian sugar not

made by slaves.
 In the United States, abolitionists tried to grow sugar beet and abstain
from purchasing sugar imported from the Caribbean. American Quakers
also supported the maple sugar industry as an alternative, and small
amounts of maple sugar were produced beginning in the 1780s. In 1789,
Philadelphians agreed to buy a given amount of maple sugar at fixed prices
to help the industry get off the ground. Quakers especially urged the use of
maple sugar to ‘reduce by that much the lashings the Negroes have to
endure to grow cane sugar to satisfy our gluttony’. Almanacs urged readers
to make maple sugar at home because it was sweeter than cane sugar, which
was ‘mingled with the groans and tears of slavery’. In the 1830s, articles in
the Episcopal Recorder and the Colored American newspaper urged parents
to prevent their children from purchasing sweets in confectionery shops
because all purchases of sugar supported ‘the whole iniquity’ of slavery.
Abstention and other abolition efforts finally brought some success. On 3
March 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed a bill ‘to prohibit the
importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the
United States’. Three weeks later, the British House of Lords passed an Act
for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Slavery continued in the British West
Indies until 1834, in the French colonies until 1848, and in the United States
until 1866. Cubans held slaves until 1886 and Brazilians did so until 1888.
Technological improvements – such as the vacuum pan, the centrifuge
and the application of steam power to the sugar refineries in the late
nineteenth century – made production less labour intensive, but large
numbers of labourers were still needed. Freed slaves were unwilling to
work in sugar plantations after emancipation. The demand for a workforce
led the sugar industry to engage in hiring contract labourers, particularly
from India and China, to work the plantations. Eventually hundreds of
thousands of contract workers flooded into sugar-growing areas, and many
remained after their contracts were completed.

Cuban Sugar
The immediate beneficiary of the end of the sugar industry in Saint-
Domingue was Cuba, a Spanish colony. Sugar cane had been grown on the
island since 1523, but the industry did not mature because of Spain’s
policies, which included laws that forbade Cubans from trading with
foreign ships and restrictions on importing slaves.
The Cuban sugar industry did not get off the ground until 1762, when the
English controlled Havana for ten months during the Seven Years War.
During this period the British introduced tens of thousands of slaves into
Cuba. When the war ended, the British withdrew, but Cuban sugar
producers demanded liberalized policies: Spain relaxed its laws regarding
the importation of slaves and permitted Cubans to trade with foreign
countries. More than 18,000 slaves were brought to Cuba during the 1780s,
and more than 125,000 during the 1790s and the first decade of the
nineteenth century. The Cuban sugar industry thrived, considerable amounts
were exported and finished goods from Europe and the United States
flowed into Cuba. Still, in 1790, Cuba produced only 15,000 tons of sugar.
But this was about to change.
During the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, Frenchmen from that island
moved to Cuba with their slaves and set up sugar plantations and factories.
Sugar production in Cuba was enhanced by an improved transportation
system; new roads and, later, railways made it possible to move sugar from
the refineries to seaports for export. Simultaneously sugar production on
other Caribbean islands decreased, largely because of the emancipation of
slaves in the British- and French-controlled islands. Cuba retained slavery
and quickly became the most cost-efficient sugar producer in the world.
Sugar became Cuba’s premier export crop, and the United States became its
major trading partner. Small sugar mills were closed, and more efficient
central factories began to service several cane growers. Cuban sugar
received another boost during the American Civil War (1861–5), when
sugar plantations in Louisiana were crippled and there was a jump in
sugar’s price on the world market. From the 1840s to the 1870s, Cuba
supplied 25 to 40 per cent of the world’s total sugar.
The Cuban sugar industry stagnated during a rebellion on the island that
lasted from 1868 to 1878. During the war, many sugar producers left Cuba
and some set up shop in the Dominican Republic. After Cuban slaves were
emancipated in 1886, many slaves left plantations and refused to work in
the sugar industry. Cuba reached out to contract labourers. During the
following decades, it absorbed 1.2 million immigrants from Spain, the
United States, China, Haiti and other Caribbean islands.
 Yet another serious problem was increased competition from abroad in
the form of sugar beet, which was grown and converted into refined sugar
in Europe and the United States. But large American corporations
increasingly invested in Cuban sugar refining. In 1890, they lobbied the
United States Congress to pass the McKinley Tariff Act, which eliminated
tariffs on refined sugar imported from Cuba. By 1896, the Sugar Trust alone
owned nineteen Cuban sugar refineries.

Cutting sugar cane in Cuba, from Commercial Cuba: A Book for Businessmen … Illustrated (1899).

Cuban sugar factory, 19th century.

Exports of Cuban sugar to the United States soared, as did American

exports of finished goods to Cuba. Production hit 1.1 million tons in 1894.
But then sugar-beet growers and American sugar refiners successfully
lobbied Congress to levy a 40 per cent increase in duties on imported Cuban
sugar. Spain retaliated by placing a tariff on American goods exported to
Cuba. The price of Cuban raw sugar dropped sharply, while prices for
imported goods from the United States soared. Workers on sugar
plantations were laid off, and many joined Cuban guerrilla groups who were
fighting for independence from Spain. Guerrillas destroyed sugar refineries
as well as cane fields, and the Spanish colonial authorities retaliated with
harsh measures, including creating concentration camps, to put down the
revolt. The resulting atrocities were covered by many American
newspapers; inflammatory articles, which came to be known as ‘yellow
journalism’, swayed U.S. public opinion in favour of the guerrillas.

The Spanish American War and Its Aftermath

In February 1898, an American battleship, the USS Maine, exploded and sank
in Havana harbour. Although the cause was never determined, the
Americans blamed the Spanish. Two months after the explosion, the United
States declared war on Spain. In five months of conflict, the American
military occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The United
States also annexed Hawaii, then controlled by American sugar interests.
After the war, sugar output in Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines
increased to some extent, but Cuban production skyrocketed with the
advent of new milling methods, such as the use of water mills, enclosed
furnaces, steam engines and improved vacuum pans. American investments
in Cuban sugar also soared. By 1919, Americans were estimated to control
about 40 per cent of the Cuban sugar industry. Cuban sugar production hit
3.5 million tons by 1925.

Cutting cane, early 20th century.

 Looking Backwards
During the four centuries after Columbus’s first voyage to the Caribbean in
1492, the sugar industry had greatly changed. It had shifted from the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands to the Americas. Plantation labour
had shifted from a slave-based force to one based on contract workers.
Sugar harvesting, milling and processing had emerged from a largely hand-
powered system to an industrial one based on machinery and the latest
technology that science could devise. Sugar production had shifted from
small plantations and mills to one based on multinational corporations. All
of these developments contributed to the steep decline in the price of sugar
and the rapid rise in its consumption throughout the world.
 3
Global Sugar

The beet (Beta vulgaris) originated around the Mediterranean, and both the
roots and the leaves were widely consumed in Europe and the Middle East
beginning in Neolithic times. The Greeks and Romans grew it in their
gardens. Medical practitioners prescribed it as the remedy for various
ailments. Beets survived as a garden plant during the Middle Ages and they
were grown all over Europe by the fifteenth century. Sixteenth-century
herbals list several varieties of beet, including pale ones with a sweet taste.
The French agronomist Olivier de Serres, in his Théâtre d’agriculture
(1600), was the first observer to report that the root of the beet ‘is counted
among the choice foods and the juice which it yields on cooking is like a
sugar syrup’.
Beets are a sturdy food crop. Unlike sugar cane, they grow in temperate
climates; the hardy plants can withstand droughts and floods. Their growing
season is relatively short, so another crop can be planted after they have
been harvested. The roots (beetroot) can be dried and preserved for later
consumption, and they make excellent fodder for cattle and horses. They
became a common agricultural crop in Europe during the seventeenth
century.
It was a Prussian chemist named Andreas S. Marggraf who discovered
another important property of beetroots. In 1747, Marggraf presented a
paper to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin reporting that he had derived
small amounts of sucrose from them. The variety of beet that Marggraf used
in his experiment, however, yielded very little sugar, and the extraction
process was neither practical nor economical. Still, it was promising: if this
process could be improved, non-tropical countries would be able to supply
their own sugar and would not have to import it. The Prussian government
funded research into beet sugar production sporadically for the next several
decades.

Sugar cane- and beet-growing areas around the world in the 1930s.

Marggraf repeated his experiments in 1761 and made enough sugar to

produce a few loaves, but the process remained impractical from a
commercial standpoint. After Marggraf’s death, in 1782, his student Franz
Carl Achard continued experimenting with beets and found that some
varieties yielded more sugar than others. He perfected Marggraf’s process
and in 1799 gave Frederick William III, the king of Prussia, a few pounds of
sugar crystallized from beetroot. Two years later, the king gave Achard
financial assistance to construct a factory in Silesia to test his method.
Achard learned a great deal about beets and he is credited with being the
first person to extract sugar from them on a commercial basis. He
determined that white beetroots contained the most sucrose, and they were
subsequently used for breeding purposes. Achard claimed that domestically
produced beet sugar could be more economical than imported cane sugar,
but he was unable to make a success of his factory.

Franz Carl Achard (1753–1821).

 The beet sugar industry revived during the Napoleonic Wars, when
France enforced the Continental System, which prevented goods from Great
Britain or its colonies from entering European countries that were
controlled by or allied with France. This included imported sugar from the
British West Indies, which had previously flooded Europe. In 1791, the
slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Dominique greatly reduced the
amount of sugar imported from French colonies in the Caribbean. During
wartime, the British blockaded continental ports controlled by France,
making it difficult for sugar to be imported from any source. France offered
a bounty for the production of sugar from beets, and more than 100 sugar-
beet factories were established, mainly in northern France, but also
elsewhere in continental Europe. Sugar was successfully extracted, but the
industry collapsed when peace was restored in 1815 and cheap sugar once
again flowed in from the Caribbean.
But sugar beet was not forgotten. Vilmorin, a French seed producer and a
pioneer in the selective breeding of plants, began breeding experiments
aimed at increasing the sugar content of beets. In 1837, the company
introduced the sugar beet (B. vulgaris var. altissima), which had a high
sucrose content. Simultaneously new extraction techniques were developed
that lowered the cost of producing sugar from beets. The beet sugar industry
revived in Germany, France, Belgium, Austro-Hungary, Russia and
Scandinavia. Eventually breeders were able to produce beets with roots that
were 20 per cent sucrose.

Achard’s sugar beet factory in Silesia.

Even with this increase in sugar content and improved methods of

extraction, it was still cheaper to import cane sugar than it was to extract
beet sugar. Early support for beet sugar production came from Quakers and
abolitionists, who opposed buying cane sugar produced with slave labour.
This support died down in England and France when slaves in the
Caribbean were emancipated in the mid-nineteenth century. Sugar prices
should have escalated with the end of slavery in the Caribbean, but
expanding sugar beet and cane production worldwide meant that prices
declined throughout the nineteenth century. National governments
interested in supporting their sugar-beet industries created policies that
favoured in-country beet growers by placing high tariffs and quotas on
imported sugar. With governmental intervention, beet sugar cultivation in
Europe expanded and hundreds of factories were opened during the late
nineteenth century. Governmental support continued through the twentieth
century, and Europe became a net exporter of sugar by the end of that
century.
Napoleon was ridiculed for his support of the sugar beet industry.

Field of ripe sugar beet, 1930s.

Children working in a sugar beet field in Sugar City, Colorado, in 1915.

Maple syrup remains an important sweetener in Canada and the United States, as in this illustration
from Upper Canada Sketches by Thomas Conant (1898).

Sugar beet was also grown in the Americas, and attempts to convert it
into sugar began as early as the 1830s. Successful operations, however, did
not get off the ground until the 1870s in the United States and the 1880s in
Canada. With governmental protection and support, sugar-beet operations
rapidly expanded during the early twentieth century. Technological
advancements, such as mechanical harvesting, increased production and
efficiency.

African, Asian and Oceanian Sugar

As sugar-beet cultivation grew in temperate areas of the world, sugar-cane
growing and manufacturing expanded in tropical Africa, Asia and the
Pacific. Mauritius, a British colony in the Indian Ocean that had been
acquired during the Napoleonic Wars, had the perfect tropical climate for
growing sugar cane, which was introduced in 1829. As the industry grew,
however, it faced serious labour shortages. The British plantation owners’
solution was to contract with workers, and tens of thousands came from
India. By the mid-nineteenth century, the island was producing 9.4 per cent
of the world’s sugar, and as sugar production declined in the West Indies,
Mauritius became one of Britain’s major suppliers. Rather than returning to
India after their contract was up, most workers remained on Mauritius.
When it became independent in 1975, the majority of its population was of
Indian descent. Mauritius continues to grow sugar cane, with the European
Union its major buyer.
Sugar cane was also grown in Natal, which today is part of South Africa.
The cane growing area expanded into adjacent Zululand (today KwaZulu-
Natal) after its annexation in 1887. Once again, the growers’ main problem
was finding a suitable workforce: Africans were not willing to work under
the conditions and wages the growers offered. Workers were bought in
India, but they, too, found the work disagreeable and shifted to other
employment. Many remained in South Africa and opened other businesses
instead of returning to India. Indians were replaced by African migrants
from other parts of southern Africa, including large numbers of children,
from Natal, KwaZulu and Mozambique.
Sugar cane was introduced into the Pacific islands in prehistoric times by
Polynesians and Melanesians, who brought it with them as they set out on
long voyages. When they reached new islands, they planted the cane. The
British first planted sugar cane in Australia in 1788. It was originally
brought to Sydney, but the climate there was too cold to grow it. In the
1860s, sugar production was relaunched. In Queensland, convict labour was
used at first; New South Wales hired contract workers from Polynesia. In
Queensland, sugar-cane growing was launched by small farmers, but this
shifted to plantation-style cane growing in the 1880s, using contract labour
from Melanesia. Queensland converted large sections of forested land to
agricultural uses, with sugar as a leading crop.
By 1900, the sugar industry was one of America’s most important
businesses: cane was widely grown in Louisiana and Texas and in the newly
acquired territories of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii; sugar beet
was grown in western states such as Utah and California. Sugar refining
played an even greater role in many eastern cities. The most important was
the Havemeyer operations in New York. As discussed previously, in 1887,
Henry O. Havemeyer devised a partnership with other sugar refiners to be
called the Sugar Refineries Company, commonly known as the Sugar Trust.
The American firm Ladd & Co. leased land on Kauai to grow and mill
sugar in 1835; others followed its example. Few native Hawaiians wanted
to work on sugar plantations, so the growers looked abroad for cheap labour
and began to import contract workers, initially Chinese men (women were
intentionally excluded). By 1860, Hawaii had 29 sugar plantations, and
most of the territory’s sugar exports went to the United States. When Mark
Twain visited the islands in 1866, he was so impressed with the cane
growing that he declared Hawaii ‘the king of the sugar world far as
astonishing productiveness is concerned’. In 1875, Hawaii and the United
States signed a Reciprocity Treaty permitting duty-free importation of
Hawaiian sugar.
California and Hawaii Sugar Company factory, early 1900s.

The following year, Claus Spreckels, a German immigrant who operated

a beet sugar factory in California, arrived in Hawaii and immediately made
arrangements to purchase most of the Hawaiian sugar. He eventually owned
or controlled most of the sugar production in California and on the islands
until the 1880s.
By 1882, Chinese labourers totalled 49 per cent of the entire sugar
industry’s workforce in Hawaii, and Hawaii’s political leaders became
concerned about the large number of foreigners living there. The following
year, Hawaii stopped accepting immigrants from China, and most Chinese
workers left. In 1887, American sugar interests forced the king of Hawaii to
agree to a constitution giving them most of the power in the kingdom. With
the assistance of U.S. Marines, Euro-American business interests overthrew
the monarchy in 1893. They then put pressure on the United States
Congress to annex the islands, which it finally did in 1898, during the
Spanish–American War.
Labour was needed to work the cane fields and operate the refineries.
Okinawan, Korean, Puerto Rican, Portuguese and Filipino nationals came
to Hawaii to work in the sugar industry, but the largest group was Japanese
immigrants, who had been coming to Hawaii as contract workers since
1865. When their contracts expired, many Japanese labourers remained in
Hawaii, and their progeny are the largest single ethnic group on the islands
today.
The California and Hawaii Sugar Company (C&H Sugar), formed in 1906,
dominated sugar production in Hawaii until the 1930s, when sugar
plantations were converted to other uses. Today, only one cane grower
remains on the islands. C&H Sugar is now part of American Sugar Refining
(Domino Sugar), a company owned by Florida Crystals and the Sugar Cane
Growers Cooperative of Florida.
Florida is not an ideal place to grow sugar. Its semitropical climate has
occasional freezes, which can destroy the cane crop. The southern part of
the state would be preferable, but much of it is occupied by the Everglades
National Park. Sugar plantations and mills had been established in eastern
Florida in the late nineteenth century. Spain ceded Florida to the United
States in 1821, and the sugar-cane industry rapidly expanded, but the
plantations stagnated as they could not compete with domestic sugar from
Louisiana or cheap imports from the Caribbean.

