Sugar Read online

  Sugar had also become a central item in the way the dining table should be set out, particularly for the most formal of meals. Sugar sculptures took their place alongside floral displays and elaborate silverware on the most important dining tables. The table arrangers even copied the examples of contemporary landscape designers to create elaborate landscapes on the tables, and all were scattered with sugar moulds and sculptures. Skilled confectioners used sugar (in a host of colours) and marzipan to create whatever scenes and images their masters and mistresses demanded.23

  Such displays of power, wealth and status were important, and chefs in palaces and stately homes perfected the art of fashioning sugary blends into edible sculptures to astound, impress and feed. Mixing sugar with nuts and gums, or pouring liquid sugar into moulds made specifically for the purpose, cooks vied to outdo each other in their elaborate concoctions, to grace the tables and attract the admiration of guests at formal banquets and state ceremonies. Known as ‘soteltes’ (subtleties), they were designed initially to be consumed between courses, and might be shaped in the form of fish or meats. In time, however, they took on great significance in conveying messages from rulers to their rivals, friends and enemies, and were designed to impress guests by flaunting the host’s status and wealth.

  Other privileged members of society soon adopted the sugary habits of their rulers. High-ranking clerics and prominent academics, for example, all found sugar sculptures a perfect reflection of their own status and positions. When Thomas Wolsey was installed as Cardinal in Westminster Abbey in 1515, he ordered an extravagant display of churches, castles, beasts, birds – and a chess set – all made from sugar.24 For his installation in 1503, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford ordered a display of ‘the eight towers of the university’, its officers and the King – all made from sugar.25 In 1526, Henry VIII employed seven cooks to devise an elaborate sugar banquet at Greenwich which displayed a dungeon and a manor festooned with swans and cygnets, while another chef created a tower and a chessboard, all ‘garnished with fine gold’.26 More daring still were sugary displays of genitalia crafted for the amusement of dinner guests, though more formal religious or diplomatic dinners were graced by more tasteful sugar sculptures, such as religious or royal images to fit the occasion.27 It is no surprise to learn that the French and English courts suffered dreadfully from dental problems – rotten and missing teeth, gum disease, collapsed mouths and disfigured appearances. All were a consequence of sugar.

  As wealth spread to a new merchant and trading class (many grown fat on the pickings of overseas and imperial trade and settlement), so, too, did the luxurious habits of their betters; they also began to use sugar to impress and entertain. In common with other luxury items, however, the more popular its base, the less potent the message, and as sugar became more widespread and cheaper by the late sixteenth century (courtesy of African slaves in the Americas), the prestige of elaborate displays of sugar lost their effectiveness. English elites tended to buy their sugar in London but, by the mid-seventeenth century, sugar was available in the smallest of provincial towns – in Mansfield in 1635 and Rochdale in 1649, for example. In Tarpoley, Cheshire, in 1683, locals could buy sugar from Ralph Edge, the local ironmonger.28 By the time sugar entered the homes of humbler sorts, it had lost its social cachet among the wealthy.

  The commonplace use of sugar in household affairs was reflected in early cookery and recipe books. Distinctively English recipe books first appeared in the 1580s, and included sugar as an ingredient, both for preserving fruit and for cooking. Gervase Markham’s manual, The English Housewife (first published in 1616 but drawing on much older advice and recipes), is strewn with recommendations for the use of sugar in cooking and food preparation. Sugar was thought ideal, for example, in salads, pancakes, veal roasts, fritters, to enhance liver, for a number of sauces, for oyster pie, for a string of puddings, pies and jellies, for spice cakes and, of course, for ‘a sugar plate’.29 This handbook also thought that the ideal housewife should not restrict herself solely to cooking. She was also charged with the household’s health and well-being, and the book offered instructions about contemporary nursing and healthcare, and for any ailment or accident that might happen. Even here, sugar was invaluable, and it was recommended in a cordial ‘for any infection at the heart’ and for a new cough’ and for an old cough’. Sugar was recommended for an eye problem, for consumption and to staunch the blood, ‘for the wind colic’, and even ‘for any old sore’.30 Sugar was now as medicinal as it was tasty, and as practical as it was symbolic. If it could impress in sculptured displays, it might, if administered properly, even provide succour to the sick and cure the infirm.

  Sugar had taken its place in the kitchen not simply as an ingredient, but as a medicine, and the explanation is again to be found in the spread of Islam. The development of a new Islamic orthodoxy saw the emergence of a new kind of Islamic medicine, much of it rooted in pronouncements of the Prophet and his followers, but also encouraged by the rise of new learning, centred on Baghdad, and on the translation of ancient, classical texts – such as the Greek medical writings of Galen – into Arabic. Hence Galen’s medical ideas permeated the world of Islam – and beyond. A rich medical literature emerged, most notably the dominant compendia which provided a digest of medical learning, along with questions and answers for anyone interested in medical issues.

