Sugar Read online

  In both France and Britain, the most notable group keen to make their social mark were the Nabobs from India and the sugar planters from the Americas. Costly lavish homes, extravagant parties, spending on a scale which raised even aristocratic eyebrows, all came to define the sugar barons – the plantocracy – the name itself a blend of planter and aristocracy. They had the money, and they wanted the social cachet that went with it. The sugar barons had made their money from sugar and, as if to prove it, sugary desserts adorned their dining tables.

  All this belonged to the world of wealthy people, but as sugar became cheaper and more widespread, it naturally found its way into food across the social scale. The middle social orders sought to adopt the sweet-eating habits of those above them and, by the early eighteenth century, puddings (which came in a great variety of tastes, shapes and sizes – but always sweet) had become a favourite dessert even in modestly prosperous homes. Indeed, the word itself – pudding (like ‘sweet’) – became a British term for dessert.

  The relationship between the English and their puddings was a well-established cultural landmark by the late eighteenth century and was used, for example, to telling effect by late-century caricaturists. The increasing number of cookbooks all sought to instruct the nation’s wives and daughters in the ways of kitchen management and cooking, and all inevitably turned to the blessings of sugar.4 What slowly emerged was a codification of rules and conventions both for cooking and for serving meals, a codification which reflected the formality of the French culinary culture from which it had originally emerged.

  By the mid-eighteenth century, however, French cookbooks had shifted their social focus. In 1746, La Cuisinière Bourgeoise established a new template for cooking. As the title makes clear, the book was aimed at a much lower social class than royalty or the aristocracy, which had been the traditional market for earlier cookbooks. One major problem facing such books was the assumption that there would always be plenty of food – and plenty of money to indulge in elaborate cuisine. But at critical points in the eighteenth century, France was plagued by serious food shortages and real famine.5 It reached its famous crisis in the Revolution of 1789.

  Notwithstanding the recurring problem of hunger, sugar found a secure home in French cuisine in the two centuries before the Revolution. But what impact did it make on the lower orders? What possible use could elaborate desserts, even sweet puddings, be to humble labourers – rural or urban – whose main task in life was simply to earn enough to eat? Domestic servants might encounter sugary delights via their workplace and the kitchens and dining rooms, but what about the rest?

  The plebeian diet was, at best, poor. Low earnings left little spare for luxuries, even in years when the standards of living were rising a little. Yet sugar was obviously a luxury. People had survived without it for centuries, and any commodity shipped from the Caribbean arrived loaded with meaning, the very definition of a luxury item. Critics in both France and Britain thought it absurd that the poor, people with few resources, should yearn for sugar. In the British case, the attacks on sugar were directed largely against sugar in tea. Time and again, commentators railed against the consumption of sweet tea – people would be better advised to spend their money on basics such as bread, for example. Yet despite such frequent criticisms, the lower orders turned, in growing numbers, to what many continued to view as a luxury – notably tea and coffee laced with sugar.

  Such criticism of sugar rang like a refrain throughout the eighteenth century on both sides of the Channel, as critics denounced the love of luxury among the common people. More perceptive authors recognized, however, that sugar had already become one of life’s necessities – it enhanced people’s lives, strengthened them for their daily tasks, and added some kind of comfort to a miserable existence. In any case, the kind of sugar consumed by the poor – like the tea they drank – was always the very poorest and cheapest sort. Theirs was not the costly, top-end sugars of the fashionable households, but the literal scrapings of the poorest sugar loaves, which they added to the cheapest of oats.6

  As the Caribbean plantations disgorged ever more sugar (and other tropical foodstuffs), sugar prices plummeted by half between 1630 and 1680. Sugar imports to Britain doubled, then doubled again. Sugar consumption doubled in the forty years to 1740, before doubling again by 1775. In a little more than a century, the sugar consumed by people in England and Wales increased sixty-fold, while the population scarcely doubled in the same period. The per capita consumption of sugar in 1700 was 4lb, rising to 8lb in 1729, 12lb in 1789 and 18lb by 1809. Sugar was now being used extensively – and not simply in tea. It was added to a range of basic foodstuffs – wheat, oats and rice became significantly more palatable. Not unlike the ancient habits of sweetening foul-tasting medicines, the poor made their simple, bland diet tastier by adding sugar. Sugar also became part of the diet of poor people via the by-products of sugar manufacture – molasses and rum. It augured ill for the future, although no one realised it at the time.

  The diet of poorer people was augmented by spreading molasses on bread, thus converting a tasteless morsel into an acceptable dish. Sugar and molasses added a pleasant taste to what had long been meagre meals: sweet tea and coffee, bread or porridge for breakfast; a lunch of fried potatoes; and a similar dish for supper, again with bread or oatmeal, and weak, sugared tea or coffee. For people whose working lives were arduous and protracted, these additions of sugar to food and drink refreshed and revived – and provided essential energy. Even so, it was a meagre, minimalist diet which regularly-shocked curious outsiders and social investigators, who became a permanent feature of labouring life from the mid-eighteenth century right down to the present day. In the nineteenth century, the poor augmented their meagre diet by the addition of sugar-filled jams.

