Sugar

13th February 2022

(music)

Liz: Hello, and welcome to Bread and Thread, a podcast about food and domestic history. I’m Liz

Hazel: And I’m Hazel. We are two friends who studied archaeology together and love history, and domestic history, and making food, and other things, that may or may not be historical. So, shall I start this time, or do you want to start?

Liz: You can start if you want

Hazel: Ok. Yeah, again, I haven’t really been doing that much, because very tired and doing hospital placement, but I’ve been working on a little bit, on my quilt. Oh yeah, I said that last time, didn’t I. In terms of…my little bedsit that I’m renting doesn’t have an oven

Liz: What?

Hazel: So I’ve been quite limited in terms of baking (laughs)

Liz: That’s wild

Hazel: Yeah. Basically the only…I’ve made nothing notable, food-wise. It has a induction hob that has one ring, and a microwave, so I feel like I want to try out some microwave baking

Liz: Gonna get into mug cakes?

Hazel: Yeah. I will come back…next episode I will tell you the best mug cake recipe that I have found (laughs)

Liz: Excellent

Hazel: But apart from that, the most noteworthy thing I made is Jack Monroe’s bean goulash recipe so, yeah. Which is delicious, and very cheap, so there’s that. What about you?

Liz: I’ve gone in slightly the opposite direction. I went back to the dangerous website

Hazel: Oh?

Liz: Well, you know, there’s a lot of historical recipes, and recipes from different countries, that we didn’t have the right spices for

Hazel: Uh-huh

Liz: So now we have mace, long pepper, and grains of paradise

Hazel: Oh wow (laughs) Oh, is that the buy herbs and spices in bulk website?

Liz: It is

Hazel: (laughs) I see

Liz: So we have 50g of each of these, ‘cause that’s the smallest amount

Hazel: Amazing

Liz: But anyway, yeah, we’re doing a, I think it’s Rwandan, chicken stew tonight, ‘cause we’re still doing the making food from random countries thing, so I might stick some fancy spices in there instead of black pepper

Hazel: Wow, ok

Liz: ‘Cause they do all have slightly different flavour profiles, which is quite fun to play with

Hazel: Oh that sounds cool. That’s just alchemy

Liz: It is. We have discovered that nutmeg is still good in sweet things but mace is better in savoury things, like in a white sauce

Hazel: Ok

Liz: It’s savoury nutmeg. It’s great

Hazel: Oooh. That sounds delicious. I’m so jelly

Liz: (sing-song) Playing with flavours

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: And speaking of things that used to be expensive but now aren’t

Hazel: Uh-huh

Liz: We have an episode which was requested a while ago by a listener, Ewan

Hazel: Hello Ewan

Liz: Who also sent me a link to a cool D&D thing, so thank you Ewan

Hazel: Oh yeah, Ewan’s cool

Liz: So I’m gonna do a brief, all things considered, whistle-stop tour through sugar

Hazel: Great, ok. Hold on, let me get my french fancies

Liz: Who doesn’t love sugar

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: Do you actually have french fancies?

Hazel: I actually have french fancies

Liz: Amazing

Hazel: I’m gonna have a dainty little sugary comfit while I listen to you talk about sugar. It’s a lemon one

Liz: (laughing) Thank you for specifying

(both laugh)

Liz: So sugar. So I’m gonna talk about sugar cane first, just ‘cause it’s older in terms of mass use

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: So it was domesticated in Papua New Guinea and Taiwan, around 4000BCE

Hazel: Wow

Liz: Two species, the Sacarum officinarum and Saccharum sinense, and you would just chew it as a sweet treat, to get the sugary juices out of it

Hazel: Mm-hmm. I’ve heard of chewing sugar cane

Liz: Mm-hmm

Hazel: I have

Liz: I think some people still do

Hazel: No, I have. When I was briefly living in Vietnam you could just buy sugarcane and chew on it, and it was tasty