Filling sugar bags in a California and Hawaii Sugar Company factory.

Sugar cane didn’t get a second foothold in Florida until the 1930s, when
the U.S. Sugar Corporation was launched in Clewiston. It remained a
marginally successful company until 1942, when the Second World War
drove up the demand for sugar and sugar cane was planted on even more
acres, and this was just the beginning. In 1948, the Army Corp of Engineers
began to drain the Everglades and establish an irrigation system to protect
populated areas of southern Florida from storm damage. During the next 50
years, more than half of the Everglades was drained, and the reclaimed land
became the Everglades Agricultural Area. While anything could have been
planted there, the local climate – and federal subsidies – encouraged
farmers to grow sugar cane.
 When Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959, the U.S. drastically
reduced purchases of Cuban sugar. In retaliation, Castro nationalized
Cuba’s sugar operations, many of which were owned by Americans. The
U.S. responded by halting all imports of Cuban sugar in 1961. Many wealthy
Cuban sugar growers and processors, such as the Fanjul family, fled Cuba
and bought land in southern Florida, where they planted sugar cane. The
Fanjuls also acquired sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic.
In 1962, the U.S. Sugar Corporation opened the Bryant Sugar House near
West Palm Beach, Florida. It was the world’s most modern mill. By the
early 1980s, U.S. Sugar was the largest sugar producer in the state and
Florida was the number one sugar-producing state in America. Part of the
reason for this success was the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which since
1979 has given subsidies and ‘non-recourse’ loans (which do not have to be
repaid) to domestic growers, and imposed import quotas on sugar from the
Dominican Republic, Brazil and the Philippines.
Subsidies went disproportionately to the largest cane growers and sugar-
beet farmers. In 1991, 42 per cent of the subsidies went to 1 per cent of the
growers. As a result of limited competition from abroad and domestic
subsidies, American consumers have paid from eight to fourteen cents per
pound above the world market price for sugar since 1985 – and that’s on top
of the subsidies they paid for through their taxes. Since sugar is added to
many processed foods, these subsidies contribute to a hefty increase in the
cost of food. The subsidies, quotas and tariffs did encourage sugar
production in the United States: by 2000, 60 per cent of the raw sugar
consumed in America was produced from domestic sources.
Since 2008, thanks to the North American Free Trade Association,
Mexico can more easily export sugar into the United States and Canada
without paying duties. This has sparked an increase in Mexican sugar-cane
growing and refining. Today, Mexico is the seventh largest sugar producer
in the world and in 2013–14 it supplied about 15 per cent of the sugar that
Americans consumed.

War and Revolution

During the Spanish–American War in 1898, the U.S. Army occupied Cuba.
In 1903, Cuba gained its independence, and the two countries signed the
Reciprocity Agreement, which, among other provisions, provided for a 20
per cent reduction in the tariff on Cuban sugar imported into the United
States. Even with the tariff, Cuban sugar continued to outsell sugar
produced in America. During the following decade, Cuba became the
dominant foreign supplier of sugar to the United States. American
companies, such as the Czarnikow Rionda Company and the Cuban Trading
Company, acquired Cuban sugar operations. In 1936, Alfonso Fanjul Sr, the
heir to these companies, married into a major Cuban sugar family, and the
combined resources became the biggest sugar operation in Cuba and one of
the largest in the world.
As the American sugar beet industry expanded, sugar prices fell. The
Depression hit in 1929, and Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
to protect the domestic sugar industry by raising tariffs on imported sugar.
The Cuban sugar industry suffered as prices plummeted. In 1934, the U.S.
Congress took control of sugar imports and supported domestic production
and refining by passing the Sugar Act (Jones-Costigan Act). After the
Second World War, however, Cuban sugar imports picked up again,
representing between 25 per cent and 51 per cent of all sugar consumed in
the United States.

Cutting cane on a Cuban sugar plantation, 1904.

Puck magazine cover with Cuba turning away from Uncle Sam, who is offering her a plate labelled
‘Reduction of Tariff on Cuban Sugar’, 1902.

Cuba nationalized its sugar industry in 1961, and the confiscated

plantations became state-run operations. Workers were promised permanent
employment, and the government pressured them to achieve production
targets, but with no financial incentive, productivity declined. In 1968, the
crop was such a disaster that Cuba militarized the harvest to make sure
production goals were met.
When the United States stopped importing sugar from Cuba in 1960, the
Soviet Union and Eastern European countries picked up the slack: during
the next 30 years they bought an estimated 87 per cent of Cuban sugar.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so did much of the Cuban sugar
industry: of the country’s 156 sugar mills, 71 closed and 60 per cent of cane
fields were converted into vegetable farms or cattle ranches. However, with
the invention of a process to make ethanol (a type of alcohol that can fuel
vehicles) from sugar cane, the Cuban sugar industry has been revitalized in
the twenty-first century.

British Sugar
Until the mid-seventeenth century, Britain was content to import raw sugar
from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands, bringing it to London and
other cities for refining. In the mid-1600s, Britain moved from buying sugar
from other European nations to acquiring colonies in the West Indies,
including Barbados and Jamaica, which became major sugar producers. In
the nineteenth century, British businessmen established sugar-growing and
refining operations in other diverse places such as Mauritius in the Indian
Ocean, Natal in southern Africa, and Queensland in northeastern Australia.
English boiling house, c. 1700s.
Illustration of the process from cutting the cane to its refining in London, c. 1830s.

During the mid-nineteenth century, sugar refining in Britain was

dominated by two businessmen: Henry Tate and Abraham Lyle. Tate, a
successful grocer in Liverpool, became a partner in the John Wright & Co.
sugar refinery in that city. Tate took over the company in 1869 and renamed
it Henry Tate & Sons. He opened additional refineries in Liverpool and in
Silvertown, London, where sugar cubes were manufactured.
Tate’s main competitor was the Scottish businessman Abram Lyle, who
with partners acquired the Glebe Sugar Refinery in Greenock, Scotland, in
1865, and six years later constructed a refinery in East London. It produced
Golden Syrup, a pale but flavourful liquid sweetener that was used for
making preserves, as a sweetener in cooking and as a table syrup. The name
Golden Syrup, trademarked in 1904, is believed to be the first British brand
so registered. In 1921, these two companies consolidated to become Tate &
Lyle, which remained one of Britain’s largest sugar refiners until 2010,
when it sold its refining operations to the American Refining Company.

Uses for sugar suggested by the recently merged

 Tate & Lyle, 1920s.

Sugar beet was grown in Britain in the late nineteenth century, but the
industry did not get off the ground until the First World War, when
importing cane sugar became difficult. The industry thrived during the
1920s, but suffered during the Depression. In 1936, Britain nationalized the
sugar beet industry and combined several companies into what became
British Sugar. In 1991, British Sugar became a subsidiary of Associated
British Food (ABF). Today, more sugar is refined in the UK from sugar beet
than from imported sugar cane.
Granulated sugar (shatang) from Shiwu bencao (Materia dietetica), a herbal dating from the Ming
period (1368–1644). Behind the man is a press for extracting sugar cane juice.
 4
Sugar Uses

For much of sugar’s history, the only way to taste it was to suck or chew on
a cut stalk of sugar cane and enjoy the sweet juice. For at least the last
2,500 years, people in cane-growing areas have used that liquid and
products made from it to sweeten foods and make alcoholic beverages. In
ancient times on the Indian subcontinent, cane sugar was added to wine
made from dates; fruit juice was sweetened with sugar; and sugar water,
sometimes flavoured with herbs, was added to other beverages. The Indian
epic Mahābhārata, which is attributed to Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (c.
400 BCE), mentions sweets made with sugar and krisara, a liquid food
consisting of five ingredients – milk, ground sesame seeds, rice, sugar and
spices. The combination would survive, although with shifts in ingredients
and consistency, to become punch (from panch, the Sanskrit word for five).
At first, these foods and beverages were reserved for wealthy households
and special celebrations. By the thirteenth century, however, sugar was
plentiful enough in India to be widely available, even to the less prosperous
in areas where sugar cane was grown.
By the 1200s, sugar was commonplace in southern and eastern China.
The writer Wu Zimu describes, in his Meng liang lu (The Past Seems a
Dream), seven confectionery shops in Hangzhou in eastern China; they sold
coloured, flower-shaped candies, sweet rice porridge, spun sugar, flavoured
pastes, musk-flavoured sugar and preserved fruits in sugar syrup. Two
Chinese cookbooks of the mid-thirteenth century have survived, and both
include recipes for cakes, candies and syrups made with sugar-cane
products. Sucheta Mazumdar, the author of Sugar and Society in China
(1998), calculated that almost 17 per cent of the recipes in one book, and 25
per cent in the other, call for sugar. Both offer recipes for fruits and
vegetables preserved in sugar. These were very useful formulas: abundant
when in season, fruits and vegetables rot quickly after picking. Preserving
them in sugar made it possible to enjoy them when fresh produce was
unavailable. Sugar also masked the unpleasant flavours of unripe or
overripe fruit. Sugared fruits and vegetables were popular throughout
southern China, sold by street vendors and in teahouses and taverns.
Rock candy was made by boiling cane syrup to super-saturation point,
then pouring it into moulds and drying it in the sun. There was also a paste
of sugar and ground pine nuts (or walnuts) that could be pressed into
moulds to create edible sculptures of flowers, animals, birds and fruit. The
combination of sugar and ground nuts later evolved into the almond paste
called marzipan, the emblematic sweet of the Middle East and
Mediterranean.
Sugar cane arrived in the Middle East by the seventh century and quickly
became a culinary sensation in Persia, Iraq and Egypt. Ibn Sayyar Al-
Warraq’s tenth-century Baghdadi cookbook includes more than 80
references to sugar in recipes for wine, sugared almonds and walnuts,
cookies, crackers, pudding, chewy nougats and hard candies. Many of these
recipes have survived in various forms. Al-Warraq’s recipe for natif, or
nougat, may well have been the inspiration for modern Turkish Delight. Al-
Warraq’s book also included special recipes for the young, the elderly and
travellers. For medicinal purposes, the author noted, sugar was soothing to
the throat, chest and stomach, and had other important properties.
Small pies filled with sugar and sweetmeats were popular at this time;
another very common treat was a thin pancake folded over several times,
saturated with melted butter and sweetened with honey or sugar. Another
was kunáfeh, thin, finely shredded dough moistened with clarified butter,
doused with honey or sugar syrup and baked. It was in the Arab world that
sugar began appearing in savoury dishes, such as lamb or mutton stewed
with peaches, apricots and jujubes (the fruit of the tropical tree Ziziphus
jujuba, sometimes called Chinese dates). Sugar was also used to sweeten
beverages. The Arabs made a drink called sharbah by stirring a sugar syrup
infused with rose petals, orange flowers, willow flowers or violets into cold
water. Other sharbahs were made with raisins or fruit conserves. When ice
was added to the mixture, it evolved into the frozen dessert that Europeans
called sherbet.
Refined sugar achieved its pinnacle of conspicuous consumption in the
households of wealthy Egyptians. According to Adam Mez, author of Die
Renaissance des Islams (1922), the Vizier Qafur’s household consumed
1,000 lb (450 kg) of sugar daily in 970 CE; during the following century, one
Egyptian vizier’s banquet featured 20 tons of sugar sculptures in the form of
castles and various animals – elephants, lions and deer. Another feast was
ornamented with 50,000 sugar figures, each weighing about 4 lb (1.8 kg).

European Sugar Usage

Prior to the ninth century, the small amounts of sugar that arrived in Europe
were used for medical purposes. At that time, the humoral system, linking a
person’s health and temperament to different bodily fluids, had dominated
European medical theories for more than a millennium and would continue
to do so for almost another 1,000 years. In this system, ‘sweetness’ was a
positive quality, and as sugar was the sweetest substance known, it was
considered a sort of miracle drug. In addition to its own healing attributes, it
could be combined with other medicines to make them more palatable, and
sugar supplied calories – and therefore energy – to anyone who consumed
it.
Beginning in the ninth century, Venice imported quantities of molasses,
sugar and syrups from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. Sugar was re-
exported from Venice to the rest of Europe. Northern Italian medical
writings mentioned sugar in recipes and formulas beginning in the
thirteenth century. For instance, Tacuinum sanitatis (Maintenance of
Health), based on an eleventh-century Arab health manuscript, listed the
pros and cons of sugar:

It purifies the body, is good for the chest, the kidneys, and the bladder. Dangers: it causes thirst
and moves bilious humours. Neutralization of the dangers: with sour pomegranates. Effects:
Produces blood that is not bad. It is good for all temperaments, at all ages, in every season and
region.
 Venetian apothecaries specialized in refining raw sugar and became
skilful in making syrups, jams, nut-paste confections, candied violets and a
‘celestial water of youth’, touted as an elixir for long life. Sugar was given
as gifts and it was a must at marriage ceremonies, at which brides were
given a box of sweets together with a sugar statuette of a baby.
As sugar became more common over the course of the fourteenth
century, it appeared more frequently in cookery manuscripts. In the version
of Le Viandier from 1300 (a later version of which was attributed to
Guillaume Tirel – aka ‘Taillevent’), sugar appears only in dishes for the
sick. In a version of the same manuscript from 1420, sugar is used in most
of the recipes. The early fourteenth-century cookery manuscript Liber de
coquina, probably written in Naples, called for abundant use of honey, but
occasionally replaced it with sugar; in such cases the sugar was mixed in
with the other ingredients rather than poured over a finished dish, as honey
was. Sugar was used in recipes for broad beans flavoured with spices; rice
with almond milk; a torta sweetened with both sugar and honey; and a dish
made with bitter oranges. A Tuscan recipe collection from the end of the
fourteenth century emphasized sugar, giving only a marginal role to honey
(in fritters and some desserts). Of the 135 recipes in the manuscript, sugar
was an ingredient in 24 per cent, according to Alberto Capatti and Massimo
Montanari’s Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History (2003).
By the fifteenth century, sugar was commonplace in wealthy European
households; it was used in sauces, pastry, and confections. Maestro
Martino’s Libro de arte coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), written about
1465, used sugar in great quantities. More than 50 recipes include sugar –
custard pies, fish and poultry dishes, potages, a dish of broad (fava) beans,
sugar-coated seeds, hot and cold beverages, pan-fried cheese, fritters,
macaroni and lasagna, tortes, marzipan, blancmange and preserves.
Bartolomeo Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine (Right Pleasure
and Good Health), published in 1474, makes even more use of sugar, as
does Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare (The Art and Craft
of a Master Cook), published in 1570. As one recipe reported, sugar was
‘an excellent accompaniment to everything’.
Sugar continued to be a symbol of opulence and a sign of wealth. When
Henry III, king of France and Poland, visited the city-state of Venice in 1574,
sugar was a major component in a banquet given in his honour. The
napkins, tablecloths, plates, cutlery – everything on the table – were made
of sugar. The setting also boasted 1,250 figures designed by the sculptor
Jacopo Sansovino, including a queen on horseback between two tigers, with
the coat of arms of France on one and Poland on the other, as well as sugar
figures of animals, plants, fruit, kings, popes and saints.
By the early seventeenth century, sugar was widely available throughout
much of continental Europe, and on the tables of all but the poor. Naturally
this robbed sugar of its cachet for the rich. The Florentine Giovanni Del
Turco, in his Epulario e segreti vari (1602), complained that earlier
cookbook writers had relied too heavily on spices and sugar, which did ‘not
appeal to the taste of many people’. The number of published recipes
requiring sugar began to decline, and smaller quantities of it were used
overall in sophisticated cookbooks.

Sugar sculpture from the wedding banquet of Johann Wilhelm of Julich, Cleve & Berg, Dusseldorf,
1587.