  Beneath these generalities there lay a revealing fact, albeit one which had ancient origins. Foods were shared unevenly within working families. The best bits – when available – were reserved for the main breadwinner (the phrase itself revealing). And that normally was the man of the house, although this was to change dramatically in the nineteenth century with the rise of modern textile industries with their preponderance of female industrial workers. The breadwinner needed the physical strength to work at arduous tasks and to bring home a weekly wage. That often left wives and children with the scraps, and with the cheaper or leftover items, and it was they who consumed most of the family’s sugar. Yet in the textiles industries – which formed the engine of Britain’s industrial revolution – women and young children also worked long, energy-sapping hours. Survey after survey, especially in the nineteenth century, revealed the importance of sugar: ‘Factory women survived on bread, sugar and fat, supplemented by portions of meat . . .’7 Jams, heavily dependent on sugar, and later treacle (dispensed by sugar refineries direct from their vats into jugs brought to the refineries by working people) were spread on bread, and became a basic sweet ingredient in plebeian diets across the face of Britain. Sugar thus became a vital source of sustenance and energy for a growing population of urban industrial people; it was a key ingredient in their meagre diet and a necessity in their hot drinks.

  Sugar also transformed the way people preserved their foods. Previously, people had preserved fruit in honey and various syrups. At first, sugar enabled apothecaries – later, the confectioner – to create preservatives by boiling fruit and other ingredients, mainly for medicinal purposes. (The process was utterly transformed in the early nineteenth century by the invention of a new bottling process, later by canning.) Whatever the process, whether at home or in new bottling and canning factories, sugar was the essential ingredient, and with the advance of the modern food industry, sugar was added in very large volumes, and this was true for a range of foodstuffs. What made this process possible on an industrial scale was not simply the emergence of the science and the technology of treatment and bottling, but the availability of cheap sugar in huge industrial quantities. Sugar was everywhere. In its va
rious guises, sugar had become an inescapable feature of everyday life. It was like tobacco, both a source of strength and a consolation – ‘the general solace of all classes’ – but especially of working people.8

  Sugar had entered people’s lives both at home and at work, and it was part of the routines of work itself. Bread, spread with sweet jam (or simply speckled with refined sugar) was carried to work, to be eaten at lunchtime or, increasingly, at the ‘tea break’. People whose lives were increasingly regimented by machines, and by the new industrial disciplines that emerged from mechanised work, were granted a break from the arduous monotony, and it was in those brief respites from the demands of the machine that they drank sweet tea and coffee and ate a sweet snack carried from home. Sweetness at the breaks made strenuous work in factories more tolerable, and provided some of the necessary energy required for the tasks ahead. Sugar, not long ago a luxury for the rich, thus became a necessity for working people.

  Even so, many critics continued to regard the transportation of food and drink vast distances a strange way of feeding the population, especially the poor. Nonetheless, sugar (and molasses and rum) continued to make their mark among working people. In colonial North America – which was to become a land flowing with material abundance – settlers were greatly reliant on imported goods. Until the local economies matured, and until both land and people began to yield the abundance which came to be associated with that vast continent, colonial North America needed a great range of imports. Americans enjoyed some things in abundance, of course – there were plentiful fuel supplies for cooking and heating, copious running water (for grinding) and a profusion of land for cultivation and for animal grazing.

  Yet colonial Americans imported huge volumes of foodstuffs. They also consumed huge volumes of the slave-grown produce from the Caribbean colonies to the south. In large part, this was organised by design; the British tied the northern colonies into the wider imperial system. The slave islands needed American commodities to maintain the sugar plantations. And, in return, they shipped sugar, molasses and rum northwards. More than 75 per cent of the value of all items imported into North America from the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century consisted of sugar, rum and molasses. As a result, rum was the favoured drink given to labourers in North America, much as beer was in Britain. In 1770, an estimated 7.5 million gallons of rum were shipped to the northern colonies. There, men and women, free and enslaved, drank rum on a daily basis. It provided perhaps one quarter of all the calorie needs for an active adult. We also know that, on the eve of the American Revolution, some two thirds of American adults drank tea twice a day.9 They, like their British counterparts, sweetened it with sugar from the Caribbean.

  Behind these patterns of the American diet lay an issue which was to become a source of great American contention, and the cause of political opposition to the British – the taxation on imported foodstuffs. The British state enjoyed income via the duties levied on commodities shipped into the northern colonies. The string of British Acts of Parliament which threatened to increase taxation on such items – the Molasses Act 1733; the Sugar Act 1760; and the Tea Act 1773 – was to create deep American resentment which helped propel Americans towards independence.

  Each of those Acts was directly related to the consuming passion for sweetness in food and drink, and they were all, of course, directly related to slave labour. British governments saw those commodities as a source of income, but Americans viewed them as an intrusive hand in matters over which they had no say or influence. Sugar was, at one and the same time, both cause and occasion of North American popular taste, and of rising American antipathy to British rule.