Liz: Was it particularly sweet, or…

Hazel: Quite sweet, yeah. Very fibrous

Liz: Mm-hmm. So it becomes a major crop around Polynesia and Micronesia within about 500 years of this first evidence of domestication, which is quite fast

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Probably spread by Polynesian sailors, and it hits mainland China around 1000BCE, so it spends about 3000 years just hanging around the South Pacific

Hazel: Sounds like a good time

Liz: But we don’t get to solid sugar, beyond the sugarcane juice either from chewing or just pressing and then using that liquid

Hazel: Yep

Liz: Until possibly the 1st century AD, definitely by 350

Hazel: Ok. That’s quite a long time after

Liz: It is. The purifying process is apparently surprisingly complicated at that point, and involves ethanol and burnt bones

Hazel: Ooh

Liz: So we know that it’s being purified in Uttar Pradesh around 350AD, and it spreads all around the Arab Peninsula. Persia learns how to make it pretty quickly. It doesn’t seem to be a protected, secret of Uttar Pradesh or anything like that

Hazel: Ok

Liz: It’s just “hey, here’s how you make sugar”

Hazel: And then the Silk Road does its magic

Liz: It does. Yeah, like with tea it seems to spread to India and then get taken off to China by Buddhist monks

Hazel: Ok

Liz: This technology. Which, I mean, by this point they’ve been growing sugar in China for a long time, this is the 7th century

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: So suddenly going “here’s a new thing we can do with sugar”

Hazel: Ooh

Liz: By this point, it’s a big thing in Indian and Middle Eastern cooking, you’ve probably encountered Indian sweets, they’re incredibly, tooth-meltingly sweet

Hazel: Yeah, I tried to make gulab jamun once, and the sugar syrup was delicious, but very sugary

Liz: I genuinely cannot eat more than one Indian sweet in one go. They’re great, and I love them, but just one. Unsurprisingly with it being in India and the Middle East, shows up in Ancient Greek medical texts very early on, again around the first century when they’re first starting to crystallise it. Pliny the Elder specifically says that Indian sugar is better than Arab sugar

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Doesn’t say why

Hazel: Pliny just knows. Plint has a sweet tooth

Liz: I think it was him in the soap one as well that he was just like “this soap’s better. I won’t ay why, but it”

Hazel: Could it presumably be because that’s the one he’s heard of more?

Liz: It’s possible. Or maybe they didn’t transfer all of their secrets? I don’t know. The physician, pronouncing Ancient Greek names, Dioscorides talks about a “coalesced honey the resembles salt, but is sweet”

Hazel: That sounds like sugar

Liz: Mmm. Which apparently you get in sort of hazelnut-sized lumps

Hazel: Hmm

Liz: And is apparently good for bladder and kidney pain

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Not entirely convinced that would do anything, but you might feel better if you’ve just eaten basically a sugar cube

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: It’d distract you for a little bit

Hazel: It’d give you some endorphins

Liz: Yeah, so then it spreads mostly with the spread of Arab culture. I’m jumping ahead a lot, but there’s a lot to cover, so very much surface level

Hazel: Mmm

Liz: Yeah Sicily is a big producer

Hazel: Ok

Liz: And it pops up in Al-Andalus, which was the southern part of Spain, that was colonised by the Moors

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And it’s still very expensive in Europe at this point, even though, like I say, it is being grown in Europe by now, just because it takes a lot of work to grow the sugar cane and extract it

Hazel: Ok. Whereabouts in Europe can you grow sugar? Well I suppose Spain and the Mediterranean countries

Liz: Well like I say, Sicily and Al-Andalus are the big centres for it, that Mediterranean

Hazel: Yeah. Not just like, Norway

Liz: Where it’s warm and…I don’t think you can grow sugar cane in Norway, no

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: It starts to get popular with rich Europeans around the 12th century, ‘cause Crusaders also encounter this sweet salt. Seems to be referred to as that a lot, which I think is quite interesting, and they bring it home with them, because it tastes good

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And Venice does what Venice has done throughout history, which is set up a virtual monopoly

