Tag Archives: Sugar

Culinary History, Early Modern, Food and Drink, Posts

Waste Not Want Not: Molasses in Colonial America – More than a Waste Product?

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By Mimi Goodall

Molasses is the dark brown, sweet, sticky goo that is known today for its robust flavour. It gives a depth of taste to gingerbreads, toffees and fruitcakes. It does not have the immediate tongue-numbing sweetness of powder sugar; rather, it has a denser, fruitier mouthfeel. However, sugar and molasses are related foodstuffs. When sugar cane juice is refined to make powder sugar, it is boiled repeatedly and it crystallises as it cools. The more times the juice goes through this process, the whiter the resulting crystals appear. Molasses is the viscous residue that is the ‘waste product’ of refining.[1] Yet it has historically been left out of the story of the rise of sugar consumption across the Atlantic world.

This story is well-known. Sugar begins life as a rare luxury but with the rise of slavery and the slave trade, the increase in production enables prices to fall and consumption to rise, reaching mass levels sometime towards the end of the 18th century. Before this point, it’s thought that ordinary consumers did not have much access to sugar.

However, there was, in fact, a strong base layer of consumer demand much earlier on. This demand served as encouragement for the industry’s take-off and the concomitant exploitation of thousands of human beings. Molasses is at the heart of it. Understanding the consumption of molasses puts agency back into the hands – or rather the mouths – of ordinary consumers. Molasses wasn’t a waste product, it was a driving force in sugar’s rise to ubiquity.

Molasses. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Molasses as Commodity Money:

Molasses wasn’t expensive. It features often in account books documenting the spending habits of non-elites. Looking at these account books reveals that molasses was often used as a form of payment. Colonial America was dramatically short of coinage and therefore outside of the port, exchange was enacted through a system similar to barter, known as commodity money. Records documenting these instances of barter are what enable us to understand more about who was actually consuming molasses.

Take for example the Clarke Family of New Jersey. The Clarkes emigrated from England to New Jersey in the 1680s. Ann Clarke created a recipe book that her husband and son subsequently repurposed as an account book and diary relating to farm practices, which is now in Princeton University Library. It shows that the Clarkes paid their labourers in commodity money. The most detailed accounts range from 1701-1720, during which time we see payments in sugar, molasses and in a variety of what I call ‘sugar products’ – this included beer, cider and rum. All of these alcoholic drinks were brewed using molasses or sugar. To give one example, in 1714 Benjamin Maple was paid for his weaving – work worth 2 pounds 5 shillings in monetary terms – with 2 gallons of molasses, 2 gallons of cider, hogs fat, turnips, and rye. 

There are more account books in the American Antiquarian Association, including that kept by Robert Gibbs in the 1680s. Gibbs was a Boston merchant and grocery store owner, who had longstanding arrangements with the local people who supplied his shop. The most interesting is Goody Gavate, a cake maker. Gibbs gave her molasses, ginger, sugar and flour in exchange for the cakes that she made out of these ingredients. Gibbs then sold these cakes in his shop and thus molasses continued to circulate within the economic system.

Cakes are especially interesting when we think about people’s proclivity for sweet things. Recently, I spoke to New York Times journalist Anahad O’Connor who writes about contemporary sugar consumption. He explained to me that the current scientific consensus is that sugar is not addictive on its own, but that the combination of sugar and fat create feelings of physical dependency. Human beings seem particularly susceptible to this combination. Breast milk, for instance, contains a uniquely high proportion of fat and sugar. When molasses was combined with fats to make cakes, puddings, biscuits, and breads it created an especially palatable end result – one which consumers sought out.

Conclusions:

These examples show that molasses was a form of sugar that was readily available to consumers across the socio-economic spectrum. Sugar products weren’t only goods to be aspired to; rather, they were component parts of many consumers’ diets. Ordinary colonial American men and women developed a taste for sweetness and their reliance on the calories found in sugar early on. Molasses encouraged ordinary consumers’ proclivity for sweetness. By the time tea and coffee arrived and white sugar became cheaper, their palate was already a sweet one.