English Sugar
In England, the account books of the household of Henry II (1154–1189)
indicate that very small quantities of sugar were used. An entry in an
account book from the Countess of Leicester’s household records that 55 lb
(25 kg) of sugar were acquired over a seven-month period in 1265, but the
cost remained high. The English love affair with sugar – at least among the
nobility – began in the fourteenth century. The Forme of Cury (c. 1390),
written by Richard II’s master cooks, includes numerous recipes with sugar
as an ingredient: it went into fritters, custards, pies, sauces, stews,
forcemeats, meat, fish, poultry, seafood and game recipes as well as
alcoholic beverages, including Cypriot wine, German wine and mead.
Within these recipes, sugar was combined with a wide variety of other
ingredients, including currants, eggs, cheese, raisins, dates, milk, almond
milk, figs, pears, rice, bread and virtually all the spices and herbs then
available. Several recipes called for ‘Cypriot sugar’ as well as other types.
Thereafter no feast or banquet was thought complete without sugar. The
poem ‘The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye’, written about 1438, bemoans the
importation of commodities from Florence and Venice, with one major
exception – sugar: ‘And yett. there shulde excepte be ony thynge, It were
but sugre, truste to my seyinge.’ The manuscript ‘A Noble Boke off cookry’
(c. 1480) contains scores of recipes with sugar, including those for
beverages, such as one in which it is added to claret. In most cases sugar
was used in small quantities and its sweetness did not dominate the recipe.
At most banquets, moreover, few sweet courses were served. This
changed by the first decade of the sixteenth century, when the price of sugar
dropped and it became affordable to households that were merely
prosperous, not necessarily noble or royal. One of the poet Thomas
Newbery’s ballads mentions a confectioner’s shop selling simnels (buns),
cracknels (small cakes baked hard so that they crunched when broken),
comfits (sweetmeats) and other products made with sugar. The price
continued to drop throughout the century, and by the 1590s, sugar was the
prime vehicle for demonstrating high status. The Earl of Hertford gave a
banquet for Elizabeth I that included a vast display of decorative foods
modelled in flat and three-dimensional sugarwork: ‘March-paves, grapes,
oisters, muscles, cockles, periwinkles, crabs, lobsters, Apples, pears, and
plums of all sorts. Preserves, suckats, jellies, leaches, marmelats, pastry,
comfits, of all sorts.’ There were also:

Castles, forts, Ordinance, Drummers, Trumpeters, and soldiers of all sorts in sugar-works.
Lions, Unicorns, Bears, Horses, Camels, Bolls, Rams, Dogs, Tigers, Elephants, Antelopes,
Dromadaries, Asses, and all other beasts in sugar-works. Eagles, Falcons, Cranes, Bustards,
Herons, Hawks, Bitterns, Pheasants, Partridges, Quails, Larks, Sparrows, Pigeons, Cocks,
owls, and all that fly, in sugar-works. Snakes, Adders, vipers, frogs, toads, and all kinds of
worms, in sugar-work. Mermaids, whales, dolphins, congars, sturgeons, pike, carp, bream, and
all sorts of fishes, in sugar-work.
 By the early seventeenth century, sugar was almost universally praised in
Britain. Francis Bacon even proposed a statue for the ‘Inventours of Sugars’
in a gallery of important inventors in his utopian novel Nova Atlantis
(1624). James Heart, author of Klinke; or, the Diet of the Diseases (1633),
proclaimed that ‘Sugar hath now succeeded honie, and is become of farre
higher esteem, and is far more pleasing to the palate, and therefore
everywhere in frequent use, as well in sickness as in health.’
The French-trained Gervase Markham, chef to England’s aristocrats,
offered dozens of recipes with sugar in The English Hus-wife (1615). These
included salads, roasted meats, fish, sauces for turkey and other fowl,
preserves, puddings, tarts, sweet and savoury pies, jumbles, cakes,
pancakes, fritters, marchpane (marzipan), suckets and many more. The
recipes in The Queens Closet Opened (1655) made prolific use of sugar. It
was called for in preserves, cakes, cheesecakes, pancakes, bread, candy
flowers, pumpkin and other pies, tarts, puddings, beans, preserves, salad
dressings, alcoholic beverages (such as possets and syllabubs), creams and
rudimentary forms of hard candy, as well as in medicinal formulas.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, sugar lost some of its former
charm for the British upper classes. Robert May’s The Accomplished Cook
(1685) mentioned sugar in only two recipes – sauces for meat and fish. John
Evelyn’s Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) included a few dozen
recipes with sugar in them, but he wrote that ‘Sugar is almost wholly
banish’d from all, except the more effeminate Palates, as too much palling,
and taking from the grateful Acid now in use, tho’ otherwise not totally to
be reproved.’
As the English upper classes became disenchanted with sugar, other
strata of society discovered its allure, and its consumption surged. What
fuelled its renewed popularity was beverages.

Drinking Sugar
Throughout the Middle Ages, the most popular European drink was
hypocras or hippocras (probably named for the ancient Roman physician
Hippocrates), a mulled or spiced wine commonly consumed at the end of a
meal as a digestive. Traditionally hypocras was sweetened with honey. A
late medieval French hypocras recipe attributed to the physician Arnoldus
of Villanova (c. 1310) includes some sugar. In the Middle Ages, the French
cookery manuscript Le Ménagier de Paris (c. 1393) includes a recipe
containing 1¼ lb (570 g) of sugar. Recipes for hypocras continued to appear
during the next three centuries. An English hypocras recipe from 1692
consisted of 2 quarts (1.9 litres) each of Rhine wine, Canary wine and milk,
sweetened with 1½ lb (680 g) of sugar.
Hypocras disappeared in the eighteenth century, but by that time many
other mixed drinks sweetened with sugar were popular. In England and
America, these included flips (beer sweetened with sugar, molasses or
honey, and frequently strengthened with rum) and possets (spiced,
sweetened hot milk combined with ale or beer), which eventually evolved
into eggnog. Syllabubs – spiced milk or cream whipped to a froth with
sweet wine or cider and sugar – were spirituous drinks for festive occasions.
Shrubs, composed of sweetened citrus juice from oranges, lemons and
limes mixed with various spirits, were popular drinks, as were hot toddies,
made of spiced and sweetened liquor, and cherry bounce, made from cherry
juice and rum. There were iced punches for summer and hot punches for
winter. Sangaree, a mixture of wine, sugar and spices, evolved into sangria.
Cachaça is a popular Brazilian rum-like beverage.

European colonies in the New World produced different alcoholic

beverages from sugar and its by-products. In Portuguese Brazil the sugar-
based liquor was cachaça, a potent distilled alcoholic beverage. Portugal’s
large and politically powerful brandy industry squelched any possibility of
competition from this imported product, so most cachaça remained in
Brazil. But it was likely Dutch and Jewish immigrants from Brazil who
introduced the concept of a sugar-cane-based spirit – and its means of
manufacture – into the Caribbean. In the French West Indies it was called
rhum, a word most likely derived from the English in Barbados, where it
was variously called kill-devil, rumme and rumbullion. Eventually these
terms were shortened simply to ‘rum’.
Molasses, a by-product of sugar manufacturing, was also used to make
mildly alcoholic beverages. West Indian slaves just added water to the
molasses, which permitted fermentation. The early eighteenth-century
historian Robert Beverley recorded that the ‘poorer sort’ of British colonists
in Virginia used molasses to make a type of beer. It was often flavoured
with bran, corn, persimmons, potatoes, pumpkins or even Jerusalem
artichokes. In New England, molasses imported from the West Indies was
used to make rum. New England was ideally suited for rum production: it
had access to the metal and skilled workers needed to make the stills, an
abundance of ships to transport the bulky molasses from the Caribbean, and
plenty of wood for fuelling the stills and making barrels. Rum quickly
became America’s alcoholic beverage of choice. It was drunk straight,
watered down or mixed with other ingredients – often including sugar. The
most popular mixed drink was punch, usually composed of rum, citrus juice
and sugar, with myriad variations. Milk punches, made with egg yolks,
sugar, rum and nutmeg, were popular at parties and balls. Rum was quite
popular in England, while in continental Europe the wine industry
successfully fought for laws against its importation.

Rum distillery in Christiansted, Saint Croix Island, Virgin Islands, 1941.

But it was in three non-alcoholic beverages – chocolate, coffee and tea –

that sugar became indispensable throughout Europe, particularly England.
The chocolate beverage originated in pre-Columbian Mexico, where it was
made by mixing ground chocolate with water and flavouring it with vanilla,
chilli peppers, achiote seeds and other ingredients. Since there were no
sweeteners in the New World, it was an extremely bitter drink. European
colonists, after tasting it, added other spices and sweetened it – at first with
honey, and later with sugar.
 Chocolate and the equipment needed to make it had been introduced into
Spain from Central America in the early sixteenth century, but it was slow
to catch on. From Spain, interest in chocolate spread to Italy, and from there
to other European countries. At first, it was flavoured with a variety of New
World ingredients and sweetened with honey. As the custom of drinking
chocolate spread beyond the elite, sugar replaced honey. Among the earliest
European recipes for cocoa is this one, dating from 1631, by the Spanish
physician Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, who wrote in the first treatise
on chocolate:

Take a hundred cacao kernels, two heads of Chili or long peppers, a handful of anise or
orjevala, and two of mesachusil or vanilla – or, instead, six Alexandria roses, powdered – two
drachms of cinnamon, a dozen almonds and as many hazelnuts, a half pound of white sugar,
and annotto enough to color it, and you have the king of chocolates.

Over time, Europeans found that they preferred their chocolate without
the exotic flavourings, but sugar remained in the mix. Hot chocolate did not
become an important beverage in England until the second half of the
seventeenth century: chocolate houses were established in London in the
1650s, and several publications extolled the drink’s virtues and provided
recipes for it. William Coles reported in his Adam in Eden (1657) that
chocolate ‘may be had in diverse places in London, at reasonable rates’ and
he added yet another benefit – it was, he claimed, an aphrodisiac.
According to William Coles, chocolate had a ‘wonderful efficacy for the
procreation of children’. The first French recipe for hot chocolate appeared
in Francois Massialot’s Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1693).
Coffee drinking originated in eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
Beginning in the ninth century, it spread to the Middle East. Europeans
visiting Turkey and Arab countries wrote about this new beverage, many
complaining that it was too bitter. Some Egyptians added sugar to ‘correct
the bitterness’, reported German botanist Johann Vesling, who visited Cairo
in the 1630s. Turks opened the first coffeehouses in Europe in the mid-
seventeenth century. The first coffee-house in Venice was established in
1629, and soon more opened in other major European cities. When
coffeehouses first appeared in Europe, they served their coffee black, with
sugar as an optional addition, but it soon became an inseparable companion
to coffee.
 About the same time that coffee and chocolate began to be appreciated in
Europe, tea arrived from East Asia. Tea had been consumed in China for
thousands of years, and by the Middle Ages tea leaves were exported from
there by overland caravan via the Silk Road to the Middle East, and later to
Russia. European explorers and travellers tasted tea while in East Asia, but
it wasn’t until the Dutch began importing it from China (by 1610) that tea
became known in Western Europe. It arrived in England by the mid-
seventeenth century, but at first was of interest only to the wealthy. By
1658, tea was being served in coffeehouses, and it quickly became popular.
Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator who kept a diary recording the
smallest details of his everyday life, reported that he drank his first cup of
tea in 1660. Within a few years tea was sold in most London coffeehouses
along with coffee, chocolate and sherbet, a version of the Middle Eastern
beverage made with flavoured sugar syrup.
Sugar was sometimes added to coffee, tea and chocolate in excessive
amounts. In 1671, Philippe Dufour, a Parisian coffee seller, published De
l’usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate (The Manner of Making of
Coffee, Tea and Chocolate), which described how each of these beverages
was consumed in ‘Europe, Asia, Africa, and America’. Dufour
recommended adding sugar to coffee, but he complained that some
Parisians went overboard with this, until their coffee ‘was nothing but a
syrup of blackened water’.
The first coffeehouse in England was opened in 1652 by a Turkish
merchant. A novelty became a trend and then a craze, and by 1675, London
alone reportedly had more than 3,000 coffeehouses, frequented by the city’s
gentry and well-to-do merchants. While sipping their sweetened coffee,
patrons discussed business affairs and politics.
Because of the high price of chocolate, coffee, tea and sugar, British
coffeehouses remained the province of the well-to-do; lower classes
gathered and drank beer in taverns. Then the British East India Company, a
subsidized governmental monopoly, began to import tea in bulk: annual
imports increased from 250,000 lb (113,000 kg) in 1725 to 24 million lb
(10.9 million kg) in 1800. As volume increased, the price of tea fell below
that of chocolate and coffee. Tea drinking soon outpaced the consumption
of chocolate and coffee, and as more tea was imported, it became affordable
for the middle class. Tea became England’s hot beverage of choice.
 During the eighteenth century, the sweetener of choice among the less
affluent in England was honey, and for good reason: it was six to ten times
cheaper than sugar. During the eighteenth century, sugar was imported from
the English colonies in the Caribbean in ever-increasing quantities, and its
price nosedived as consumption skyrocketed. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century, annual per capita sugar consumption in England was 4.4
lb (2 kg) per person. In 1784, duties on imported tea were reduced, which
was followed by a sharp increase in the use of tea. By the century’s end, per
capita sugar consumption had increased by almost 600 per cent, to 24 lb
(10.9 kg). Even the poorest drank tea with sugar, though they could put
little else on the table.

An Essential Ingredient in Cookery

Once the price of sugar dropped below that of honey, it began to be used
not just as a sweetener for drinks, but as a cooking ingredient. English
cookbooks published in the eighteenth century incorporated sugar into
many recipes. Hannah Glasse published her Complete Confectioner in 1760
– the first such book published in England – and confidently called for
sugar in almost every recipe. There were ice creams, ices, creams,
conserves, compotes, marmalades, syrups, jams, cakes, icings, breads,
biscuits, beverages, candies, wafers, jumbles, timbales, puffs and tarts, as
well as directions for making sugar sculptures and preserving fruit,
vegetables, berries, spices, nuts, seeds, roots and flowers. Elizabeth
Raffald’s Experienced Housekeeper (1769) contains more than 100 recipes
containing sugar: sauces, pastes, pies, fritters, pancakes, gruels, puddings,
dumplings, sweetmeats, custards, pastries, spun sugar, floating islands and
all sorts of beverages – syllabubs, ales, various wines, possetts, sherbets,
shrubs, brandy and lemonade. Sugar was no longer a luxury – it was an
essential ingredient.
Just as sugar dominated English cookery, so it dominated American
dishes, although refined sugar was expensive in colonial America. Far
cheaper was molasses, which could be used both as a sweetener and as the
basic ingredient in rum. Molasses was the primary sweetener for cookies,
cakes, pies and puddings, but also in mush, vegetable dishes and meat
cookery, especially pork. An English traveller in the 1780s complained that
Americans served molasses at every meal, ‘even eating it with greasy pork’.
Sugar was sold in many forms, the most common being 8- to 10-lb (3.6–
4.5 kg) cone-shaped ‘loaves’. The wealthy purchased large quantities of
sugar, but a middle-class family might make one loaf last a year. It has been
estimated that as late as 1788, annual U.S. per capita sugar consumption
averaged only about 5 lb (2.3 kg). Despite this rapid increase in the amount
of sugar consumed throughout the world, the love affair with sugar had
barely begun. The amount of sugar would increase in beverages, meats, pies
and cakes, but particularly in sweets and candies.

James Gillray, Hero’s recruiting at Kelsey’s or Guard Day at St James’s, 1797, featuring ice cream.
 5
Sweets and Candies

When sufficient sugar is added to certain foods, whether infused by cooking

or applied as a coating, it functions as a preservative by inhibiting the
activity of microorganisms. This quality made it possible for traders to carry
products such as candied orange peel and sugar-coated almonds over long
distances. Solid chunks of sugar (both rock candy and loaf sugar) could also
easily be traded. It was through such trade that sweets and candies were
introduced in areas where sugar cane was not grown, and where particular
fruits and other ingredients were not available.
Through trade routes from southern Asia, sugar confections had reached
the Middle East by the seventh century, later spreading to Europe. These
early confections, such as comfits, pastes, marzipan, pastilles and rock
candy, were the point of origin for many present-day sweets and candies,
and traces of their centuries-old heritage still linger today. Early European
confectionery traditions have evolved into modern sweets – Jordan
almonds, marmalade, sweet pies, cake icing, taffy, toffee, bonbons,
jawbreakers (gobstoppers), lemon drops, M&M’s, Good & Plenty and ice
cream – to name just a few.
Comfits (from the French confit, meaning ‘candied’ – confetti in Italian)
were initially sugar-coated medicines. Doctors and other healers used the
miraculously sweet substance to coat the bitter seeds, nuts, roots, spices,
herbs and vegetable extracts they prescribed for various ills, doubtless
helping the medicine go down. A sick person might need extra calories,
which were easily supplied by sugar; depending on the number of comfits
consumed, they may also have given a weak patient a little burst of energy.
 Comfits that included candied aromatic seeds, such as anise, coriander,
cloves, caraway or cinnamon, were common. In India (and in Indian
restaurants elsewhere), plain or candy-coated fennel seeds may still be
offered at the conclusion of a meal to aid digestion and freshen the breath.
Comfits also included sugar-coated nuggets of candy flavoured with an
extract from the roots of plants of the genus Glycyrrhiza, a small,
leguminous shrub native to Europe, Asia and the Americas. The roots have
a sweet, anise-like flavour, and a confection was made by squeezing their
juice and then cooking it down to thicken it. Called ‘liquorice’, it became an
important sweet throughout Europe from the Middle Ages onwards.
Today, liquorice candy is manufactured in many shapes and flavours
throughout the world, although in many cases the actual root extract has
been replaced with anise and artificial flavouring. In the United States, the
most famous liquoriceflavoured candy is Good & Plenty – little beads of
chewy liquorice with a pink or white candy coating reminiscent of
traditional Indian comfits. It was first made in 1893. The artificially
flavoured liquorice twists called Twizzlers were first sold in 1929. Today,
most liquorice sold in the U.S. is mass-produced using synthetic ingredients,
but elsewhere, notably in the Netherlands and Scandinavia, real liquorice in
various shapes, hard or soft, from mildly sweet to pungently salty, is
practically the national snack.

Good & Plenty liquorice candy, first made in 1893, remains popular today.