Hazel: (laughs) Ok. Yeah, as soon as you mentioned Venice I could see that coming

Liz: Yeah. It’s just what Venice does

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: And yeah, they keep that monopoly until the 1390s, when new sugar extraction techniques pop up in Andalucia

Hazel: Ooh

Liz: But interestingly, even though we know people were eating it before then, from other records, the first time it shows up in an English language recipe, it actually shows up in multiple circa 1450 recipe books in English

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: Including, I’ve got a custard recipe here, if you want

Hazel: Ok

Liz: If you want me to try and pronounce

Hazel: I absolutely do, go on, please

Liz: So this is from the Harleian Manuscript 4016, presumably Harleian library. “Take faire milk and flour, and draw hem through a strainer, and set hem over the fire, and let hem boil awhile; And then take hem up, and let hem cool awhile” I think that’s cool, it’s spelled kele/ And then take raw yolks of eyren” which is eggs

Hazel: Ok

Liz: “And draw hem through a strainer, and caste thereto a little salt, and set it over the fire til it be somewhat thick,  let it not fully boil, and stir it right well evermore”

Hazel: Just evermore?

Liz: Slight tangent. Just keep stirring it forever

Hazel: Just keep going

Liz: “And put it in a dish al abroad, and serve it forth a good pottage in one manner, and then take sugar, a good quantity, and cast thereto, and serve it forth”

Hazel: Why does mediaeval England make everything pottage?

Liz: I don’t know

Hazel: I guess that’s a texture that you would be familiar with if you’re describing something

Liz: Yeah. It does sound good, it sounds like kind of a custard

Hazel: Yeah (inaudible) sauce

Liz: But without the vanilla

Hazel: Hmm. I love Middle English. It makes it sound poetic

Liz: It’s one of those things that’s easier to read out loud than in your head, I think, Middle English, ‘cause once you start tryna make the sounds you go “oh, that’s that word”

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: But written down it’s not great. So by this point Antwerp is the centre of the European sugar trade, with plantations in Valencia. Unfortunately, this is the point where slavery comes in

Hazel: Ah

Liz: Because those Valencian plantations had African slaves

Hazel: Right

Liz: So then you get colonisation in the New World. Portugal takes sugar to Brazil, Hispaniola, and Demerara

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: You’ve probably heard of demerara sugar

Hazel: I have

Liz: Which is apparently in modern day Guyana

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And they had 3000 mills by 1550, and I dread to think how many enslaved people there were working in them at that point

Hazel: Wow. Yeah, that’s quite a scale

Liz: But it takes about 100 years for the Dutch to actually start doing the same thing in the Caribbean, about 1640

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: They start setting up sugar mills there

Hazel: I didn’t realise that the whole industrial processing started so early

Liz: Yeah, people had a big taste for sugar

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Over the course of the 1700s, sugar consumption in Britain increases five-fold, purely because, even though a lot of it is being grown further away, it’s cheaper

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Because of slavery

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And it was actually Britain’s most valuable import until the 1820s

Hazel: Oh!

Liz: Which is wild to be

Hazel: Yeah, that’s still..I mean that’s mid-industrial-revolution

Liz: Literally worth its weight in gold for a long time

Hazel: Wow

Liz: But it’s not sold in bags of sugar crystals like we’re used to today, it’d be sold as sugar loaf

Hazel: Oh yeah

Liz: Which is essentially an enormous cone of white sugar

Hazel: There’s a folly fairly near where I come from called The Sugar Loaf, so one of those things that rich people would just build in their grounds, because it’s just this cone-shaped structure in a field. You can go inside

Liz: It’s not even the “oh I’ll put a romantic ruin in my garden”, it’s a big cone?

Hazel: Yeah. It’s quite random

Liz: I mean, bucking the trends, I guess

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: So yeah, you’d have to snip pieces off this enormous cone with what were called sugar nippers, or sugar nips

Hazel: (laughs) Ok, I’m going to start calling people “sugar nips”

Liz: Yeah, it does sound slightly like a term of endearment, doesn’t it? Which there will be a picture of on the twitter, because that’s gonna be the clue for this episode, ‘cause why make the clue obvious when I can post a picture of sugar nips?