In detailing this, I’m pushing the story of consumption backwards in time. Sugar and molasses were far more widely available far earlier than has been recognised. There was a strong demand for sugar in the 17th century, which would have served as encouragement for the development of the industry and the rise of slavery in the following one.

William Clark, ‘Slaves Cutting the Sugar Cane’, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua (London, 1823). Plate IV.

[1] Molasses is vital to the production of rum, which took off after 1720 but elsewhere, and for an earlier time period it has been considered to be a waste product.

Antiquity, Ingredients, Medicine, Medieval

Sugar versus honey in Byzantine recipes

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By Petros Bouras-Vallianatos

The Byzantine Empire, with its capital in Constantinople (now Istanbul), then a mainly Greek-speaking region, constituted a natural crossroads between East and West for more than a millennium (AD 324–1453). Its history is an indispensable part of the medieval period in both Europe and the Middle East. In the field of medicine, for example, we can attest to widespread interactions with the Islamic tradition.

The most dynamic part of Byzantine therapeutics was pharmacology. We are privileged to have several surviving pharmacological manuals, especially dating from the later period, i.e. from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, which provide us with a unique testimony to Byzantine composite drugs. Here I have selected the example of sugar-based potions, as it offers an excellent case-study that helps us to better understand the way Byzantine recipes were developed through a process of both practical experimentation and influence from outside.

Before the introduction of sugar, people relied on honey to make medical potions sweet. Greek and early Byzantine medical authors referred to honey-based drugs such as oinomeli (a mixture of honey with wine), hydromeli (a mixture of honey with water) or oxymeli (a mixture of honey with vinegar). For example, Paul of Aegina (fl. first half of the seventh century) recommends the following recipe for those suffering from calculi:

One ounce[1] each of saxifrage, betony, dog’s-tooth grass, maidenhair fern, spikenard, carpesium, hazelwort, and eryngo; one half ounce each of Macedonian parsley and seed of rue; two ounces each of green fennel, iris, baked squill, and periwinkle; three ounces of bark of the root of capper; two ounces of water-parsnip; and two sextarii[2] each of water, vinegar, and honey.[3]

Meanwhile, the cultivation of sugarcane gradually spread throughout the Islamic East from the seventh/eighth century onwards. Sugar was used as a simple drug, for stomach ailments and the relief of pain in, for example, the chest and kidneys. However, it also became popular as an excipient in liquid pharmaceutical dosage forms, used as a sweetener and preservative, initially supplementing and gradually replacing the use of honey for pharmacological purposes in the Islamic world. Sugar is of higher purity than honey, thus a smaller quantity has a stronger preservative action; it is also less susceptible to changes of temperature and ensures greater homogeneity into the final product. Among the most commonly used potions in Islamic medicine are the so-called julep (julāb) and syrup (sharāb), both of which consisted of sugar and one or more kinds of fruit juices or extracts of flowers.

Figure 1. Medieval, cone-shaped earthenware devices for the refining of sugar from Cyprus. Courtesy of Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation.
Figure 1. Medieval, cone-shaped earthenware devices for the refining of sugar from Cyprus. Courtesy of Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation.

By the eleventh century sugarcane cultivation was thriving in Syria and Palestine, eventually reaching the large Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Sicily. Western merchants, such as the Genoese and the Venetians, played an important role in the distribution of this commodity throughout the Mediterranean, including Byzantium. For example, sugar is mentioned among the main supplies for the newly established Byzantine hospital (xenon) of the Pantokrator Monastery in Constantinople in the early twelfth century, but it was not until the late thirteenth century that sugar became widely available in the Byzantine world.