  Islam also spawned a new breed of doctors whose work and research, now available in printed form, advanced learning and understanding of the human body, its ailments and treatments.31 The most famous and influential, Al-Razi (865–925), recommended that ‘unpleasant tasting drugs should be made palatable’.32 Like the Greeks and Romans before them, Islamic physicians, and those who followed (especially Spanish and Jewish authorities), found sugar and honey ideal antidotes to the bitterness of certain medicines. It was a slow, gradual process, but sugar became part of Islamic and then European pharmacology.

  Medicine had also been helped by the vast geography of Islam, by yielding an astonishing array of flora and fauna, and of minerals and animals to be used as medicines. By the thirteenth century, pharmacists had lists of upwards of 3,000 items used in medicines, many of them exotic items culled from distant tropical regions. Sugar was only one of a long list of such items, but it quickly found a special niche, both for its own sake, and more broadly for the way it made unpleasant drugs palatable.

  These Islamic medical and pharmaceutical traditions spread to Western Europe. Apothecaries (from the word apotheca, meaning a place where wine, spice and herbs were stored), dispensed sugar alongside, or mixed with, other medicines. Robert de Montpellier, ‘spicer-apothecary’ to King Henry III, opened London’s first pharmacy in 1245 and, among his wares, he offered electuaries’ – mixtures of spices and herbs bound together by sugar and prescribed for the sick. At the end of his life, Henry VII was treated with sugar mixed with rose water, violets and cinnamon.33

  In France, Louis XIV employed Monsieur Pomet as his ‘Chief Druggist’; Pomet later published A Complete History of Drugs, a work translated and published (edited and added to) in London in 1748. It devoted five pages to sugar – its nature, cultivation, and culinary and medical use. Quite apart from all the tasty sweets, desserts and drinks provided by sugar, it was, so the author claimed, good for the breast and the lungs, for asthma, coughs, for kidneys and the bladder. However (and here Pomet must have looked closely at Louis XIV himself), ‘It rots and decays the teeth . . .’ Having listed all the places where sugar was grown, the book claimed that ‘now our fine Jamaica and Barbados Sugar is inferior to none . . . and next to them is it reckon’d the Lisbon sugar . . .’34

  By around 1600, sugar had undergone a remarkable transformation. What had, up to this point, been the preserve of the rich and powerful, was now available in the humblest of shops and in the smallest of villages. Tarpoley was a long way from the French royal court; even further, in time and distance, from the great centres of Islamic learning and medi
cal science. Yet there was a link – a progression – from one to the other. Once the monopoly of kings, by the mid-seventeenth century sugar could be bought from a humble ironmonger in the north of England. It had begun to change from an expensive luxury to the everyday necessity of ordinary people. Even more curious is the fact that this massive change in direction and fortunes was all made possible by the brutal exploitation of vast numbers of African slaves. Tons of sugar now found their way to the docksides of Europe, and from there to local refineries and, finally, onwards to markets, fairs, shops and travelling salesmen, reaching consumers across Western Europe and, later, across the globe. Sugar was to become an everyday item in the shops and shopping baskets of humble people.

  2

  The March of Decay

  BY THE REIGN of Elizabeth I, sugar was hugely popular among the upper echelons of English society. They ate and drank it in abundance (Shakespeare’s Falstaff loved his sweet wines made even sweeter by the addition of sugar), and they revelled in lavish, sugary displays of power and influence. When the Queen progressed through Hampshire in 1591, the Earl of Hertford laid on a firework display followed by a banquet dominated by ‘Her Majesty’s arms in sugar works . . . Castles, forts, ordnance, drummers, trumpeters and soldiers of all sorts, in sugar works . . .’ Exotic beasts and birds, snakes, whales, dolphins and fish – all made from sugar – were paraded for the Queen’s pleasure. The monarch had a very sweet tooth. In 1597, the French Ambassador wrote of the 64-year-old monarch: ‘Her teeth are very yellow and unequal . . . Many of them are missing so that one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly.’ A year later, a different visitor thought her teeth were black. Even by the late sixteenth century, it was already clear that sugar wrought great damage to people’s teeth.1 Today, when faced with dental problems that can be quickly and painlessly solved, we tend to wince when thinking of our ancestors’ dental sufferings. In fact, rotten teeth and painful dental treatment are relatively modern phenomena – and are, overwhelmingly, associated with the history of sugar. We have become aware of this partly because of the advances in modern science, and we’re painfully aware now that tooth decay is particularly destructive when sugar reacts with bacteria to produce an acid that attacks the enamel. But, in recent years, the associated work of archaeologists has revealed that our forebears did not suffer the widespread dental problems we often imagine – not until the coming of refined sugar. Curiously, the devastating explosion of Mount Vesuvius provides some useful clues.

