Please Don't Quote Me By Caralee Aschenbrenner Sugar and spice and everything nice is what little girls are made of, a popular old timey rhyme once told us. Before sugar was developed we don't know what little girls were made of. Sugar, as we know it wasn't always a part of the pantry's supply. It wasn't until the Crusades, the 11th-13th centuries that sugar was brought back from the Far East, probably India, and then it was used for medicinal purposes.

As word spread, (among the elite only), so too did the sweet tooth increase and "medicinal purposes" were forgotten. Forget the dosages for the blatspitz, or whatever and pass the cookies!

Despite the lateness in history(!) of its arrival in Europe, it was first mentioned in journals of Alexander the Great in expeditions down the Indies River in 325. Sugar was described as "honey-bearing reeds."

Some hundred years later, the Fifth Century, the Emperor of China sent an emissary to India to learn how to extract syrup from the canes and from there, there was no stopping where sugar was to go.

Sugar somehow was to be boiled down to a thick, dark crystalline substance about the color of today's dark brown sugar and that's how it was known for years to come. Refinement of sugar wasn't an issue until the past hundred years or so.

Reference gives that Diascrides, a Greek physician, explained that "Sugar was a sort of hard honey," the long time natural sweetener, "called Saccharum found on the canes in India grainy, like salt and brittle between the teeth but with a sweet taste withal."

Trade in sugars began in earnest with many merchants from Arabia traveling through Italy and Spain, they growing rich by their carrying them, a luxury item, onward to the Canary Islands to Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Cuba, Martineque by the 1500's, anywhere there was a warm-hot climate to accommodate the sugar cane's growth.

As early as 1319 however ten thousand pounds of sugar was shipped into London in exchange for wool.

Its importance was seen in 1453 when the Turks captured Constantinople (Istanbul!) to impose a high tax on caravans and ships passing through. This put a glitch in the sugar and spice trade throughout the Mediterranean and may have been a key reason for Columbus' seeking the westward route to the Far East in 1492. Fleets could thumb their noses at the Turks and free-range pirates by going another way.

On his second journey to the West Indies, Columbus took some sugar cane cuttings to plant in the tropical islands which changed their role in history when the cane grew so successfully. Columbus reported that it "was planted in fertile soil and was in luxuriant growth." By 1518 there were twenty-eight sugar plantations in Santo Domingo alone.

Of course, as it developed it wasn't just for sugar that the reeds were planted and acreage so proliferated molasses, also an early day sweetener, resulted from the cane processing as well. And RUM. It became the basis of many a fortune of New Englander and Southern plantation owner. Rum became a major trade item in the early days of the history of developing Colonies into the United States.

By 1728 its estimated that the Colonies imported 2,124,500 gallons of rum alone.

The English Parliament caught on by 1733 and levied a high duty on imports from the West Indies. In retaliation the Colonies began smuggling rum and other goods such as molasses and sugar to make another interesting, if illegal, chapter in our history.

Because of the high taxes on sugar products Colonials stirred themselves and began considering a break with Mother England nearly forty years before Boston Harbor. It was sugar, not tea taxes that first agitation for a revolution occurred. Ironically, too, was the ardent consumption of tea in Britain, served with sugar in a highly socialized ritual that fixed the British into habits of both. Sugar became a necessity after years of luxury.

Wartime conflicts and ports blockaded caused another plant to become a source of sugar. Napoleon called for scientists to find a substitute for sugar cane when the British cut off French supplies. (It would also stop Britain's immense trade).

As a result beets were "discovered" as a practical, usable alternative. The scientist, Achard, perfected earlier experiments and patriotically donated the method to the French Institute for the nation's use. Beets continued as sugar source for decades afterward in France unlike the United States where they are but a percentage of the sugar product. (See PDQ Me for the Stephenson County Beet Factory, 1870's - 4/16-30, 2008).

The "Grocer's Handbook," a trade publication in an 1886 issue gave the most pages to retailing sugar, twelve pages of discussion and advice. There was some argument apparently in selling for profit in sugar or keep it as a "loss leader." It describes the processing method back then ... Cooking the stripped reeds over increasingly hotter fires in four foot by twenty foot "pans." Meanwhile, huge rollers with the "greatest possible pressure" being moved over the canes, squeezing out the juice, only two to four revolutions per minute. (A hundred pounds of cane resulted in 65 to 75 pounds of cane juice.) Filter out the impurities, skim the scum, crystallization, etc., etc., etc.

The processing achieved various grades of sugar, also discussed. You don't want to know some of the steps such as using ox blood (fresh or dried), filtering with charcoal made of beef bones, ("the soul of sugar refining!") Fuller's Earth, milk of lime, egg albumen ... These in part in making molasses, too. The colored illustration here is from the 1886 issue.

Sugar was poured into conical molds which produced "loaves" of about 55 pounds or smaller ones approximately twelve pounds and about a foot high. Both sizes went to the merchant in general stores throughout where sugar cutters sliced off a portion for the customer. Sugar tools became a marketable inventory. When unmolded the customer's order would be wrapped traditionally in white paper first then in a purple one. It should have been dried 3 to 5 days, remember, and save that purple paper to be immersed in fluid for dyeing cloth! These cones are still marketed in parts of Europe and North Africa.

If the sugar had come in a large barrel "hogshead," it would be drawn from the barrel with the use of a sugar auger, another tool of the trade. A sugar grinder then was used to "granulate" the product. Some homemakers had sugar tools also and may be seen in museums or collections of kitchen items.

Sugar became such a main part of everyday life that rituals grew up around it. Cultured young ladies learned the art of breaking pieces from the loaf with a sugar hammer, then cutting them into fashionable lumps with sugar shearers for table use, especially at "tea time." Sometimes lump was hung above the table for everyone to take a bite from!

Sugar, after all, was a luxury. Heretofore honey or maple products were food sweeteners, mostly home-produced. It is estimated that in the 1860's twenty-five million gallons of maple syrup was produced, an example of amounts used. Way into the last segments of the nineteenth century sugar was still brown and coarse. Granulating and refining it to fine sugar did not come about until after the Civil War and then was slow to become standard. Here in America the first sugar factory wasn't built until the 1850's, the "Boston Sugar Refinery," which goes to show how slow was the evolution of sugar to the familiar granulate we take for granted today. Granulated sugar didn't become popular in Britain until several decades later, perhaps because of that tea-sugar ritual before mentioned.

Covering the history of sugar, important in our lives in so many ways in our nation's progress is hardly able to be touched in all its phases ... From centuries past ... The inventiveness involved, the trade it inspired; some illegal, the creativeness in using it in foods of all sorts, the wars that were "inspired" by it, if not the cut-throat "trafficking" of it ... Sugar helped shape the world and our nation.

Sugar influenced history as well as gold seeking or oil exploration. Now it seems but an innocent staple on the shelf. Along with the spices.

Being the make-up of little girls, it obviously was a beneficial ingredient. Now, little boys being made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails is gonna be a bit of a stretch in writing some history of that connected with Northwest Illinois.

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