At the same time, we can observe the transfer of medical knowledge to Byzantium through translations of Arabic and Persian works into Greek. The earliest text of this kind, which preserves a large number of references relating to the various kinds of sugar-based potions, is the Greek translation of Ibn-Jazzār’s (fl. tenth century) Ephodia tou Apodēmountos (Zād al-musāfir wa qūṭ al-ḥāḍir/Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment for the Sedentary), which must have been translated in the late eleventh/early twelfth century by scholars working in Southern Italy. By the early fourteenth century recipes for sugar-based potions had become very common in Byzantine manuals. The Constantinopolitan medical author and practising physician John Zacharias Aktouarios (ca. 1275–ca. 1330) provides an extensive list consisting of about thirty recipes, and he often explicitly acknowledges that he was introducing a new recipe. For example, he gives the following recipe for a julep for heart palpitations:

One hexagion[4] of the three sandalwoods; three hexagia of violet; two hexagia of basil seed; two hexagia of rose; five hexagia each of bugloss and ox-eye flowers; two hexagia of aloeswood; one hexagion of ambergris; two hexagia of saffron; three hexagia each of dried flower-buds from the clove-tree and nutmeg; one hexagion each of cinnamon, anise, caraway, and fennel seed; five grains of musk; one hexagion of poppy seed; three ounces of the juice of sweet apples; one ounce of rosewater; five ounces of distilled endive water; one ounce each of the roots of fennel, wild celery, and chicory; three hexagia each of marjoram, chamomile, and wormwood; and three ounces of sugar.[5]

Figure 2. A julep recipe added in the lower margin of a fifteenth-century medical manuscript, MS.MSL.52, f. 143v. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.
Figure 2. A julep recipe added in the lower margin of a fifteenth-century medical manuscript, MS.MSL.52, f. 143v. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

In this recipe, in addition to sugar, we can also see ingredients from Asia and the Far East, such as musk, amber, and sandalwood, which became common in European pharmacology, especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries after the Mongols’ conquests in Eurasia that led to the Pax Mongolica and the resulting improvements in trading conditions. To sum up, the fact that Byzantine physicians were aware of the usefulness and effectiveness of these sugar-based potions and made extensive use of them is at odds with the established view that Byzantine society was not very open to outside influence. Nowadays sugar is omnipresent and often replaced by sugar substitutes for the sake of diabetics and the diet-conscious; but once it was a novelty and highly desirable!

[1] One ounce is equal to 27.288 g.

[2] One sextarius is equal to 0,5472 ltr.

[3] Ed. J. L. Heiberg. Paulus Aegineta, vol. 2 (Leipzig-Berlin: Teubner, 1924), 309, 1-6.

[4] One hexagion is equal to 5.166 g.

[5] Vindobonensis med. gr. 17 (first half 15th c.), f. 118r, lines 4-11.

*****

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos studied pharmacy, ancient and Byzantine history, before completing his PhD on the late Byzantine medical author John Zacharias Aktouarios; a revised version of his doctoral thesis is to be published soon. He is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Medical Humanities in the Department of History at King’s College London, where he is working on a three-year project entitled ‘Experiment and Exchange: Byzantine Pharmacology between East and West (ca. 1150-ca.1450)’. He has published several articles on Byzantine and early Renaissance medicine and pharmacology, the reception of the classical medical tradition in the Middle Ages, and palaeography, including the first descriptive catalogue of the Greek manuscripts at the Wellcome Library in London. He is also co-editing the Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen.

17th Century, British Studies, Food and Drink, Series: Chocolate, Series: Hannah Wolley

Chocolate in Seventeenth-Century England, Part II

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In The Queen-Like Closet (1670), Hannah Woolley publishes a second recipe, “To make Chaculato,” that is radically different from her earlier one for chocolate in The Ladies Directory (1662) and from those coming from Spain and the New World.[1] The reconfiguration, I think, indicates the development of English trade systems and colonial ventures in America. This second recipe, much more fully than her first one, amalgamates the local with the global, the English with the Continental, and the European with the New World. It thus modifies the entire recipe for the changing English tastes:

To make Chaculato

Take half a pint of Clarret Wine, boil it a little, then scrape some Chaculato very fine and put into it, and the Yokes of two Eggs, stir them well together over a slow Fire till it be thick, and sweeten it with Sugar according in your taste. (QLC 104)

For this adapted New World drink, Woolley’s recipe begins with French claret wine, into which she grates the American chocolate, adds local English egg yolks, and then sweetens the mixture with Caribbean sugar. Beginning in the sixteenth century, England imported a particular red wine from Bordeaux that the English called claret. In the seventeenth century, however, a new tax law against the importation of French wine had made claret more rarified and expensive, and therefore more desirable.[2] Woolley’s use of this wine in particular indicates that her imagined readership would have the financial means to purchase this preferred beverage, especially as they would also be purchasing the rare ingredient of chocolate.