Another common comfit in the Middle Ages was the sugar-coated nut,
which also originated in the Middle East and was later carried to Europe.
The French term dragées describes spiced, sugar-covered nuts, especially
almonds. Today, these have been commercialized under a variety of names,
such as Jordan almonds, also known as mlabas in the Middle East and
koufeta in Greece.
Candied fruit and citrus peel also arrived in Europe during the Middle
Ages and were typically served after a meal at times of the year when fresh
fruit was unavailable. They survive in a variety of forms – candied or
glazed fruit, chocolate-dipped cherries, jams, marmalades and jellies.
Marzipan (or marchpane in English), a thick paste of ground almonds
and sugar, was a popular delicacy in the Middle East by the Middle Ages. It
may have originated in Iran, and arrived in Europe through Arab influence.
The first located European reference to it is in northern Italy in the late
thirteenth century. It’s likely, however, that it had been a popular confection,
probably made initially with honey, in Spain, Catalonia and Italy well
before that. Marzipan was widely adopted in France, Germany, the
Netherlands, northern Europe and England. It wasn’t just another bite-sized
sweet – it was also shaped into figures, such as pigs or eggs, and was often
given as gifts on special occasions, such as Christmas, Easter and at
weddings. Marzipan remains popular in Europe and in many former
European colonies.
Candied fruit at La Boqueria market in Barcelona.

Pulled sugar also arrived in Europe in the Middle Ages, likely from Arab
sources in the Middle East. It is made by melting sugar with water, then
kneading it to form a plastic substance that can be stretched and pulled into
various shapes, such as ribbons, flowers or leaves.
During the Middle Ages sugar was also used as a post-prandial digestif –
in sugared and spiced wine served with fruit at the end of the meal, after the
dishes had been removed. This course came to be called dessert (from the
French desservir, meaning to clear the table). By the eighteenth century,
dessert had become an elaborate course that might include creams, jellies,
tarts, pies and sweet puddings. Although typically served after dinner, such
dishes could also be offered in the afternoon or evening, unconnected with a
meal. Dessert-making became a household art, and was usually done by a
professional confectioner or by servants under direction of a professional.
Bonbons, first made in France in the 17th century.
Meringue recipes have been published since the 18th century.

Laura Mason, in her book Sugar-plums and Sherbet (1998), writes that,
by the eighteenth century, English confectioners sold preserved and candied
fruit, biscuits, cakes, macaroons, syrups, comfits, pies, tarts and decorative
figures made of sugar. Confectioners also imported and sold sweets from
other countries. Bonbons (various types of fancy candies that were initially
served at the French court) were imported into England and other European
countries. These choice treats, consisting of fondant, fruit or nuts typically
coated with chocolate, were a luxury for the leisure class – the only people
who could afford them – but this was about to change.

Confectioners
By the seventeenth century, comfit-makers and confectioners were selling
their sweets at shops for serving at home. Over time, retailers became more
sophisticated. In Paris, limonadiers sold beverages such as lemonade (hence
their name). One limonadier, a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio dei
Coltelli, opened a café in Paris in 1686. In addition to serving coffee, the
café also offered sugar-coated fruit, ices, sugar-sweetened cold beverages,
liquors and hot chocolate.
Declining prices for sugar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
made sweets more affordable. In England, the number of sweet shops in
provincial cities increased fourfold between the 1780s and the 1820s. They
sold a variety of candies, some imported from other countries, some sent
from London.
Particular types of sweets and candies emerged. Rock candy was made
by allowing a supersaturated solution of sugar and water to crystallize over
time; hard candies were made by boiling sugar and water to a syrup and
then pouring it into moulds or shaping it by hand. These evolved into
gobstoppers, lollipops, peppermints and candy canes. Sugared nuts were the
starting point for brittles – whole or broken nuts embedded in a sheet of
buttery hard candy. Fruit drops, originally made from boiled sugar
flavoured with actual fruit juice, are still popular, although today many are
made with corn syrup and artificial flavours and colourings that imitate the
taste and appearance of fruit. Life Savers are the most famous modern
incarnation of the fruit drop in the U.S. and Canada.
Rock candy has been made for about 2,000 years; it
is still consumed today in different ways, such as on
a stick.
 Taffy and Toffee
The first references to taffy and toffee appeared in the early nineteenth
century in northern England, where the candy was made in homes and
confectionery shops. (The candy-makers of Everton, today a district of
Liverpool, were famous for their toffee.) The basic recipe calls for sugar or
molasses to be boiled with butter and flavourings: orange, lemon, chocolate
or vanilla. From this basic recipe, two different sweets emerged.
Taffy is made by removing the mixture from the fire at the ‘hard ball’
stage – when a drop of syrup instantly forms a rigid ball when dropped into
cold water. The candy is cooled a little, then stretched and pulled by hand
with the help of a metal hook until it is satiny smooth. In the nineteenth
century, ‘taffy-pulls’ were popular at parties: guests would pair off to
stretch the strands with buttered hands, and then enjoy the fruits of their
labour.
To make toffee, the mixture is boiled to the ‘hard crack’ stage, at which a
drop of the boiling syrup forms brittle threads when dropped into cold
water. When cooled, this produces a dense candy that snaps when broken.
In England, toffee was associated with Guy Fawkes Night (5 November,
also known as ‘Bonfire Night’) and was sold under the name ‘Bonfire
Toffee’.

Joseph William Thornton opened his first confectionery shop in Sheffield in October 1911; among
his more popular items was toffee.

Taffy and toffee migrated from England to the United States by the
1840s, and both were popularized in East Coast cities, particularly
Philadelphia and Atlantic City. John Ross Edmiston, a Pennsylvanian, was
probably the first to sell ‘saltwater taffy’, supposedly created when a storm
brought seawater flooding into his Atlantic City candy shop. There was
actually no difference in the recipes for regular taffy and saltwater taffy, but
the name caught on. Others perfected its formula and expanded the product
line by making the candy in a range of appealing pastel colours, various
flavours and diverse shapes. By the 1920s, more than 450 companies, many
in seaside resorts, were manufacturing saltwater taffy in America.

Manufacturers
Handmade sweets had been sold commercially in Europe and North
America since the late eighteenth century, but they were not widely
consumed until the nineteenth century, when the price of sugar declined and
the technology of refining it had become more efficient. Sweets were first
mass-produced in England in the 1850s, but manufacturing quickly spread
to other countries. Sweets appeared in ever-larger quantities and in more
varied shapes and sizes as the century progressed. By the late nineteenth
century, hundreds of commercial manufacturers of confectionery were
operating in the Middle East, Europe and North America. Most produced
small, hard sweets, usually retailed in shops, where they were displayed in
big glass jars and sold for pennies.
Soft and chewy candies were also mass-produced. One popular
confection that derived from the Middle East was Turkish Delight, or rahat
loukoum (‘rest for the throat’), made from sugar (originally honey), a starch
or gelling agent such as gum arabic, and flavouring, often rosewater or
orange-flower water. Chopped nuts, such as almonds, pistachios or
hazelnuts, or pieces of dried fruit, may be added. The cooked mixture is
cooled in a pan and then cut into squares and dredged in icing (powdered)
sugar. Its invention is attributed to a Turkish confectioner of the mid-
eighteenth century. The popularity of this sweet grew throughout the
Middle East and Europe, especially Great Britain, where a Turkish Delight
chocolate bar, with a rose-flavoured filling enrobed in milk chocolate, has
been made since 1914.
Jellybeans – small, bean-shaped sugar confections with a firm jelly centre
and a hard outer coating – may have derived from Turkish Delight. They
come in different colours with various associated fruit flavours. The earliest
located reference to jellybeans in print appears in an advertisement dated
1886 from Illinois, where they were touted as a Christmas candy. Jellybeans
were commonly sold from jars in sweet shops, or in vending machines. It
was not until the 1930s that jellybeans were also marketed as an Easter
candy, presumably because of their egg-like appearance.
Albert and Gustav Goelitz, German immigrants who opened a candy
store in Belleville, Illinois, in 1869, could be called the forefathers of the
modern jellybean. By the turn of the century the family business was
specializing in buttercream candies, including candy corn, a three-coloured
(yellow, white and orange) candy mimicking an enlarged corn kernel. In
1976, Goelitz descendants created the ‘gourmet’ jellybean, smaller than the
standard size and featuring unexpected flavours such as pear, watermelon,
root beer and buttered popcorn (reportedly the most popular flavour). They
named the new product Jelly Bellies, and now offer 50 flavours, including
cappuccino, chilli-mango and piña colada. Today, the company makes
Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, named after a product mentioned in J.
K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and Sports Beans, with added vitamin C
and electrolytes.
Chewy sweets date back at least to the Middle Ages, where they were
made in the Middle East. Among the first commercial chewy candies were
jujubes, named for the juju gum (derived from a shrub of the Ziziphus
species) that was the main ingredient. Today these fruit-flavoured pastilles
are made from potato starch, gum and sugar or another sweetener. Another
chewy candy, fruit- and vegetable-shaped jujyfruits, soon emerged. The
gummy bear was developed in Germany during the 1920s. Animal-derived
gelatin is the basic ingredient in these colourful little figures. In 1982, the
German candy company Haribo first marketed their ‘gummi’ candy in the
United States. Trolli, another German manufacturer, introduced gummy
worms during the 1980s and they have remained popular ever since.
Swedish Fish, another gummy favourite imported from Sweden since the
1960s, are made without animal gelatin. Gummy candies are made in
hundreds of shapes and flavours throughout the world.
Jellybeans are popular candies at Christmastime and Easter.

Holiday Sweets
Many sweets and candies are associated with holidays, particularly
Christmas, Chanukah, Easter, Halloween and Valentine’s Day. In periods
when sugar was rare and costly, the less affluent would have eaten sweets
only on such special occasions.
The tradition of Christmas fruitcakes dates back to the Middle Ages.
Historically, such cakes were sweetened with candied fruit stirred into the
batter or dough; by the sixteenth century, sugar was a basic ingredient, and
a sugary icing was a common addition. Particular traditions emerged in
different areas, such as the British Christmas cake and the German Stollen.
 Cultures that celebrate the twelve days of Christmas (from 25 December
through to 6 January) have their own traditional cakes. Twelfth Night, or
Epiphany, is also Three Kings’ Day; in France, a galette des roix (kings’
cake) is served. In Spain and Latin America, the traditional pastry is the
ring-shaped rosca de reyes (kings’ ring), lavishly decorated with candied
fruit. Different kinds of ‘kings’ cakes’ are served on Epiphany in many
countries; a special king’s cake is also a Mardi Gras speciality in some
places.
Many different types of sweet, such as butterscotch, chocolate, lemon,
creams, caramels, jellybeans and others, were popular at Christmastime in
various times and places. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that
the candy cane – a red-and-white striped candy stick with a crook at the top
– became part of American Christmas celebrations. The candy cane’s
invention is attributed to August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, who purportedly
made and decorated Christmas trees with paper ornaments and candy canes.
They were not an immediate commercial success, although people made
candy canes at home on a small scale. They were tricky to make and,
because of their fragility, difficult to ship. This changed in the 1950s, when
candy cane machines automated production and packaging innovations
made it possible for the candy to reach its destination unbroken. Candy
giants including Mars, Hershey and Nestlé now make their own brands of
candy cane.
Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve – the night before All Saints’ Day) is
observed, mainly in English-speaking countries, on the night of 31 October,
when children dressed in costumes go from house to house asking for
sweets. Since Halloween comes during the apple season in many countries,
it has long been celebrated with candied, toffee or caramel apples.
Homemade sweets, such as candied popcorn balls and taffy, gradually gave
way to commercial candy, notably candy corn (tricoloured kernel-shaped
sweets), which was introduced in the 1880s. Today, miniature boxes of
popular candies and small, individually wrapped versions of favourite
candy bars are specially packaged for Halloween distribution. This
Americanized, candy-filled version of Halloween has recently been adopted
in other countries.
Fertility symbols employed in pagan celebrations of spring – rabbits,
eggs and chicks – were absorbed into Christian celebrations of Easter.
Giving Easter eggs to poor children was a tradition that began in medieval
Europe. Easter candy, though, is a relatively recent tradition that may have
originated in Eastern Europe. The first located reference to chocolate Easter
eggs dates to 1820 in Italy. During the 1930s, Easter sweets, such as
jellybeans and chocolate bunnies, became part of the Easter basket
tradition. The American candy manufacturer Just Born Company began to
make three-dimensional marshmallow Easter chicks, called Peeps, in 1953.
In 2012, Americans spent more than $2.3 billion on Easter candies,
including 90 million chocolate bunnies, 700 million marshmallow Peeps
and 16 billion jellybeans.
Chanukah, the eight-day Festival of Lights, celebrates a Jewish military
victory over the Seleucid Empire in 164 BCE and the rededication of the
Second Temple in Jerusalem. Chanukah is celebrated at home, with modest
presents for children, one for each night. Small coins, or gelt, were the usual
gift. In the 1920s, urban candymakers began promoting their wares as ideal
Chanukah gifts. New York’s Loft Candy Company, for instance, sold round,
flat chocolates wrapped in gold foil to simulate coins. Brooklyn-based
Barton’s, founded in 1938, made kosher chocolates for both Chanukah and
Passover.
Valentine’s Day (14 February), purportedly celebrated in honour of a
saint killed in Roman times, was a popular holiday in medieval Europe.
Precisely when candy became a Valentine’s Day tradition is unclear, but in
1860 the British confectioner Richard Cadbury introduced the first
Valentine’s Day chocolate box, and couples still exchange elaborately
boxed chocolates on that day. In America, Sweetheart candies, little sugar
hearts bearing brief romantic mottos, were made by the New England
Confectionery Company in 1902. By the twenty-first century, NECCO was
producing about eight billion Sweethearts each year – virtually all of them
sold during the six weeks before Valentine’s Day.

Chocolates
Hot chocolate was consumed with sugar in Europe and North America by
the mid-seventeenth century, but chocolate was not sold as a sweet until the
nineteenth century. In 1815, Coenraad Van Houten, a Dutchman, developed
a process for defatting chocolate and then subjecting it to an alkalizing
process. This set in motion a series of discoveries that eventually made
possible the manufacture of powdered cocoa, which was achieved in 1828.
Eventually this led to the large-scale manufacture of chocolate in both
powder and solid form.
Handmade chocolates were produced in England by the mid-nineteenth
century. One manufacturer was John Cadbury, a Quaker and a strong
temperance advocate who thought that it was important to provide
alternatives to alcohol. In 1831, Cadbury began manufacturing cocoa for
drinking chocolate; by 1866, Cadbury was also producing eating chocolate
– handmade bonbons, chocolate-covered nougat and other chocolate
candies. Cadbury began to produce milk chocolate in 1897. Another
important chocolate manufacturer was Joseph Storrs Fry, another British
Quaker, who invented a process for combining cocoa powder, sugar and
melted cocoa butter to produce a thin paste that could be shaped in a mould
to make chocolate bars. Soon, J. S. Fry & Sons was the largest
manufacturer of chocolates in the world. In 1919, Cadbury acquired J. S.
Fry & Sons, although a few Cadbury chocolate bars still bear the name
‘Fry’s’.
Cadbury itself was acquired by Kraft Foods in 2010, but three years later,
Kraft span off its sweets and snack food to a new company, Mondelēz
International. Today, Mondelēz’s bestselling confectionery brands are
Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Milka chocolates and Trident gum. These rank sixth,
fifth and third in global sales.
The grocers William Tuke and Sons of York, England, began to sell
cocoa in 1785. In 1862, Henry Isaac Rowntree acquired the Tukes’s cocoa
business. In 1881, the company introduced Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles and in
1893, Rowntree’s Fruit Gums. Four years later, Rowntree & Company was
established. Like Cadbury, Rowntree innovated exceptional benefit
programmes for employees, including dining and other facilities, workers’
councils, a pension scheme, unemployment benefits and annual paid
holidays.
Shopkeeper Miss Roud selling chocolate to pupils in the tuck shop at the Schoolboy’s Exhibition at
the Horticultural Hall, Westminster, London, 2 January 1926.

In 1931, Rowntree began an aggressive development programme. One

key to its success was the company’s relationship with Forrest Mars, whose
Mars Bar had been introduced in England in 1932. Until then, ‘combination
bars’ (which had multiple ingredients such as chocolate, peanuts, caramel
and so on) had not been popular in Britain. The Chocolate Crisp was
launched in 1935 and renamed the Kit Kat two years later. The Rowntree
company introduced Smarties in 1937. These colourful sugar-coated
chocolate drops remain popular today in the United Kingdom, South Africa,
Canada and Australia. Nestlé acquired Rowntree in 1988; subsequently
many new chocolates and sweets have been introduced under the Rowntree
brand.