Hazel: Exactly. Makes it more fun

Liz: I’ve gotta challenge you, the listeners. So Cuba, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a big sugar producing area, it’s one of the biggest

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Because unlike a lot of the Caribbean and South America it’s not particularly mountainous, and you don’t want mountains for growing sugar

Hazel: Yeah, ok. Ok, I think we touched on this part a little bit in our episode on rum a while ago?

Liz: Yes. Which is episode 12. ‘Cause the molasses, or in British English black treacle, is a byproduct of the sugar purification process, basically turning it from brown sugar to white sugar

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And that’s what you make rum with

Hazel: Indeed

Liz: So yeah, listen to episode 12 for more on the, at times slightly bizarre, history of rum

Hazel: It is, as they say a rum…thing? I was trying to make a pun

Liz: Are you trying to remember the phrase “a rum do”?

Hazel: A rum do, yeah, I was wondering if that was the phrase, or is it a rum deal? Let’s just pretend that I did that right. It is, as they say, a rum do

Liz: (laughs) Flawlessly saved

Hazel: (laughs)

Liz: But, of course, sugar cane is not the only source of sugar

Hazel: Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, there’s sugar beet, right?

Liz: There is. Beta vulgaris vulgaris, which is actually the same species as the mangelwurzel, and beetroot

Hazel: Oh! Ok

Liz: That’s all the same species

Hazel: Right

Liz: Also Swiss chard

Hazel: Is it a root vegetable?

Liz: Well, like I say, it’s kind of like…have you ever seen that image, there’s a wild plant in the middle, and then it’s different cultivars of that same plant are broccoli, and mustard, and things like that?

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: It’s the same thing. It’s the same plant. You breed it for leaves, you get chard, you breed it for different aspects of the root, you can get beetroot or mangelwurzel or sugarbeet

Hazel: Ok

Liz: So yeah, that has a relatively large amount of sugar for a root

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Specifically the taproot is the sugarbeet, which is fairly common for beet-type-vegetables, I guess you’d call it

Hazel: Uh-huh. And does that sugar taste the same as cane sugar?

Liz: Well once it’s been purified it’s all mostly sucrose

Hazel: It’s the same thing, ok

Liz: Yeah, there are people who argue that it has a different flavour, but I personally don’t think it does. So, we’re getting back to the King of Potatoes, Frederick the Great

Hazel: (laughs) Ok, what did that whacky individual do this time?

Liz: He subsidised experiments for extracting sugar from sugarbeet

Hazel: Ah

Liz: Instead of from cane. There was a scientist, a chemist from Berlin which, I’m trying to remember what German kingdom that would be, I think Brandenburg, in 1747 managed to isolate sugar from the roots and show that it is chemically the same

Hazel: Ok

Liz: As cane sugar

Hazel: Wow. And that is something that you can grow in northern Europe

Liz: It is. They did. They created their own cultivar, which…weiße schlesische Zuckerrübe, apologies for my pronunciation, or white Silesian sugarbeet

Hazel: Ah

Liz: Which has 6% sugar concentration, which is quite high for a sugarbeet

Hazel: Ok

Liz: And that is the same species that’s used now

Hazel: Oh wow, they’re still using the same one?

