From: jane@soave.swdc.stratus.com (Jane Beckman)
Newsgroups: rec.food.historic
Subject: Re: 'Pioneer sugar'?
Date: 24 Nov 92 00:23:21 GMT
Organization: Stratus Computer, Inc., San Jose, CA

>   This confuses me a bit.  "Made" by pioneers "during" their
>   treks?  Harvested, I can believe, but "made" is something
>   entirely different, especially considering the effort required
>   in refining the raw materials enough to get something
>   sugarlike.
>
>Actually, only white refined sugar requires a lot of effort. Making
>unrefined brown sugar is closer in terms of effort to making apple
>butter or berry jelly (about a day's worth of work), most of which
>simply requires making sure that the stuff doesn't burn. 
>
>Another guess on "pioneer sugar": sorghum. Depending on which route
>across the country said pioneers took, they might have run across it.

That was a possible guess.  

However, with regard to the rest, once you headed across the
Mississipi, you were on your own, with regard to sugar. None
of the Trails furnished suitable sugar plants such as maples.
You can't get sugar from cottonwood and willow, and most of
the trails, both Oregon/California and Santa Fe, are 
across either grassland or desert.  Honey bees
("the white man's fly" to the Indians) were making their way 
up the Platt at a rate of about 20 miles a year, but there was
a lot of prairie to cross, and emmigrants had better things to
do (like harvesting hay for livestock) than hunting up sugar
substitute.  And no, it's not as easy as just boiling stuff
up.  If you had come up with an answer that easy, you would
have become a millionaire of the Early West.  A lot of folks
were hoping for at least an easy way of making beet syrup, a
process that took days.  And suitable sugar plants were few,
which is why sugar pine sap was even considered for use,
despite its resinous taste.  If you wanted sugar, you bought it in
Independence, Mo. before starting out, or bought imported when
you reached the West Coast (where it came from Peru, Hawaii,
or (raw panocha cones) Central America.  (Useful stuff:
Margaret Breen of the Donner Party kept her family alive on
her hoard of sugar that she had saved, allowing them to avoid
all the gristly behavior that was going on with the rest of
the party, who were reduced to cannibalism while stuck in the
snow at Donner Lake.)

By the way, if you think manufacturing sugar is easy, check on
the abortive attempts to make sugar in pre-Gold Rush
California.  The person who was successful would have made a
mint.  As it was, they were importing rather expensive panocha
(raw sugar cones) and refined sugar from Peru, mostly.  (Small
amounts were also coming in from the fledgeling Hawaiian sugar
industry, but Peru was still the main source of supply.)  There
were several attempts to use sugar beets to make sugar, but
they all came to naught, it being a rather involved process.

(In case you're wondering, I've been studying food in the
pre-Gold Rush West for the past ten years.  Sugar refining was
also a special interest when I was taking ethnobotany courses.
You'd be amazed at what it takes to get a little bit of
sweetening out of a plant that produces even moderate amounts
of sugar.  Sugar cane (and sorghum, for a much cruder product)
is the easiest, but both take rich soil and warm weather (deep
South or tropical).  Probably the next most effective is maple sugar,
and running a sugar-bush is time-consuming and labor
intensive.  Extracting beet sugar wasn't terribly effective
until modern (Victorian ;-) ) technology stepped in.

Living History Cook,
--
  Jilara   [jane@swdc.stratus.com]

"The field of pseudo-science hasn't progressed much in ten
years, except to gain access to the net." --from ca.earthquakes