American Chocolate Makers

Milton Hershey was a manufacturer of caramel candies in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. In 1893, he visited Chicago’s Columbian Exposition and was
fascinated by the chocolate-making machinery exhibited by Lehmann &
Company of Dresden, Germany. Hershey bought Lehmann’s machinery at
the Exposition and had it shipped to Lancaster. Then he hired two chocolate
makers from Baker’s Chocolate and began mass-producing chocolate
candies. Up to this time, all American chocolate candies had been made by
hand. The Hershey Chocolate Company, a small subsidiary of Hershey’s
caramel business, initially produced breakfast cocoa, sweet chocolate,
baking chocolate and a variety of small candies, eventually coming out with
the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar about 1905 and Hershey’s Kisses in
1907. While the Hershey Chocolate Company was successful from the start,
it received a major boost during the First World War, when Hershey
chocolate bars were given to American soldiers fighting in Europe. Many
had never eaten a chocolate bar before, and when they returned after the
war, the demand for Hershey’s products surged. Recently, the Hershey
Company has expanded its global presence through increased sales and
acquisitions. Its Reese’s chocolates rank first in the U.S. and fourth globally
in sales.
In 1922, Frank Mars of Minneapolis founded the Mar-O-Bar Company. It
initially sold a bar composed of caramel, nuts and chocolate. The next year,
the company introduced the Milky Way bar and in 1930, Snickers, a peanut-
flavoured nougat bar topped with nuts and caramel and coated with
chocolate. It quickly became one of the most popular candy bars in
America, a position it has held ever since.

Kit Kat bars originated in England; today they are available throughout most of the world.
Reese’s Pieces were featured in the mega-hit movie ET.

Forrest Mars introduced the Mars Bar into Britain in 1932.

Frank Mars’s son, Forrest Mars, did not get along with his father, so with
$50,000 in his pocket he moved to England and formed a new company,
Mars, Ltd. In 1932, he introduced the Mars bar, a slightly sweeter version of
the Milky Way. By 1939, the company was ranked as Britain’s third-largest
confectionery manufacturer. When the Second World War started in 1939,
Forrest Mars returned to the United States, where he launched a new
company with Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of the Hershey
Company. Because both of their last names started with M, they called their
new company M&M. Their first product was a small milk-chocolate drop
covered with a hard sugar shell, a small Smarties clone, which they named
M&M’s Chocolate Candies. The two companies, Mars and M&M, were not
merged until 1964. Mars, Inc. has continued to expand, both through
acquisitions and by creating new products. As of 2011, Mars controls 15 per
cent of the global candy market and is the world’s largest confectionery
manufacturer. Their Dove chocolates (Galaxy in the UK), Orbit and Extra
globally rank fifth, eighth and ninth respectively. For decades, Mars’ M&M’s
were the world’s largest selling confection. Sales hit $3.49 billion in
globally in 2012, but M&M’s were dethroned by Mars’ Snickers, which had
worldwide sales of $3.57 billion and is now the largest selling confectionery
item in the world.
Mars’s Milky Way was one of the first popular combination candy bars.

Other Confectionery Manufacturers

In the 1860s, Henri Nestlé, a German-born pharmacist living in
Switzerland, developed condensed milk and successfully marketed an infant
formula made from milk and flour. He sold his company in 1874, but it
retained his name. Henri Nestlé then worked with his friend Daniel Peter, a
chocolatier, to help perfect the milk chocolate bar. Peter’s chocolate, made
with Nestlé condensed milk, quickly became one of Europe’s best-known
chocolate brands.
Ovaltine, a Swiss product created by a physician in 1904 to nourish
seriously ill patients, was widely marketed during the following decades. A
sugary, malted chocolate powder designed to be mixed with milk and drunk
hot or cold, Ovaltine’s healthful qualities, particularly added vitamins, were
touted in its advertising. Ovaltine’s success encouraged Nestlé to market its
own milk modifier: Nestlé Quik (also called Nesquik), a sweetened
chocolate drink powder. It was introduced in 1948, and its long sponsorship
of children’s television programming ensured its lasting popularity. Its
product line was subsequently extended to include sugary syrups and
cereals.
Top-selling candy sold in the United States.

Beerntsen’s Confectionary, a historic old-fashioned candy store in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

Chocolate bars are made and marketed throughout the developed world.
 The First World War depressed Nestlé’s sales, but after the war the
company began to expand. By the late 1920s, chocolate was its second most
important product. In 1929, Nestlé acquired Daniel Peter’s company and
entered into manufacturing powdered chocolate for making chocolate milk,
premium chocolates and solid chocolate bars. After the Second World War,
Nestlé began to grow rapidly, in part by acquiring other companies. In
1988, Nestlé acquired the Italian chocolate maker Perugina and the English
chocolate maker Rowntree. Its Kit Kat bar ranks tenth in sales globally.
Another large confectionery manufacturer is Perfetti Van Melle Group,
which was formed in 2001 and is headquartered in Milan, Italy. Its Mentos
mints and chewy sweets rank eleventh in global sales today.
Tens of thousands of brands of assorted sweets are manufactured
worldwide. Swedes consume more sweets than any other people in the
world (annually 37 lb, or 16.8 kg, per capita). The Swiss consume more
chocolate (annually 25 lb or 11.3 kg per capita). Americans eat less candy
per capita, but spend more money – hitting $32 billion per year – and the
amount is still increasing, even during the recent economic downturn.
Worldwide sales of confectionery have also been increasing, and today are
estimated at $150 billion annually.
 6
American Bliss

In addition to candies and confections, sugar is added to a large number of

other products sold throughout the world, including breakfast cereals,
biscuits (cookies), doughnuts, ice cream and soft drinks. Sugar is also added
to processed foods that were not traditionally sweet, and where its flavour
may not be dominant. Hidden sugar can be found in canned soups and
vegetables; breads, crackers and chips; frozen dinners; condiments
(ketchup, chilli sauce and Worcestershire sauce) and salad dressings; peanut
butter; baby foods and infant formula; pizza; hot dogs and lunch meat;
pickles and cocktail snacks; flavoured yogurt; frozen foods; fruit juice, fruit
coolers, ‘energy’ and sports drinks; and even pet foods. Sugars hide in
processed foods under a variety of names, including sucrose, glucose,
dextrose, maltose, lactose, galactose, malt syrup, maltodextrin, corn syrup,
high fructose corn syrup, molasses and corn sweetener, to name a few.
Nowhere is this sugarization of processed foods more apparent than in
the United States. As sugar prices declined in the nineteenth century, sweet
desserts and snacks became universal in American homes, regardless of
income or social class. More and more sugar went into cakes, cookies, pies
and other pastries. Foreign visitors remarked upon this, noting that the
amount of sugar and other sweeteners ‘used in families, otherwise plain and
frugal, was astonishing’. By the 1870s, U.S. sugar consumption per capita
was 41 lb (18.6 kg) per year; as commercially processed foods came on the
market and sugar prices sank further, American consumption shot up.
Cakes, from simple to lavish, were becoming an everyday part of the
American diet. Parties were celebrated with a profusion of jelly cakes,
pound cakes, plum cakes and lady cakes. From American kitchens issued a
steady, fragrant stream of sugar cookies, wafers, kisses, drops, jumbles,
snaps, macaroons, gingerbread, crullers and doughnuts – all with ever-
greater quantities of sugar. Sweet rolls and doughnuts became regular
breakfast fare. By 1901, Americans were consuming an average 61 lb (27.7
kg) of sugar per capita per year. The American love affair with sugar was
flourishing, but was still a long way from its peak.

Cotton candy (candy floss), spun sugar in a paper cone, became popular in America in the early 20th
century.

Breakfast Cereal
Until the twentieth century, the typical American breakfast included fruit,
breadstuffs, eggs, potatoes and meats of all kinds – not just bacon or
sausage but beefsteak, savoury meat pies and calves’ liver. During the late
nineteenth century, vegetarians and health reformers began to develop
breakfast foods based on unrefined whole grains, which they thought better
suited to the digestion of the modern-day office worker. The first
commercial cereals were unsweetened and were meant to be moistened
with plain water. As the industry took off, entrepreneurs found that
customers preferred their cereal sweeter, so the new fashion was to serve it
with cream and sugar. Will Kellogg added sugar to the formula for Corn
Flakes over the objections of his brother, the health food guru and
vegetarian John Harvey Kellogg, who believed that ingesting sugar carried
more potential health risks than eating meat.
As more women entered the workforce during the twentieth century,
cereals were advertised as a means of easing mother’s workload. Children
could prepare their own breakfasts without help and they loved sugary
cereal. According to the medical authorities of the day, cereal was good for
children, so this was a double win for busy mothers. Cereal companies,
largely because they aimed their marketing directly at children, did well
during the Depression; adding more and more sugar to their products helped
seal the deal. After the Second World War, with sugar rationing a thing of
the past, cereal makers upped the ante even further. In 1949, Post Cereals
introduced Sugar Crisp, puffed wheat with a crunchy sugar coating. It was
an immediate success, and other cereal companies followed suit with
heavily sweetened cereals targeted at children. Some cereals approached 50
per cent sugar by weight; Kellogg’s Honey Smacks hit 55.6 per cent sugar;
Post responded with Super Orange Crisps, which weighed in at 70 per cent
sugar. This led observers to ask, ‘Is it cereal or candy?’
These high-sugar cereals were heavily promoted in children’s media,
especially radio and television, point-of-sale marketing and, later, the
Internet. The big three American cereal manufacturers (Kellogg’s, Quaker
Oats and Post) spent more on advertising their products then they did on the
ingredients that went into them. Annually the U.S. cereal industry uses 816
million lb of sugar, or almost 3 lb (1.4 kg) of sugar per capita. Ironically
cold breakfast cereals, which started out as health foods, are now
considered major contributors to excess sugar in the American diet,
especially those of children. More than 1.3 million cereal commercials air
on American television each year, and most of them are aimed at children.
Diverse breakfast cereals are numerous in American supermarkets.

Biscuits, Cookies, Cakes and Bread

The English word biscuit comes from Latin via Middle French; its original
meaning was ‘twice baked’. Some early European recipes (like those still
used for Italian biscotti) called for dough to be baked in loaf form, then
sliced or split and baked again, slowly, to drive off any moisture; the drier
the product, the longer it would keep. British biscuit recipes came to
America with the English colonists, but the Dutch also colonized parts of
America and their word koekje, meaning small cake, became the American
term for a sweet biscuit. Amelia Simmons, author of American Cookery
(1796), is credited with publishing the first known ‘cookie’ recipes,
including one for ‘Christmas Cookeys’ made with a pound and a half of
sugar to three of flour.
Cookies are the simplest of baked goods and require few ingredients –
sugar being one of them. They take only a few minutes in the oven, so they
can be baked on short notice and served as an informal dessert or eaten as a
snack. A full cookie jar was long seen as emblematic of a well-run
American home, a loving mother and a happy family, and the cookies in the
jar should be (it went without saying) home-baked: sugar-cookie cutouts,
oatmeal or peanut-butter cookies or the classic chocolate-chip cookies. But
neighbourhood bakeries and pastry shops offered more elaborate cookies,
and commercial baking plants in the U.S. started to churn out mass-produced
cookies in the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century,
store-bought cookies were available nationwide, and advertising campaigns
strove to make them acceptable to the fashionable hostess. The National
Biscuit Company (later Nabisco), founded in 1898 as a conglomerate of
smaller baking companies, pioneered a wide variety of cookies, such as
Oreos, today the world’s largest-selling cookie.

Christmas biscuits (cookies) have been served in Europe since the 16th century; they remain a
Christmas treat today.

Cakes as we know them today began as a variation on breads. Some, like

pancakes, were flat, and were turned to cook on both sides on a hot surface.
Other cakes were baked in specially designed cake pans. If early cakes were
sweetened, it was with a little honey, or they might be baked unsweetened
and served with honey as an accompaniment. During the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, sugar replaced honey in cake batters, and sugar-
based icings or frostings supplanted the accompanying honey. By 1615,
cookbooks were advising the use of ‘a good deale of sugar’ in cake recipes.
By the 1680s, cakes were commonly served as a dessert after a meal, or
with tea or coffee in the morning or afternoon. Lavishly decorated cakes
became a feature of special occasions and ceremonial feasts, such as
Christmas, weddings and birthdays. As sugar prices declined and sugar
refining improved, the amount of refined sugar used in cakes increased;
powdered or icing sugar (also called confectioners’ sugar because it was
used in candy-making) became widely available in the nineteenth century,
when it began to be called for in recipes for cake icing.
Cake-baking traditions were brought to America by European
immigrants, and cakes were popular in colonial times; they remain one of
America’s favourite desserts. From simple gingerbread, pound, angel food
and sponge cake to rich fruitcakes, cheesecakes, frosted and filled layer
cakes, elaborate wedding cakes and whimsically decorated cupcakes,
American cakes call for generous amounts of sugar. Although many people
still bake cakes from scratch at home – especially birthday cakes – there is
an abundance of mixes, bakery cakes and packaged or frozen products for
those not so inclined.
Historically bread was made without the addition of sugar, although
some early nineteenth-century recipes published for brown bread (also
called dyspepsia bread) included molasses. This changed when millstones
in flour mills were replaced by high-speed steel rollers during the late
nineteenth century. The bran, germ and oil were removed from the wheat to
produce a bland white flour. Bakers began to compensate for this
tastelessness by adding sugar, and the amount of added sugar increased over
time (sugar also adds moisture to bread, so it stays fresh longer). In the
1880s, cookbook authors recommended one tablespoon of sugar to every
eight cups of flour. By the 1890s, this had increased in some recipes to
about one tablespoon per cup of flour. Commercial bakers added even
more. This increased even more for commercial bread during the twentieth
century. By comparison, bakers in other countries, such as Italy and France,
include little or no sugar in their bread.

Doughnuts
American doughnuts (or donuts) may have been of Dutch, German or
English origin. The Dutch called them olijkoeken (oil cakes) or oliebollen.
These were pinched-off portions of sweetened dough that were rolled
between the hands and then dropped into hot oil. The Dutch-style nuggets
or ‘nuts’ of fried dough were popular in America, but doughnuts with holes
in the centre were not common until the end of the nineteenth century.
Purportedly the hole was a practical innovation that made for easier
dunking in coffee. Others maintain that the shape helped the dough to cook
more evenly.
The sale of commercial doughnuts greatly expanded after the Second
World War. Doughnut retailing lends itself to franchising because the
equipment is affordable. Doughnut franchisers include Dunkin’ Donuts,
House of Donuts, Krispy Kreme and Winchell’s. Dunkin’ Donuts alone
sells an estimated 6.4 million doughnuts per day (2.3 billion per year).
Yet another doughnut chain was established by Tim Horton, a hall-of-
fame Canadian hockey player, who opened his first outlet in Hamilton,
Ontario, in 1964. It was known for its coffee, which was guaranteed to be
served fresh, cappuccinos, doughnuts and ‘donut holes’, but it quickly
incorporated other items. The company soon expanded and it became
Canada’s largest fast food operation. In 1995, Tim Hortons opened outlets
in the United States. When Burger King agreed to purchase the chain in
2014, Tim Hortons had almost 4,600 systemwide restaurants, inluding
about 845 in the United States and other countries.
About 80 per cent of doughnut business is take-out, and 80 per cent of
doughnuts are sold before noon in North America. They come in a great
diversity of shapes, sizes and flavours. There are yeast-raised doughnuts
and baking-powder doughnuts, both deep-fried; for the fat-avoidant, oven-
baked doughnuts are available. Most doughnuts have holes, and doughnut
holes (or pieces of dough shaped to resemble them) are sold separately.
Filled doughnuts are injected with jam (jelly), custard or a variety of other
sweet fillings; further adornments may include a thick dusting of icing
(confectioners’) sugar or cinnamon sugar, a thin layer of chocolate icing, a
vanilla, chocolate or other flavour glaze, toasted coconut or sprinkles.
Similar pastries are crullers (or krullers), large strips of dough twisted
together and fried; and bismarcks, large, éclair-shaped jam doughnuts.
Entenmann’s doughnut variety pack.