Liz: It’s the same cultivar, yeah. Unfortunately the first plant used to extract beet sugar was destroyed in the Napoleonic War

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Which, long term, may have been a mistake for Napoleon, honestly

Hazel: Ah

Liz: ‘Cause in 1813 he banned imports of Caribbean sugar, not out of any concerns about slavery

Hazel: Of course

Liz: Need to understand that. It’s because he wanted to stop the money from the sugar trade going to Britain

Hazel: Ah, yes

Liz: And he would actually have his navy blockade sugar ships

Hazel: Ok

Liz: So (laughs) he actually ended up quite dependant on the sugar beet

Hazel: Yeah (laughs)

Liz: But by 1837 France was the largest producer of beet sugar in the world

Hazel: I can see why

Liz: 35 thousand tons a year

Hazel: Oh my goodness

Liz: And yeah, sugarbeet spreads throughout Northern Europe, through Ukraine and Russia, as a kind of “hey, here’s some cheaper sugar”. Sugarbeet cultivation also showed up in the US, especially Philadelphia, unsurprisingly it was popular among abolitionists

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: It was often referred to as “free sugar”

Hazel: Ok

Liz: But it was also…apparently didn’t taste as good

Hazel: Aww

Liz: Because the soil was apparently relatively salty

Hazel: Oh right

Liz: So the sugarbeet just didn’t do as well in terms of concentration

Hazel: I see

Liz: But a sugar company was set up by the Mormons in the 1880s

Hazel: Ok

Liz: ‘Cause sure

Hazel: Yeah, why not (laughs) Is it still going?

Liz: Unfortunately it is not

Hazel: Ok

Liz: But they did create a strain of blight-resistant sugarbeet

Hazel: Oh! Always handy

Liz: Which is cool. Yeah, they’re mostly in sales now rather than actually making sugar

Hazel: Ok

Liz: They’ve actually mostly switched over to Brazilian sugar cane, as of 2010. There were attempts to set up sugarbeet production in Britain, as well, in the 1830. There was The United Kingdom Beetroot Sugar Association

Hazel: (laughs) I love agricultural association names

Liz: Yeah. It was not particularly successful, although abolition did put a big dent in sugarcane

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And sugarbeet was actually two thirds of world sugar production by the start of the 20th century

Hazel: Ok

Liz: Although most British sugar wasn’t grown in Britain, and I believe still isn’t

Hazel: That makes sense. I mean, we just don’t have the capacity, do we

Liz: Well yeah. Most of the beet sugar came from Germany and Austria

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: Although now 50% of UK sugar is British beet sugar

Hazel: Ok, yeah, I’ve definitely heard of it being grown in the UK, I think

Liz: Yeah. By one company, which was originally set up by the government, just called British Sugar

Hazel: Oh

Liz: Oh mean, does what it says on the tin, doesn’t it

Hazel: Yeah

Liz: Yeah, it seems like between the first and second world wars there was a big push

Hazel: Mm-hmm

Liz: And obviously after the second world war, a big push generally to grow more stuff domestically

Hazel: Yeah, that makes sense

Liz: So yeah, that is a, like I said, a whistlestop tour through the history of sugar. I could definitely go for longer, but then there would be possibly too in depth for the level we tend to do on this podcast. It would just be its own podcast at that point

Hazel: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many different aspects. Honestly you could do a whole podcast series on most of the bigger things that we’ve talked about

Liz: Or even the smaller ones, honestly. There’s a podcast that I listen to, British Food History, that did a three-parter on eels

Hazel: Oh wow

Liz: But we only did one episode

Hazel: Yeah, we only did the one eels, but I can see where there would be much more to say about that

Liz: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t even touch on, you know, there were a lot of advances in sugarbeet technology during the Soviet Union

Hazel: Wow. They are a funky little animal. But anyway, we

Liz: The sugar beet?

Hazel: Sorry?

Liz: Sorry, you meant eels, I thought you were calling sugar beets a funky little animal

Hazel: Oh! (laughs)

(crosstalk)

Liz: So yes, before we go on to local larder, if you want to suggest an episode like Ewan, you can email breadandthreadpodcast @ gmail.com, or send us a message at bread and thread on twitter or tumblr, where you can also find various links to things we talk about on the show, pictures, retweeting/reblogging, all that good stuff

Hazel: You can also find us on youtube, bread and thread again, where there are video versions of podcast episodes, and we have a patreon that is also bread and thread, where there’s a discord server where we talk about stuff that we are making or stuff from episodes. There are monthly patron exclusive recipes and…I think that’s it?