As in her first recipe, Woolley’s directions call for grating the chocolate, indicating she likely used a hardened chocolate paste already processed in Jamaica. The process consisted of fermenting cacao seeds, roasting and crushing the shells and beans with a roller, and finally winnowing them for separation.[3] The cacao beans or nibs were then ground in a mill and made into a paste, and, according to Willliam Hughes’s The American Phystian (1672), shaped into “Lumps, Rowls, Cakes, Balls, Lozanges, &c.” This form of preservation was important for it allowed the chocolate to be kept for upwards of a year, thus facilitating easy shipment to England.[4] Furthermore, as with the increased availability of sugar through the colonial practices of the British navy, chocolate also became more readily attainable in England after Cromwell’s forces had defeated the Spanish in 1655 in Jamaica and took over the cacao plantations, where the chocolate was processed.[5]

If in her first recipe the addition of eggs to the Spanish recipe makes chocolate more appealing for the English sensibility, Woolley’s second recipe fully naturalizes chocolate into a specifically English context, essentially making it an ingredient of an already established English drink. Using wine rather than water or milk as the base liquid for her “chaculato” marks the difference in Woolley’s recipe. In essence, Woolley is taking a familiar English recipe for a posset (a hot curdled wine or ale drink) and modifying it with the addition of the foreign ingredient, chocolate. Perhaps Woolley’s choice to put the chocolate into a posset is due to the fact that, as Kate Colquhoun explains: “Hot drinks, apart from possets, were a whole new experience.”[6] Her recipe does fit into the category of hot drinks, as Woolley includes in the following pages three traditional recipes for hot possets, each primarily consisting of the same basic ingredients as her one for chocolate: eggs, sugar, and wine (QLC 106–07). Hence, Woolley’s “To make Chaculato” reveals a chemical process of fusing exotic products into domestic ingredients to make an English drink, and, by application, the cultural assimilation of American substances into the native English body.

Though English recipes had for centuries been incorporating and naturalizing foreign commodities (cinnamon, nutmeg, and saffron, for example), the process and significance of Woolley’s chocolate recipe breaks markedly with this culinary history, specifically because of the rising English colonial engagement with the New World. The fundamental difference is that the English in this context are a colonizing body politic, already engaged in the practice of absorbing some foreign other into the self. The drinking of chocolate mixed into an English posset is the physical, domestic manifestation of colonization that was occurring across the ocean. Further, as the English were expanding imperial dominion over both the environments and bodies that produced chocolate (and sugar) in the seventeenth century, recipes like Woolley’s served not just to incorporate but also to “preserve” English bodies with American materials and ingredients; both health and taste were increasingly modified through colonial activities enacted in the home by women.

[1] This post is an excerpt from Amy L. Tigner, “Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet” ” in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (Palgrave, 2011), p. 129-49. Hannah Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet (London: R. Lowndes, 1670); ———, The Ladies Directory  (London: T. M. for Peter Dring, 1662).

[2] Thomas Pellechia, The 8,000 Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade  (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 70, 119-20.

[3] Penelope Jephson’s manuscript cookbook dated from 1671, (V.a. 396) at the Folger library, contains the recipe, “To make chocolato” that unlike Woolley’s recipe uses cacao nuts in their raw form and gives instructions as to how to process it into a useable paste form.

[4] John A. West, “A Brief History and Botany of Cacao,” in Chocolate: Food of the Gods, ed. Ales Szogyi (Burnham: Greenwood Press, 1997), 109. William Hughes, The American physitian  (London: J.C. for William Crook, 1672), 116-7.

[5] Sophie and Michael Coe Coe, The True History of Chocolate  (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 167.

[6] Kate Colquhoun, Taste: the Story of Britain Through Its cooking  (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 146.