Ice Cream
Ices, ice creams, and sorbets – frozen desserts initially sweetened with fruit
juice – likely originated in Italy or France in the sixteenth century. They
were sold in cafés in Europe from the seventeenth century on, and small
vendors operated in most European cities by the 1800s. Several ice-cream
recipes appeared in English cookbooks in the eighteenth century. European
immigrants brought ice-cream-making techniques to America, where ice-
cream parlours had opened in some cities by the 1790s. Many ice-cream
recipes – most sweetened with plenty of sugar – appear in nineteenth-
century American cookbooks.
Three main ice-cream flavours – chocolate, vanilla and strawberry –
came to the fore in the nineteenth century and have remained favourites
ever since. But other flavours proliferated during the nineteenth century, as
did elaborate ice-cream presentations with inventive toppings, sauces and
garnishes, and soda-fountain drinks made with ice cream. The late twentieth
century saw the rise of the mix-in – premium ice cream studded with
chunks of cookies, candies, chocolate, nuts or fruit, or with thick swirls of
caramel, fudge or peanut butter running through the cream.
For much of the nineteenth century, going out for ice cream was a genteel
pursuit. Served in establishments called ‘parlours’, ice cream was scooped
into elegant glass dishes and eaten with a spoon. It was a popular summer
treat, and the ingredients were cheap, but the problems for street vendors
were how to keep the product cold and how to serve it without dishes and
spoons. The solution was the ice cream cone, which was invented in the late
nineteenth century.
Commercial production of ice cream did not take hold until technological
improvements in refrigeration made sales possible through drugstores, soda
fountains and grocery stores. In the United States, soda fountain offerings
competed with the alcohol served in saloons and bars, and were therefore
championed by the temperance movement. Prohibition gave a huge boost to
the popularity of ice cream as bars, saloons and taverns were shuttered and
soda fountains became community gathering places. However, it was not
until after the Second World War, when self-serve freezer chests for grocery
stores came into wide use and the freezer sections of home refrigerators
increased in size and efficiency, that packaged ice cream became an
everyday part of the diet.
By the 1950s, large ice-cream makers were underselling small producers,
and supermarkets switched to national brands. But a niche had opened up
for ‘super-premium’ ice creams, with a higher butterfat content and less air
than supermarket brands. Häagen-Dazs, a new product from a decades-old
family ice-cream business, first appeared in 1960, and Ben & Jerry’s ice
cream, originally made by hand by two young men from Long Island, was
first sold from a converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978.
Breyers is still the largest ice-cream manufacturer in America, a position it
has held since 1951. It is followed by Dreyer’s/Edy’s and Blue Bell
Creameries, Inc. Despite the concentration of the ice cream industry, the
largest category of ice-cream makers in America today is private labels,
generally sold at the local and regional level. In 2013, Americans purchased
an estimated $11 billion worth of ice-cream – complete with a generous
helping of sugar in virtually every serving.

Sugary Beverages
Yet another sugar-filled treat is soda pop, which, like breakfast cereal,
began life as a health food and ended up as just the opposite. Mineral
waters, both still and naturally effervescent, have long been considered
therapeutic, and water artificially infused with carbon dioxide (CO2) was
considered to have medicinal attributes. At European spas and resorts built
at natural springs, drinking bubbly mineral waters was an important part of
the health regimen. During the eighteenth century, several scientists,
including Joseph Priestley and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, discovered that
carbon dioxide was the source of the bubbles in natural springs, beer and
champagne. Priestley constructed an apparatus for manufacturing the gas,
and reports of his invention were sent to John Montagu, the fourth Earl of
Sandwich (the same man credited with inventing the sandwich), who was
then Lord of the Admiralty. He requested that Priestley demonstrate his
apparatus before the Royal College of Physicians. Priestley did so; among
the audience members was Benjamin Franklin, who was living in London at
the time.
Other scientists constructed their own systems for producing soda water.
In 1783, Johann Jacob Schweppe improved a process for manufacturing
carbonated water and formed the Schweppes Company in Geneva,
Switzerland. During the French Revolution and its aftermath, Schweppes
moved his operation to England, where his soda water was approved for
medicinal use by the British royal family.
By 1800, manufacturers had found they could make water fizzy by
adding a solution of sodium bicarbonate to it. Carbonated water, however,
was generally made under high pressure using sulphuric acid. Operators
could easily be burned by the acid, and containers sometimes exploded.
Various kinds of apparatus for making carbonated water were patented from
1810, but because of the complexity of the process, they could be operated
only by trained technicians. Because the devices were expensive, and the
beverages made with them were considered medicinal, soda water was
generally dispensed only in drugstores. It was a small step from carbonated
water to flavoured soda water. Ginger ale is generally thought to have been
the first flavoured carbonated beverage sold commercially in America. It
was probably first marketed in 1866 by James Vernor, a Detroit pharmacist,
who created Vernors Ginger Ale.
Another early soft drink was root beer, which was traditionally flavoured
with bark, leaves, roots, herbs, spices and other aromatic parts of plants. In
its early years, root beer was a home-brewed, mildly alcoholic beverage.
Later, extracts made from the flavourful ingredients were touted as a tonic –
typical of herbal remedies of the period. By the 1840s, root beer mixes and
syrups were manufactured locally and sold in confectionery and general
stores. Soda fountains, which sold combinations of ice cream and drinks
composed of fruit syrups, sugar and soda water, sprang up around America.
 Soda companies produced a sugary syrup or extract and sold it to
drugstores, where it would be combined with carbonated water. This began
to change in 1892, when William Painter invented the crown bottle cap,
which made it possible to seal bottles easily, cheaply and securely. At the
same time, bottling technology improved: the new, stronger glass bottles
could hold the ‘fizz’ without shattering during bottling.
Soft drinks got another major boost during Prohibition, when
manufacturing and selling alcoholic beverages was illegal. It was also
during the 1920s that fast food chains emerged, and virtually all of them
sold soft drinks. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, soft drinks and
fast food outlets were already well-established American institutions and
they continued on their upward sales trajectory.
Soft drink manufacturers spend billions of dollars on promotion and
advertising. Marketing efforts are aimed at children through cartoons,
movies, videos, charities and amusement parks. In addition, soft drink
companies sponsor contests, sweepstakes and games via broadcast and print
media as well as the Internet, much of it targeting young people. In its study
Liquid Candy of 2005, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)
revealed that soft drink companies had targeted schools for their advertising
and sales of their products. It also reported that soft drinks ‘provided more
than one-third of all refined sugars in the diet’. Soft drinks, according to
CSPI, are the single greatest source of refined sugar, providing 9 per cent of
calories for boys and 8 per cent for girls. The CSPI study also reported that at
least 75 per cent of American teenagers drink soda every day.
American soda companies have rapidly expanded abroad. Coca-Cola and
PepsiCo sell more than 70 per cent of the carbonated beverages in the
world. Worldwide, soda companies sell the equivalent of 1.3 billion glasses
of soda every day, which works out to about eight teaspoons of sugar per
glass of non-diet soda.

Energy and Sports Drinks

Added sugar is also found in many other beverages, including fruit juices,
fruit coolers, coffee beverages and ‘energy drinks’. Sugar has been added to
fruit drinks ever since they emerged as a mass-consumption processed
product in the 1940s.
 Manufacturers have used the word ‘fruit’ in their beverage names to
persuade potential buyers of good nutrition inside the can or bottle, but
many fruit drinks are just fruit-flavoured sugar water. Fruit coolers, for
instance, typically have 16 grams of sugar. Other beverages have more. A
20 oz (600 ml) bottle of Vitamin Water contains 33 grams of sugar. A 16 oz
(475 ml) Starbucks Café Vanilla Frappuccino has 67 grams per serving. A
Costa Medio Tropical Fruit Cooler contains 73 grams of sugar – seven
times more than a Krispy Kreme doughnut.
Energy drinks have become pervasive and most are filled with
sweeteners. An English pharmaceutical company developed the first energy
drink, called Glucozade, in 1927. It was a fizzy liquid filled with sugar, and
was mainly used to help children recover from illness. A British
pharmaceutical picked up the formula, renamed it Lucozade, and promoted
it with the slogan ‘Lucozade aids recovery.’ In 1983, the company decided
to reposition the product as an energy drink using the slogan, ‘Lucozade
replaces lost energy.’
Red Bull, consisting of caffeine, sucrose, glucose and other ingredients,
was launched in Europe in 1987. It was introduced into the United States a
decade later, when it became America’s first popular energy drink. Red Bull
started a frenzy of copycat beverages, such as Jolt, Monster Energy, No
Fear, Rockstar, Full Throttle and a myriad of other brands. Large companies
jumped in: Anheuser-Busch’s 180, Coca-Cola’s KMX, Del Monte Foods’
Bloom Energy and PepsiCo’s Adrenaline Rush. These drinks boast caffeine
levels of up to 500 mg per 16 oz (475 ml), and they are often loaded with
various forms of sugar. By the early twenty-first century there were more
than 300 branded energy drinks on the market in America alone – and most
were filled with high-calorie sweeteners.
Sugar is also a major ingredient in many sports drinks – beverages that
are designed to enhance athletic performance by fostering endurance and
recovery. The first such beverage was Gatorade, formulated in 1965 by
Robert Cade and Dana Shires of the University of Florida. Gatorade is a
noncarbonated drink that consists of water, electrolytes and a heavy dose of
carbohydrates (in this case, mainly sugar – 28 grams of which are in 16 oz
of the drink). Gatorade launched the sports-beverage industry. Intended for
athletes participating in serious competition or intense exercise, sports
drinks do increase energy levels (as do all sugar-sweetened drinks) – but
most sports and energy drinks are consumed by non-athletes, who often end
up gaining weight.

Bliss Point
That sweetened products sell well has been known since the early twentieth
century. Manufacturers wanted to know how much sugar should be added
for maximum sales. The research started in the early 1970s, when the
psychologists Anthony Sclafani and Deleri Springer engaged in an
experiment to induce obesity in laboratory rats. They found that rats did not
overeat or gain weight when they were fed only Purina Dog Chow, but
became obese when given Froot Loops, a high-sugar breakfast cereal.
Sclafani and Springer repeated their experiment using other common
supermarket foods – peanut butter, marshmallows, chocolate bars,
sweetened condensed milk and chocolate-chip cookies. The rats preferred
sweet food – and, if given the opportunity, continued to eat it until they
became obese. Other experiments subsequently proved that when obese rats
were exposed to non-sweet standard rat food, they declined to eat it.
About the same time, Howard Moskowitz, a researcher in the U.S. Army
labs in Natick, Massachusetts, was searching for ways to make military
rations more palatable for soldiers in combat. His experiments showed that
soldiers’ preferences for foods increased as sugar was added – up to a point
– but beyond that point, additional sugar made the food less appealing.
Moskowitz is credited with coining the term ‘bliss point’ to describe that
peak in the appeal of sweetness (bliss points were also established for fat
and salt intake). The conclusion of these and other studies was that a love
for sugar was inborn, and that humans were hardwired to prefer sweet
foods. In 1981, Moskowitz left the Army labs and opened his own
consulting firm in White Plains, New York, where many American food
companies were headquartered. His company helped food corporations find
the ‘bliss point’ for their products. He was extremely successful and so
were the companies he advised.
Yet another set of experiments was conducted at the Monell Chemical
Senses Center in Philadelphia, an independent non-profit research facility
funded by governmental agencies and large corporations. Researchers
concluded that children, in particular, preferred sweeter foods than adults.
Later experiments at the Center found that a preference for sweet flavours
was a basic part of children’s biology, and allowed researchers to determine
the exact bliss point for sugar in children’s foods and beverages. Further
studies around the world, such as at the London-based – and corporate-
funded – ARISE (Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment),
confirmed these studies and concluded that the taste for sweetness was
inborn.
These studies helped food manufacturers figure out how much sugar to
incorporate in their products in order to stimulate sales. Candy and cereal
companies, bakers and soft-drink manufacturers throughout the world
raised the levels of sweetness in their products to the scientifically
identified bliss point. The consumption of sugary foods and beverages
rapidly expanded – as did the waistlines of consumers around the world,
generating considerable criticism for the processed and fast food industries.
 7
Sugar Blues

Concerns about the health effects of consuming sugar have been expressed
for the past four centuries. The main early concern was the relationship
between sugar consumption and dental caries (cavities). One of the first
references to this is in the writings of Paul Hentzner, a German visitor to
England who met the 66-year-old Elizabeth I in 1598. He described her as
having black teeth, commenting that it was ‘a defect the English seem
subject to from their too great use of sugar’. The medical authorities agreed:
sugar rotted the teeth. William Vaughan, a doctor of civil law, condemned
sugar for various reasons; one, as he wrote in his work Approved Directions
for Health (1612), was that it blackened and ‘corrupted’ teeth. James Hart,
author of Klinike; or, the Diet of the Diseases (1633), proclaimed that the
immoderate use of sugar in sugar candy, sweet confections and sugar-plums
produced ‘dangerous effect in the body,’ including constipation,
consumption, blockages and ‘rotten teeth, making them look blacke’. He
went on to warn ‘young people especially to beware’ of consuming these
confections. Writers continued to note the relationship for centuries.
Jonathan Swift, for instance, proclaimed that ‘sweet things are bad for the
teeth’ in one of the dialogues in A Complete Collection of Polite and
Ingenious Conversation (1722).
Colour lithograph after Reginald Mount, and issued by the Ministry of Health, 1950s.

American medical authorities later expressed their own concerns about

refined sugar. The health advocate Sylvester Graham, in his final work,
Lectures on the Science of Human Life (1839), advocated banning refined
sugar because it was stimulating: ‘The stern truth is, that no purely
stimulating substances of any kind can be habitually used by man, without
injury to the whole nature.’ Many health reformers followed Graham’s
beliefs. The hydropath Russell Trall violently attacked sugar in editorials
and in his books on health:

Sugar is made into an immense variety of candies, confections, lozenges, etc., most of which
are poisoned with coloring matters, and many of which are drugged with apothecary stuff. The
intelligent physiologist will repudiate their employment in every form or shape. The raw
sugars of commerce contain various impurities; and the refined and very dry sugars tend to
constipate the bowels.
 Not all health reformers heeded Trall’s absolutist views on sugar. John
Harvey Kellogg, the Seventh-Day Adventist who directed the sanatorium in
Battle Creek, Michigan, felt that his childhood gastrointestinal problems
were caused by meat and candy, and believed that the American love of
candy and sweet desserts needed to be rigidly controlled, for sugar
interfered with proper digestion. But he did not call for the complete
elimination of sugar, recommending only that people should eat much less
of it, and replace it with honey, dates and raisins.
Dentists, understandably, condemned sugar, but medical authorities were
also concerned. In 1942, the American Medical Association’s Council on
Food and Nutrition stated that ‘it would be in the interest of the public
health for all practical means to be taken to limit consumption of sugar in
any form in which it fails to be combined with significant proportions of
other foods of high nutritive quality.’ The medical profession also worried
about sugar consumption, particularly its effects on hypoglycaemia (low
levels of sugar in the blood). E. M. Abrahamson, MD, and A. W. Pezet, in
their book Body, Mind, and Sugar (1951), concluded that refined sugar
caused a ‘constellation of diseases’, and that its removal from the diet led to
immediate improvement in patients’ health. The book was mainly based on
personal experiences – Abrahamson was a physician specializing in
diabetes who dosed Pezet with ‘hyperinsulinism’ – but it received wide
publicity and sold more than 200,000 copies. Other medical professionals
agreed. A British Royal Navy surgeon, Thomas L. Cleave, and a South
African physician, George D. Campbell, examined a number of different
societies and found that diabetes, heart disease, obesity, peptic ulcers and
other chronic diseases were correlated with increased consumption of
refined sugar, white flour and white rice. The less refined carbohydrates that
were consumed, the lower the incidence of these diseases. They published
their views in the book Diabetes, Coronary Thrombosis and the Saccharine
Diseases (1966). While their beliefs were scoffed at by some, most medical
professionals did recommend that their patients reduce their intake of added
sugar.

Sugar Substitutes
Concern with increasing diabetes and obesity led to the invention of non-
caloric and low-calorie artificial sweeteners. The first artificial sweetener
was saccharin, a white crystalline powder that has 300 to 500 times the
sweetness of sugar, but no calories. It was discovered by a graduate student
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1879. Saccharin was
commercialized by several companies, including Monsanto, but was not
widely used until sugar rationing was encouraged during the First World
War.
After the war, saccharin became a boon to diabetics, and eventually was
used in diet products for weight-loss regimes. In 1977, a Canadian study
reported that saccharin caused cancer in test animals, and the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) placed a moratorium on its use until more studies
were conducted. Further studies did not confirm earlier test results and the
ban was lifted in 1991.

Broadside encouraging Americans to consume less sugar during the First World War.

A second artificial sweetener, calcium cyclamate, was used in diet soda

beginning in 1952. Variations of it were used in a variety of other products.
Lab studies carried out in the late 1960s showed that cyclamates were likely
carcinogenic, and they were banned by the FDA in 1970. By the late 1970s,
most diet products were being made with a third sugar substitute, aspartame
(marketed under the names NutraSweet and Equal).
Stevia is a non-caloric natural sugar substitute derived from plants in the
sunflower family. The plant extract is 300 times as sweet as table sugar.
Stevia became popular in Japan in the 1970s and since then has been widely
used in many countries in Asia and South America. In 1994, the FDA
classified stevia as a herbal supplement and required it to be listed on the
food labels. In 2008, the FDA approved two sweeteners derived from stevia:
Truvia, developed by Cargill and the Coca-Cola Co., and PureVia,
developed by PepsiCo and the Whole Earth Sweetener Company. The
following year, the FDA placed a purified form of stevia on the ‘Generally
Recognized as Safe’ list.
Another recent introduction is Sucralose, which is 600 times sweeter than
table sugar. It was approved for use in Canada in 1991, and seven years
later in the U.S. Marketed under several brand names – Splenda, SucraPlus,
Candys, Cukren and Nevella – it is found in thousands of diet products.
Acesulfame potassium, another non-caloric sweetener, is 200 times as sweet
as table sugar. It is approved for use in the United States and the European
Union. Neotame, an artificial sweetener made by NutraSweet, is 7,000 to
13,000 times sweeter than table sugar. The FDA approved it for use in the U.S.
in 2002, but it has not yet come to be widely used. Little evidence has
surfaced about negative short-term effects of approved artificial sweeteners;
the long-term health risks, if any, remain under debate.