  Molasses emerged as a key commodity in North America. From the Massachusetts fishing communities in the north-east to the slaves in the Old South, molasses from the Caribbean was a major ingredient in the American diet. The American poor especially relied on molasses, on bread, as a staple diet. Slaves liked molasses mixed with cornmeal and pork. Molasses was also used in the manufacture of North American alcoholic drinks. Grocers sold molasses from barrels in their shop, and that sticky substance established itself in a range of popular, cheap American recipes, from gingerbread to Boston brown bread – even in Boston baked beans.10

  When the North American colonies broke away from British control in 1776, they had come to rely on sweetness imported from the Caribbean slave colonies. But by then, so had the people of Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, sugar and its sweet by-products had insinuated themselves into the diet and drink of millions of people. In the form of rum, it brought solace and comfort to millions, although it was to have disastrous consequences among the native peoples of North America.

  8

  Rum Makes its Mark

  THE IMPACT OF cane sugar on the modern world went far beyond the urge for sweetness. Extracting refined sugar from the sugar cane involved industrial processes which, at first, began in relatively simply factories on or close to the plantations, and was then completed in sugar refineries in Europe and North America. This sugar industry linked together two distant parts of the world – tropical cultivators and northern industries in temperate countries – which remained a basic feature of sugar production for centuries. That long-distance and protracted international system produced sugar crystals – refined sugar – which people added to their food and drink. But it also created a number of by-products which themselves became important features of modern consumption habits.

  The cane cut in the sugar fields was carted into factories to be crushed, boiled, evaporated and then filtered into pots and barrels. Bigger plantations had their own factories, and even at an early date they formed an industrial complex rooted in the rural heart of sugar cultivation. Long before modern factories characterised Europe and North America, sugar factories dotted the landscape of the colonies, belching steam and smoke into the tropical sky, and announcing that the sugar crop was in full swing. Smaller sugar cultivators sent their cane to the nearest plantation factory for processing. Much later, large-scale ‘central factories’ emerged to undertake the same process.

  Converting cane into sugar generated a trail of by-products and waste matter: crushed canes (‘bagasse’, which was later used as fuel); a liquid residue of impurities; and molasses. Molasses could then be distilled again, and further processed to produce rum. Although rum-making had long been familiar in Islamic sugar production, the alcohol – prohibited as a drink in Islam – was used in medicines and perfumes. Europeans, on the other hand, with their own traditions of distilling strong spirits, had no cultural restrictions on drinking alcohol. Brazil produced crude rum in the mid-sixteenth century and sugar planters noted that African slaves enjoyed it. One early critic remarked (in 1648) that it was ‘a beverage fit only for slaves and donkeys’.

  Providing the crudest rum to the enslaved labour force continued throughout the history of slavery in the Americas, but attitudes to rum changed when the drink began to prove its commercial value. In fact, a variety of alcoholic drinks emerged from the sugar industry. An Englishman told of a drink he encountered in Puerto Rico in 1596 made from molasses and spices, and other forms of fermented alcohol from sugar were reported in a number of slave colonies. Until rum became a viable export commodity, however, many planters were happy to allow slaves to use the residue from sugar manufacture to make their own alcoholic drinks.

  By the mid-seventeenth century, rum had become an established export commodity in its own right. The exact origins of rum’s commercial production remain uncertain, but it seems likely that it effectively began in Barbados and in Martinique. Dutch refugees, expelled from Brazil, may have helped establish rum distilling in both those islands. By the 1640s, rum was being manufactured in Martinique; a decade later, it was well established in Barbados. The original Barbados rum was described as ‘a hot, hellish and terrible liquor’ and was known by various names, ‘Kill Devil’ being perhaps the most revealing.1 Much of it was consumed on the island (by the 1670s, th
ere were an estimated 100 taverns in Bridgetown), although some was exported to North America and Britain. Rum punch (a staple of the modern Caribbean tourist industry) was popular among sugar planters by the 1660s. A century later, it was common in Europe and North America, hence the appearance of ‘punch bowls’ in taverns and on fashionable dining tables.2

  By then, rum was hugely popular in the Caribbean, and visitors were often struck by the levels of drunkenness in the islands, and by the associated levels of ill health. Widespread, heavy rum-drinking in Barbados was often followed by ‘dry belly-ache’. It was discovered that the problem was caused not by rum itself, but by lead poisoning, although the culprit was only finally located in 1745 – the lead piping in local rum distilleries.3 By then, there was a thriving rum export trade to Britain and, more commercially significant, to New England – especially to Rhode Island. Distilleries designed to produce rum were founded in major ports on both sides of the Atlantic. In Bristol, the local copper and brass industries specialised in making equipment destined for the distilleries in the Caribbean.4

  As sugar cultivation spread throughout the Caribbean in the course of the seventeenth century, rum emerged as a popular drink throughout the Americas and Europe. It was now established as a lucrative tropical product in its own right and, like sugar, it yielded handsome returns to the British state in the form of duties levied on imports. Rum also helped to change the physical appearance of the sugar islands. Not only did the plantations devour the wild landscape and convert it to orderly fields, but the sugar factories and the distilleries used for producing sugar and rum saw the development of industry in the middle of rural activity. The Caribbean landscape was dotted first by hundreds of windmills, then by smoking and steaming chimneys attached to factories and distilleries.