Liz: I think that’s it

Hazel: I love how we do this every time like “is that all the places that we are?”

Liz: It’s just a lot of things

Hazel: Yeah. We’ve got fingers in a lot of pies. But what I’m gonna talk about now is not a pie. But it does include sugar

Liz: Oh

Hazel: So there’s a connection. So this is one that I was actually gonna do more towards Christmas time, but I think it still counts, we’re still in winter, but I’ve been wanting to talk about St Lucia buns for a while

Liz: Ok

Hazel: Yeah, or lucicata, as I believe they are known in Sweden. So, these are a traditional Scandinavian bun, and they are flavoured with saffron. So they’re traditionally eaten for breakfast on St Lucia’s Day, which is the 13th of December, which under the old calendar is the winter solstice, and there is actually a John Donne poem about that, A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day. “Now is the day’s midnight, and the world’s”, something like that. So St Lucy is an early Christian saint from Sicily, but has ended up being celebrated, mostly in Scandinavia and Italy, on December the 13th

Liz: Do we know why? Because that’s an odd combination of countries, I think

Hazel: Yeah, it is quite random, but I’m not quite sure. No-one seems to be entirely sure. Possibly it just kind of made its way there. I mean, people did celebrate the winter solstice in the Norse countries as well, so it might have just been convenient, conflated, but it is still celebrated in Scandinavia, and you might have seen images where there’s a…I think a lot of schools do it, where they pick one of the girls to wear a crown, a wreath with candles, and they do a service, and yeah, one of the girls dresses as St Lucia, and these buns are traditionally eaten upon that day, although they are also just kind of associated with the Christmas season. And so they are a saffron bun, in a distinctive S-shape. There’s a bit of a myth about the legend of these buns, as there are with many things

Liz: I mean, that’s our favourite part, isn’t it?

Hazel: Exactly. So, there’s kind of a folk history bit of this idea that, on that night, the wild hunt would be riding, and the original name for these buns translates to devil’s cats

Liz: Oh, I like that a lot more

Hazel: Yeah. Which is where that comes from, but apparently it actually doesn’t have anything to do with cats (laughs), and it comes from a Dutch midwinter feast bread that’s similar, that sounds a bit like cat. Yeah

Liz: Disappointing

Hazel: I know. So they actually don’t have much to do with warding off the devil, but they do sound delicious. So, one of the recipes that I found involves milk, saffron, butter, white bread flour, golden caster sugar, yeast, and currants. A lot of them seem to be sprinkled with that, I’ve forgotten what it’s called, the really chunky sugar

Liz: I think that is demerara

Hazel: No, no, it’s the white crumbly

Liz: Chunky white sugar?

Hazel: Yeah, yeah. Pearl sugar, apparently that’s what it’s called

Liz: I haven’t heard of that

Hazel: Ok. Yeah, it says, apparently it’s just sugar that is compressed to make it crunchy and nice-looking

Liz: Hmm

Hazel: In little lumps. Yeah, so it’s a sweet bread, flavoured with saffron

Liz: It sounds delicious. Brioche-y

Hazel: Yeah, yeah, it sounds quite brioche-y. It’s a sweet bread, flavoured with saffron, and shaped into this curly S-shape, and they look quite delicious. And I did want to make some this year, but I didn’t get time, so I’m gonna give it a go when I finally have an oven again, ‘cause I’m sure, while they are associated with the Christmas season, they sound delicious for all year round. So yeah, that’s it, it’s part of this celebration that celebrates the return of the sun, and light in the darkness, and also

Liz: That’s nice

Hazel: Delicious buns!

Liz: I like that

Hazel: (laughs) Dunno. It is a nice little tradition, I think. And it sounds a bit tastier…I think a lot of the British traditional Christmas foods are quite dense

Liz: Yeah, we do go for a lot of stodge

Hazel: Yeah, which, I mean, will get you through the winter, but sometimes you want something fluffy. So yeah, that is the local larder. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and we will see you next time

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