Sugar substitutes sold in an American supermarket.

Empty Calories
The term ‘empty calories’, meaning calories derived from foods with few or
no nutrients other than carbohydrates or fat, was first employed during the
1950s. At the top of the empty calorie food chart are sugary foods and
drinks such as candy, cookies, cakes, pies, ice cream, breakfast cereals and
sodas.
John Yudkin, who established the nutrition department at the University
of London in 1953, was convinced that there was a clear connection
between sugar consumption and many chronic diseases. By the end of the
1950s, Yudkin was campaigning for the elimination of sugar from the diet
to prevent coronary heart disease and aid in weight loss. In 1958, he
published a diet manual, The Slimming Business (1958), which advocated a
very low-carbohydrate diet for weight loss. Yudkin published a number of
studies supporting his views, which were popular in Britain during the
1960s. In 1972, he published Pure, White and Deadly: The Problem of
Sugar, a tirade that generated considerable interest among the public in
Britain and the United States; still, his views were generally rejected by the
medical community, which concluded that dietary fat – not sugar – was the
major cause of heart disease.
Medical professionals in the United States concluded that American
children consumed too much sugared baby food and sweetened breakfast
cereals, resulting in hyperactivity and other health problems throughout
their lives. William Duffy, an American journalist and macrobiotic
advocate, published the best-selling Sugar Blues (1975) about ‘the multiple
physical and mental miseries caused by human consumption of refined
sucrose’. He compared sugar to heroin and called it at least as addictive as
nicotine and just as poisonous.
Despite these warnings, Americans continued to increase their per capita
sugar consumption, although not all of it was from sucrose. Much of it was
from the misnamed high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). In the 1950s, scientists
had learned to refine corn into starch, then convert the starch into glucose,
and finally convert the glucose into fructose by adding enzymes. Although
it is made from corn, commercial HFCS is chemically similar to sucrose. HFCS
contains 45 per cent glucose and 55 per cent fructose, while sucrose
contains equal amounts of glucose and fructose. HFCS’s advantage was that it
was sweeter than sucrose. Its disadvantage was that it was more expensive
than sucrose at the time. This changed in the 1970s, when the price of sugar
increased in the United States due to quotas and tariffs on imported sugar
and subsidies for corn growers which lowered the price for corn. American
manufacturers added HFCS to products, particularly beverages. Most
subsequent studies have concluded that the human body handles HFCS in the
exact same way that it does sucrose. The majority of researchers now
conclude that the health issues are associated with the total consumption of
refined sugar, not with HFCS.
The term ‘junk food’, meaning calorie-dense processed foods,
particularly sweets, salty snacks and fast foods and sugary beverages that
have little nutritional value other than calories, was first used in the 1970s,
It was popularized during the following decade by Michael Jacobson, the
director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which from its
earliest days has decried high-sugar foods. The problem, according to the
CSPI (and many others), is not just eating junk foods, but allowing them to
crowd out more nutritious ones.
Refined sugar is an important contributor to excess calorie consumption.
According to studies published in 2011 in the prestigious British medical
journal The Lancet, the global prevalence of obesity has almost doubled
since 1980, ‘when 4.8 percent of men and 7.9 percent of women were
obese. In 2008, 9.8 percent of men and 13.8 percent of women in the world
were obese.’ An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide are overweight –
half of whom are obese – and the number of people who are overweight is
increasing in nearly every country in the world. Excess weight has been
linked with high blood pressure, arthritis, infertility, heart disease, stroke,
Type 2 diabetes, birth defects, gallbladder disease, gout, impaired immune
function, liver disease, osteoarthritis and several types of cancer (including
breast, prostate, oesophageal, colorectal, endometrial and kidney cancer).
There are many causes of obesity and overweight, but an examination of
research findings led the research institute of the Zurich-based financial
firm Credit Suisse to conclude in 2013 that ‘While medical research is yet
to prove conclusively that sugar is the leading cause of obesity, diabetes
type II and metabolic syndrome, the balance of recent medical research
studies are coalescing around this conclusion.’ They believe that sugar
meets ‘the criteria for being a potentially addictive substance’. Nowhere is
this problem more acute than in the United States, where 61 per cent of
Americans are classified as overweight. The annual cost, concludes the
Credit Suisse’s Research Institute, is also staggering: 30 to 40 per cent of all
healthcare expenditures in the United States – about $1 trillion – ‘go to help
address issues that are closely tied to the excess consumption of sugar’, it
reports.
 Epilogue

Sugar production and consumption remain easy targets for environmental,

political and nutrition groups, and for very good reason. Environmentalists
hold sugar cane growers responsible for the destruction of rainforests in
Brazil, the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the
deterioration of the Florida Everglades. Fertilizer and pesticide runoff have
caused environmental damage throughout areas where cane or sugar beet
are cultivated, including the pollution of fresh and oceanic waters. Contract
labourers in sugar-cane-growing areas, such as Haitians in the Dominican
Republic, are treated abysmally, and concerns have been raised about
migrant workers employed in cane fields in many other countries, including
the United States.
Citizens’ groups have charged large agricultural interests and food
corporations with lobbying for subsidies for domestic sugar production, and
high tariffs and low quotas for imported sugar, such as those currently in
place in the EU and the U.S. These actions have lowered the price of sugar
worldwide, causing severe economic crises in some of the world’s least
developed countries, and have pushed up the cost of sugar-containing
processed foods in developed countries.
Health professionals and nutrition experts have identified added sugar as
a major cause of obesity and have pegged it as a contributing factor in many
illnesses, including diabetes, heart disease, obesity, peptic ulcers and other
chronic diseases. Critics blame large food corporations for lacing their
products with excessive amounts of sugar, and for targeting children in their
advertising campaigns on television, radio and the Internet, and at or near
schools and sporting events.
 Because of the criticism, some food companies have begun to decrease
the amount of sugar in their foods. Since 2007 the Kellogg Company and
General Mills, which produced six of the ten unhealthiest cereals, and did
the most child-focused marketing of any cereal company, have lowered the
sugar content of the cereals they market to children.
Despite the anti-sugar movement, sucrose remains one of the world’s
most important foods: it is estimated that about 8 per cent of the total
calories consumed in the world comes from sugar, although the amount
consumed by populations varies greatly. The global average is about 17
teaspoons (70 grams) per day. At the top are Americans, who consume an
average 40 teaspoons of sugar per day – 132 lb (60 kg) per year. Close
behind are Brazilians, Argentinians, Mexicans and Australians, with 30
teaspoons per person, per day. Indians eat far less, but the Chinese consume
the least among the world’s largest countries at seven teaspoons per day –
about 4 lb (1.8 kg) per year.
Sugar cane and sugar beet remain among the world’s most important
crops. Although they are grown in many countries, the major production
breaks down to relatively few. Brazil is by far the world’s largest grower of
sugar cane, producing around 28 per cent of the global crop, but about half
of it is converted into ethanol. Brazil exports about 25 per cent of the
world’s total processed raw sugar. India ranks second in production, and
together with China and Thailand accounts for about a third of total world
sugar production. The remainder is produced by 114 other countries around
the world.
Sugar will remain an important part of the human diet. It isn’t just our
physiological needs, or the successful marketing of junk-food and soda
manufacturers, that attract us to sweet foods and beverages. Sweet-tasting
foods – candy, cake, chocolate, ice cream and soda – generate good
feelings, and serve as small rewards that help us get through the day. They
are often associated with good times – holidays and celebrations such as
Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, birthday parties and
weddings. Consumed in moderation, sweet foods and beverages will remain
an integral part of our lives far into the future.
 Recipes

To make a March-pane
—from Delightes for Ladies (London, 1611)

Take two pounds of almonds being blanched and dryed in a sieve over the
fire, beate them in a stone mortar, and when they bee small, mixe them with
two pounds of sugar beeing finely beaten, adding two or three spoonefuls of
rose-water, and that will keep your almonds from oiling: when your paste is
beaten fine, drive it thin with a rowling pin, and so lay it on a bottom of
wafers; then raise up a little edge on the side, and so bake it; then yce [ice]
it with rose water and sugar, then put it into the oven againe, and when you
see your yce is risen up and drie, then take it out of the oven and garnish it
with pretie conceipts, as birdes and beasts being cast out of standing-
moldes. Sticke long comfits upright into it, cast bisket and carrowaies in it,
and so serve it; you may also print of this marchpane paste in your moldes
for banqueting dishes. And of this paste our comfit-makers at this day make
their letters, knots, armes, escutcheons, beasts, birds, and other fancies.

Chocolate Cream
—from François Massialot, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (Paris, 1693)

Take a Quart of Milk with a quarter of a Pound of Sugar, and boil them
together for a quarter of an Hour: Then put one beaten Yolk of an Egg into
the Cream, and let it have three or four Walms: Take it off from the Fire,
and mix it with some Chocolate, till the Cream has assum’d its colour.
Afterwards you may give it three or four Walms more upon the Fire, and
having strain’d it through a Sieve, dress it at pleasure.

To make Liquorish Cakes

—from The Pastry-cook’s Vade-mecum; or, a Pocket-companion for Cooks, Housekeepers, Country
Gentlewomen, &c. (London, 1705)

Take 12 ounces of Liquorish scraped very thin, then take two pints and a
half of Isop Water, one pint and half of Coltsfoot Water, a pint and half of
red Rosewater, two good handful of Rosemary flowers, one handful of
Maiden-hair, keep all these together three or four days in a stew Pot or Jug
that may be close stop’d, shaking them together two or three times a day,
then put them all into a Skilet, and set them upon a soft Fire two hours, then
strain it into a Silver Bason, put to it a pound of brown Sugar-candy so let it
boil till it grow thick enough to beat to a Paste, when you find it grow pretty
thick, take a little upon a Spoon, and beat it with a Knife till it be cold, and
then you will find whether it be enough, when you take it off the Fire, it
must be beaten with a good strength with a Spoon till it be white, then take
some fine Sugare searced, and so roul it up in little Cakes, the best way is to
keep beating it to the last, or else it will so crackle that it will never role
handsomely, half this Receipt is enough to make at a time.

Portugall Cakes
—from Edward Kidder, Receipts of Pastry for the Use of his Scholars (London, np, c. 1720)

Put a pd [pound] of fine sugar & a pd of fresh butter 5 eggs & a little beaten
mace into a flatt pan beat it up wth yor hands till tis very leight & looks
curdling yn put thereto a pd of flower ½ a pd of currants very clean pickt &
dryd beat yn together fill yor hart pan & bake ym in a slack oven
You may make seed cakes ye same way only put carraway seeds
instead of currants.
 Another Christmas Cookey
—from Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 2nd edn (Albany, NY, 1796)

To three pound flour, sprinkle a tea cup of fine powdered coriander seed,
rub in one pound of butter, and one and half pound sugar, dissolve three tea
spoonfuls of pearlash in a tea cup of milk, kneed all together well, roll three
quarters of an inch thick, and cut or stamp into shape and size you please,
bake slowly fifteen or twenty minutes; tho’ hard and dry at first, if put into
an earthern pot, and dry cellar, or damp room, they will be finer, softer and
better when six months old.

To Clarify Sugar
—from Hannah Glasse and Maria Wilson, The Complete Confectioner; or, Housekeeper’s Guide
(London, 1800)

In proportion to three pounds of fine, lump, or powder sugar, which you are
to put in a skillet or boiler; break into an earthen pan the white of an egg,
with near a pint of fresh water, and beat them up all together with a wisk to
a white froth; then put the whole into a copper kettle, or pan, and set them
on a clear and slow fire; when it begins to boil, do not fail to put a little
more water in, and begin to skim it, till you see the scum appears thick on
the top, and the sugar becomes pretty clear; that done, to clear it properly,
sift it in a wet napkin, or silk sieve, and pass it thus into what vessel you
please, till you want to make use of it.
Note. – If the sugar does not appear very fine, you must boil it again
before you strain it; otherwise, in boiling it to a height, it will rise over the
pan.

German Biscuits
—from William Alexis Jarrin, The Italian Confectioner (London, 1829)

Take cloves, cinnamon, corianders, nutmeg, of each a quarter of an ounce,

and pound and sift them (or the essence of those spices will answer the
same purpose); two ounces of preserved lemon peel, and one pound of
sweet almonds cut into fine prawlings [as for pralines]; mix these
ingredients with twenty four eggs, and five pounds of sugar, and as much
flour as will make it of a malleable paste. Roll it out into squares, lozenges,
ovals, or any other shape; when baked put on them an iceing of chocolate
&c. to your taste.

Of Boiling the Sugar

—from M. A. Carême, ed. John Porter,
The Royal Parisian Pastrycook and Confectioner from the Original of M. A. Carême (London, 1834)

There are six degrees of boiling the sugar after it is clarified, viz.; –
First Degree. – Au Lisse. – The sugar being clarified, put it on the fire,
and after boiling a few moments, take a little of it on the top of your fore-
finger, which you press against your thumb; when, on separating them
immediately, the sugar forms a fine thread hardly visible, but which you can
draw out a little, it is a sign that your sugar is boiled au grand lisse but if on
the contrary it breaks instantly, your sugar is only au petit lisse.
Second Degree. – Au Perle (to a Pearl or Bead). – Having boiled your
sugar a little longer than stated in the preceding degree, again take some
between your fingers, which on separating them immediately will cause the
sugar to extend like a string. When this string breaks, your sugar is called
au petit perle, but if it extends from one finger to the other, without
breaking, it is a proof that your sugar is boiled au grand perle.
The bubbles thrown up by the sugar in the latter case, should, besides,
appear on the surface like small close pearls.
Third Degree. – Au souffle. – Continue boiling your sugar, and then
dip a skimmer in it which you strike immediately on the pan. Then blow
through the skimmer, and if that causes small bubbles to pass through it, it
is a sign that your sugar is boiled au souffle.
Fourth Degree. – À la Plume (to a Feather). – Let the sugar boil up
again; then dip in the skimmer and shake it hard, in order to get off the
sugar, which will immediately separate itself from it, and form a kind of
flying flax. This is called à la grande Plume.
 Fifth Degree. – Au Cassé (to a Crack). – After boiling the sugar a little
longer, dip the end of your finger first in cold water, and then in the sugar,
and immediately after again in cold water, which will cause the sugar to
come off your finger. If it then breaks short, it is boiled au cassé; but if, on
putting between your teeth, it should stick to them, it is only boiled au petit
cassé.
Sixth Degree. – Au Caramel. – When the sugar has been boiled to the
5th degree, it passes rapidly to a caramel; that is, it soon loses its whiteness,
and begins to be very lightly coloured, which proves that your sugar is
really boiled to a caramel.

Sugar Candy
—from L.-J. Blachette, A Manual of the Art of Making and Refining Sugar from Beets (Boston, MA,
1836)

To fulfil, without omission of anything, the task we have imposed on

ourselves, it only remains to speak of the processes by means of which they
obtain the sugar candy: but this manufacture, constituting, in France, at
least, a part of the art of the confectioner, rather than that of the refiner, we
shall only point out very summarily the labours by which they make it.
Sugar candy does not differ from sugar in the loaf except in this, that
its crystallization instead of being produced by the stirring, must be effected
by repose; and also, that it may be done more slowly, in order that the
crystals be more regular, we have removed all causes of a too sudden
cooling, and maintained the temperature of the place, where it is to a
suitable degree for a time long enough. We have seen, on the contrary, that
the operation known under the name of clouding in the manufacture of
sugar in the loaf, has for its object to break the crystals, and to promote the
cooling by renewing the surfaces. Thus they call regular crystallization, that
by which they obtain sugar candy; and confused crystallization, that of loaf
sugar.
The sirup having been clarified and filtered, is taken again into the
reservoir of the clairée and carried into the cauldron, to be there baked to a
suitable point. This is commonly, by the proof of the breath, weak or strong,
according as we wish to obtain crystals larger or smaller.
 We pour the baked sirup into copper basins, nearly hemispherical, the
interior of which is perfectly polished. They are from fifteen to eighteen
inches diameter at their edge, and six to eight inches deep. At about two
inches below the edge, they are pierced on each side with eight or ten very
small holes, through which a thread is passed, which goes from one edge to
the other, passing through each of the holes. They stop these last either with
paste, or by pasting paper on the outside of the basin, in order that the sirup,
shall not flow through the holes.
The basins thus prepared are filled to an inch nearly above the threads,
and carried immediately into a hot-house, the temperature of which is so
high that the crystallization will not be complete till the end of six or seven
days. After this time they remove the basins from the hot-house, and draw
off the motherwater, that is, the sirup that remains liquid. They pour a little
water in the basins, to wash the crystals which are spread over their
bottoms. This water is put with the mother-water.
The bottom of the bed then presents a crystalline bed from six to nine
lines thick. The threads which are covered with crystals have the form of
garlands. They reverse the basins on a vase suitable to drain them well;
after which they carry them again to the hot-house, that they may be well
warmed. At the end of two or three days the sugar is dry; they take it from
the hot-house, and remove it from the basins from which it is easily
detached. It may then be put up for sale.
The mother-water enters into the manufacture of loaf sugar, like the
bastards or lumps.
The tints more or less deep which many kinds of sugar candy exhibit,
belong wholly to the purity of the sirup that has been used in making them.
Sirup perfectly pure gives crystals entirely white.
Sometimes also they shade it in different manners by adding suitable
coloring substances. It would lead us entirely from our subject to enter into
the detail of these operations, which will be found, beside, in all works that
treat of the art of the confectioner, into which they enter thoroughly.

Strawberry Ice Cream

—from Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery (Philadelphia, 1837)
Take two quarts of ripe strawberries; hull them, and put them into a deep
dish, strewing among them half a pound of powdered loaf-sugar. Cover
them, and let them stand an hour or two. Then mash them through a sieve
till you have pressed out all the juice, and stir into it half a pound more of
powdered sugar, or enough to make it very sweet, and like a thick syrup.
Then mix it by degrees with two quarts of rich cream, beating it in very
hard. Put it into a freezer, and proceed as in the foregoing receipt. In two
hours, remove it to a mould, or take it out and return it again to the freezer
with fresh salt and ice, that it may be frozen a second time. In two hours
more, it should be ready to turn out.

Lemonade
—from Enquire within upon Everything (London, 1856)

Powdered sugar, four pounds; citric or tartaric acid, one ounce; essence of
lemon, two drachms: mix well. Two or three teaspoonfuls make a very
sweet and agreeable glass of extemporaneous lemonade.

Food for a Young Infant

—from Sarah J. Hale, Mrs Hale’s New Cook Book: A Practical System for Private Families
(Philadelphia, 1857)

Take of fresh cow’s milk one tablespoonful, and mix with two
tablespoonfuls of hot water; sweeten with loaf sugar, as much as may be
agreeable. This quantity is sufficient for once feeding a new-born infant;
and the same quantity may be given every two or three hours, not oftener –
till the mother’s breast affords the natural nourishment.

To Make Bon-bons
—from Angelina Maria Collins, The Great Western Cook Book (New York, 1857)
Have some little tin moulds, oil them neatly; take a quantity of brown sugar
syrup, in the state called a blow, which may be known by dipping the
skimmer into it and blowing through the holes, when parts of light may be
seen; add a few drops of lemon essence. If the bon-bons are prepared white,
when the sugar is cooled a little, stir it round the pan till it grains and shines
on the surface, then pour it in a funnel; fill the little moulds; when they are
hard and cold, take them out and put them in papers. If you wish to have
them colored, put on the coloring while hot.

Efferton Taffy
—from [M. W. Ellsworth and F. B. Dickerson], The Successful Housekeeper (Harrisburg, PA, 1884)

This is a favorite English confection. To make it take three pounds of the

best brown sugar and boil with one and one-half pints of water, until the
candy hardens in cold water. Then add one-half pound of sweet-flavored,
fresh butter, which will soften the candy. Boil a few minutes until it again
hardens and pour it into trays. Flavor with lemon if desired.

Spinning Sugar
—from Juliet Corson, Miss Corson’s Practical American Cookery (New York, 1886)

Spun sugar is used to ornament large candied pieces of fruit and nuts, or
nougat; for instance, the preceding piece, the chartreuse of oranges, might
be covered with spun sugar after it is taken from the mould; or a pyramid
formed of macaroons, cemented with white of egg; or any large ornamental
combination piece built up of candied nuts, fruit, and macaroons; or such a
stand of candy as is shown upon the table in the background of the
accompanying engraving. The sirup is boiled to the degree called ‘the
crack,’ and then a very little of it is poured from a spoon moved back and
forth over an oiled knife held as shown in the engraving. The motion must
be quick and steady; the spun sugar may be made in the long sections
shown in the picture, or in shorter lengths; or it may be spun directly over
the piece to be ornamented.
 Ginger Pop
—from Isabel Gordon Curtis, The Good Housekeeping Woman’s Home Cook Book (Chicago, IL,
1909)

To two gallons of lukewarm water allow two pounds of white sugar, two
lemons, one tablespoon of cream of tartar, a cup of yeast and two ounces of
white ginger root, bruised and boiled in a little water to extract the strength.
Pour the mixture into a stone jar and let stand in a warm place for twenty-
four hours, then bottle. The next day it will be ready to ‘pop.’
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Cause of Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Other Killers (New York, 1972)
 Websites and Associations

Sugar Millers, Refiners, Associations, Organizations

and Societies
American Crystal Sugar Company
www.crystalsugar.com

American Sugar Alliance

www.sugaralliance.org

Australian Sugar Milling Council

www.asmc.com.au

Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA)

http://english.unica.com.br

British Society of Sugar Technologists

www.sucrose.com/bsst

China Sugar Association (CSA)

www.csa.gov.cn/outline.asp

The International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists

www.issct.org

The International Sugar Organization

www.isosugar.org
 South African Sugar Association (SASA)
www.sasa.org.za

The Sugar Association

www.sugar.org/about-us

Sugar Association of London and Refined Sugar Association

www.sugarassociation.co.uk

SugarCane.Org
www.sugarcane.org

Sugar Producer
www.sugarproducer.com

Tate & Lyle

www.tateandlyle.com

World Sugar Research Organisation

www.wsro.org

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Corn Refiners Association
www.corn.org

High Fructose Corn Syrup

www.sweetsurprise.com

Candy Companies
Cadbury
www.cadbury.co.uk
 Hershey
www.hersheys.com

Mars
www.mars.com

Nestlé
www.nestle.com

Perfetti Van Melle

www.perfettivanmelle.com

Beverage Companies
Coca-Cola Company
www.coca-colacompany.com

PepsiCo
www.pepsico.com

Red Bull
www.redbull.com

Schweppes
www.schweppes.com

Sugar Research and Institutes

eRcane (Energie Reunionaise Cane)
www.ercane.re

Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute (MSIRI)

www.msiri.mu
 Ponni Sugars (Erode)
www.ponnisugars.com

Sugar Processing Research Institute

www.spriinc.org

United States Department of Agriculture – Sugarbeet Research Unit

www.ars.usda.gov

Vasantdada Sugar Institute

www.vsisugar.com
 Photo Acknowledgements

The author and the publishers wish to express their thanks to the below
sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.

Alamy: p. 106 top (Cindy Hopkins); Bigstock: pp. 6–7 (luiz rocha); The
British Library, London: pp. 28, 40, 50; ChildofMidnight: p. 116; Brandon
Dilbeck: p. 95; Thomas Dohrendorf: p. 75; Courtesy of Kelly Fitzsimmons:
pp. 9, 16, 17, 26, 27, 33, 35, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 (top), 54, 60, 61, 89,
90, 102, 105, 111, 113, 130; Getty Images: p. 100; Glane 23: p. 8;
iStockphoto: p. 109 (JenD); Library of Congress, Washington, DC: pp. 22,
36, 53, 49 bottom, 57, 58, 76, 82, 129; Shutterstock: pp. 103, 104 (Roman
Samokhin), 106 bottom (ValeStock); Stratford490: p. 92; Tup Wanders: p.
88; Wellcome Library, London: pp. 62, 63, 126.
 Index

italic numbers refer to illustrations; bold to recipes

Achard, Franz Carl 45–6, 46

Africa 8, 15, 18–20, 24, 27, 29, 34, 51, 62, 78, 79, 100, 128
Antigua 26, 28
Arabs/Arabia 14, 15, 19, 67, 68, 78, 79, 86, 88, 93
Argentina 135
Australia 52, 62, 101, 134, 135

Barbados 26–7, 34, 61, 76

Belgium 48
beverages
Coca-Cola 121, 122
eggnog 74
Gatorade 122
ginger pop 145
hippocras 74
lemonade 143
PepsiCo 121, 122, 130
possets 73, 74
Schweppes 119
syllabubs 73, 74, 81
see also chocolate; coffee;
 rum; soda; tea
biscuits/cookies 66, 73, 81, 89, 108, 109, 112, 113, 117, 123, 131, 139, 140
bliss point 123–4
Brazil 23–4, 26, 27, 34, 56, 75, 76, 134, 135

Cadbury 98–100
cake 66, 72, 73, 81, 83, 89, 96, 108, 109, 112–15, 131, 138–9
see also pancakes
Canada 50, 56, 91, 100, 115, 129, 130
Canary Islands 19, 21
candy see sweets/candies
Caribbean 21–3, 26, 27, 29–32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 48, 51, 55,
61, 76, 77, 80
see also specific islands
Castro, Fidel 55
Center for Science in the Public Interest 120, 132
cereal 110–11, 111, 118, 123, 124, 135
see also Kellogg Co.
China 8, 12–14, 38, 40, 52, 53, 64, 65, 66, 67, 79, 135, 136
chocolate 77–80, 86, 89–91, 93, 98–9, 100–105, 105, 106, 107, 112, 116,
117, 123, 136, 137–8
see also Hershey Co.;
Kraft Foods; Mars, Inc.;
Mondalēz; Nestlé;
Perugina; Rowntree & Co.
coffee 77–80, 90, 94, 115, 121
Columbus, Christopher 21, 22, 43
confections 68, 69, 84, 89, 93, 108, 125, 127
cookbooks 15, 66, 71, 81, 113, 114, 117
cookies see biscuits/cookies
creams 73, 81, 88, 96, 116, 118, 137–8
Crete 15–17, 19
Crusades 16, 17
Cuba 21, 35, 38–9, 40, 41, 42, 55, 57, 58, 59
see also Castro, Fidel;
 Fanjul family
Curaçao 26
Cyprus 15, 17, 19

dessert 67, 69, 88, 108, 112, 113, 114, 116, 127
digestives 7, 74
Dominican Republic 21, 40, 55, 56, 134
doughnuts 109, 115, 116,
Dutch see Netherlands

Egypt 16, 18, 66, 67, 68, 78

England see United Kingdom

Fanjul family 55, 57

France 27, 29, 32, 35, 46–8, 70, 87, 88, 96, 114, 116
Paris 74, 79, 89, 90

Germany 32, 44, 45, 48, 53, 70, 71, 78, 87, 94, 96, 101, 104, 115, 125, 140
see also Silesia
Glasse, Hannah 81, 139
Great Britain
see United Kingdom
Greece 14, 15, 18, 19
see also Crete; Cyprus
Guadeloupe 27, 29

Haiti 21, 27, 32, 35, 40, 134

Havemeyer family 32–3, 52
Hershey Co. 97, 101, 103
holidays 96–8, 100, 136
Chanukah 96, 98
Christmas 87, 93, 96, 97, 112, 113, 136
Easter 95–8
Guy Fawkes Night 91
Halloween 96, 97, 136
Passover 98
honey 8, 13, 14, 67, 69, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 86, 93, 110, 113, 127

ice cream 82, 84, 108, 116–18, 120, 131, 136

shrubs 74, 81, 85, 94, 143–4
India 8, 11–15, 30, 36–8, 51, 62, 65, 76, 80, 85, 135
Buddhism 12
Hinduism 13
Jainism 13
Indonesia 8
Iran/Persia 15, 66, 86
Iraq 15, 66
Islam/Muslims 16, 18, 67
Italy 15, 77, 86, 87, 97, 107, 114, 116
Genoa 17, 21
Milan 107
Rome, Romans 14, 44
Sicily 15, 16–17, 18
Venice 17, 18, 68, 70, 71, 79

Jamaica 21, 27, 34, 61

Japan 54, 129
Jerusalem 16, 17, 77, 98
Jews 26–7, 76, 96, 98

Kellogg Co. 110–11, 127, 135

Korea 54
Kraft Foods 99

Lebanon 16, 18
Leeward Islands 27
Lyle, Abraham 62–3

Madeira 19, 21
Malta 15
maple sugar 37, 50
marchpane see marzipan
Marggraf, Andreas S. 44–5
Markham, Gervase 73
marmalade 81, 84, 99
Mars, Inc. 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104
Martinique 27–8, 29
marzipan 66, 69, 73, 84, 86, 87, 137
Mauritius 51, 62
Mediterranean 14–19, 24, 43, 44, 59, 66, 68
Melanesia 51, 52
Mexico 56, 77
molasses 11, 12, 21, 27–31, 68, 74, 76, 77, 81, 91, 108, 114
Mondelēz International 99
Monell Chemical Senses Center 124
Monsanto 128
Morocco 15
Moskowitz, Howard 123
Mozambique 51

Nestlé 97, 101, 104, 105, 107

Netherlands 25–7, 30, 76, 79, 85, 87, 112, 115
New Guinea 8
North American Free Trade Association 56

pancakes 67, 73, 81, 113

PepsiCo 121, 130
Perugina 107
Philippines 8, 42, 52, 56
Platina, Bartolomeo 69
Poland 70
Polynesia 51, 52
Portugal 19, 20
Puerto Rico 21, 42, 52

Quakers 35, 37, 48

Rhodes 15
Rowntree & Company 100
rum 8, 9, 27, 29, 30, 74–7, 81
Russia/Soviet Union 48, 59, 79

St Kitts 27
Sansovino, Jacopo 70
São Tomé and Príncipe 20
Scandinavia 48, 85
Scotland 62
Silesia 45, 47
Simmons, Amelia 112, 139
slavery 18, 20, 23, 24, 27–9, 30, 32, 34–6, 36, 37–40, 37, 43, 47, 48, 76
Smith, Adam 36
soda 117–21, 129, 131, 136
Somali 14
sorghum 13
South Africa 51, 100, 128
Southeast Asia 8, 13
Spain 15, 19, 21, 27, 39–42, 55, 77, 87, 96
sugar beet (Beta vulgaris) 8, 37, 40, 41, 44, 45–7, 45, 48–9, 50–53, 56, 57,
63, 134, 135, 141–2
sugar cane (Saccharum robustum), varieties of 8–9, 45
sugar controversies 125–133
diabetes 128, 133, 135
environment 134
obesity 123, 128, 133, 135
tooth decay 125, 126
see also sugar substitutes
sugar refining 8–9, 23–5
sugar sculptures 13, 16, 66, 67, 81
sugar substitutes 108, 128–30, 130
sugar types
fructose 8, 108, 132
glucose 7, 8, 13, 108, 122, 132
lactose 7, 108
 maltose 8, 13, 108
sucrose 8, 10, 13, 45–8, 108, 122, 132, 135
sugar uses 65–83, 137–45
see also beverages;
biscuits/cookies; cakes;
cereal; chocolate; coffee;
confections; creams;
desserts; ice cream;
pancakes; rum; soda;
sweets/candies; tea
Surinam 26
Sweden 94
sweets/candies; 13, 14, 38, 65–6, 69, 73, 81, 84–9, 90, 91–104, 105–7, 111,
114, 120, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132, 136, 141–3
bonbons 84, 88, 89, 99, 144
caramel 97, 100, 101, 103, 117
comfits 72, 84, 85, 89
cotton candy/candyfloss 109
gobstoppers 84, 90
gummy candy 94, 96
jellybeans 93–4, 95, 96, 98
Jordan almonds 84, 86
juju 67, 94
jujyfruits 94
Kit Kat 100, 102, 107
Life Savers 91
liquorice 85, 86, 138
lollipops 90
M&M’s 103–4

Mars 102
marshmallow 98
Milky Way 103, 104
Peeps 98
Reese’s 102
Smarties 100, 103
 Snickers 103–4
taffy 84, 91–2, 97, 144
toffee 13, 84, 91–2, 92, 97
Turkish Delight 67, 93
Twizzlers 85
see also Cadbury;
chocolate; Hershey
Co.; confections; Kraft
Foods; Mars, Inc.;
Mondelēz; Nestlé;
Perugina; Rowntree & Co.
Switzerland 104, 119
see also Nestlé
Syria 18

Tate, Henry 62
Tate & Lyle 62, 63
Turkey 15, 18, 19, 73, 78, 80
see also Cyprus

United Kingdom 11, 27–31, 34, 36, 37, 39, 46, 48, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 71,
73, 74, 76–81, 82, 87, 89–93, 102, 103, 112, 115, 117, 119, 125, 131
Bristol 25, 28
chocolates 99–101
Liverpool 62, 91
London 25, 33, 61, 62, 78–80, 90, 100, 119, 124, 131
see also Cadbury;
Rowntree & Co.; Tate & Lyle
United States 30–34, 105, 106, 108–24, 129
beverages 118–22
California 52, 53, 54
candies 92, 93, 94
cereal 110–11
chocolates 101–4
Domino Sugar 33, 54
doughnuts 115–16
 Florida 54–6, 122, 134
Hawaii 42, 52, 53, 54
holidays, 96–8
ice cream 116–18
Louisiana 32, 35, 39, 52, 55
Massachusetts 123
New York, 32–3, 52, 98, 123
Spanish-American War 42
Texas 52
Virgin Islands 76
see also cereal; chocolate;
Havemeyer family;
Hershey Co.; Kellogg Co.;
Mars, Inc.; Mondelēz

Yudkin, John 131