  On 24 August AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted in what, alongside Krakatoa in 1883, proved to be perhaps the most famous volcanic eruption in human history. It destroyed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and much else in the close vicinity, killing untold thousands via waves of roaring, roasting heat which were followed by inundations of ash and volcanic lava. The ash which engulfed the towns and their inhabitants eventually hardened into pumice. In time, the bodies trapped in those shells of pumice rotted, leaving behind mere skeletons. Modern archaeologists using new technology and materials have created casts of the victims by pouring plaster into the shells. Teams of scientists, archaeologists, radiologists, doctors and dentists have recently analysed these human remains, and subjected them to experiments which would have been impossible a mere generation ago. Those human remains, which have been buried for centuries under layers of volcanic ash and lava, have begun to yield evidence about the condition and health of those who died. The remains of thirty people, examined by modern CT scans, have revealed, among other things, remarkably good dental condition. Scans, X-rays and dental analysis suggest that the victims (men, women and children) had no real need of dental treatment; few of them had cavities. When they died, their teeth were in very good condition.2

  We know a great deal about their diet from a variety of historical sources. It was a fibre-rich Mediterranean diet, characterised by lots of fruit and vegetables. Most crucially, perhaps, we also know that they enjoyed a sugar-free, or very low-sugar, diet. Theirs was a balanced diet, very similar to the one proposed by modern medical dieticians seeking a healthy alternative to modern sugar-soaked, fat-laden foodstuffs. Above all, the victims of Vesuvius did not eat refined sugar, and the teeth of those killed by Vesuvius in AD 79 provide a vivid example of what teeth look like without the consumption of sugar.

  The Vesuvius example is eye-catching but not exceptional. A number of archaeological and medical examinations of teeth from a range of ancient burial sites tell a very similar story. Almost 1,000 British examples, taken from sites ranging between the Iron Age and the late medieval period – some 2,000 years – showed no deterioration in their dental condition. Specific case studies confirm the pattern; an examination of 504 Anglo-Saxon examples showed none of the kind of tooth cavities caused by sugar.

  The pattern begins to change, however, in the seventeenth century. And by the nineteenth century – the years of Britain’s urban and industrial transformation – burial grounds tell a very different story. The Victorian dead offer up repetitive evidence of widespread dental problems – bad teeth, numerous cavities, decay and poor overall dental health. What lies behind this remarkable transformation is the story of sugar.3 We have dental data in Britain which spans more than 2,000 years. And there are even more sweeping studies of global dental and archaeological data that reinforces the pattern. Time and again, the main or sole cause of dental decay was the natural process of ageing. In the South Pacific, in ancient Egypt and among native peoples in North America, dental decay was a function of age – not diet. The overall conclusion, drawn by a renowned professor of dental surgery, was that prior to the seventeenth century (and much later in rural areas), people probably did not suffer as greatly from dental pain as might be imagined’. And that was because they did not eat or drink sugar.4

  Compare this to the evidence of widespread dental problems in the current British population. Extensive dental decay – most worrying and most widespread among the young – is a regular and commonplace topic for discussion among medical experts, and thus in the media. Of course, the precise mix of dietary factors which produces the problems of dental ill health in Britain (and elsewhere) are complex, but today the only doubts about the role of sugar in creating those problem are raised by the sugar and food industries and their paid lobbyists. Not surprisingly, when such stories surface in the popular press about, say, the generally good dental health of ancient Romans, they do so in the form of an eye-catching headline: ‘ANCIENT ROMANS IN POMPEII HAD “PEREECT TEETH”.’5 The beginnings of widespread modern dental problems were first noticed among the wealthy, not surprisingly because they were people who could afford lavish helpings of sugar. Though Elizabeth I’s problems (and those of her prosperous subjects) were conspicuous, they paled when compared to the dental difficulties of French royalty and aristocracy. Their dental problems can even be seen today in the form of French portraiture.

  In 1701, Hyacinthe Rigaud painted a lavish formal portrait of the 63-year-old King Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’. It is a dazzling, sumptuous display of royal power, draped in all the appropriate symbols of wealth and regal authority. This small, bald man actually looks tall, his head engulfed by a huge wig of curly hair. The artist’s skills and artifice, however, could do nothing with the King’s mouth and cheeks. Louis was ‘a ruler with not a tooth in his head’. Louis XIV had lost all his teeth by the age of forty, despite a personal retinue of medical staff providing the best of contemporary medical and dental care. Though they monitored the King’s general well-being, they paid no attention to his consumption of sugar. Neither was Louis alone in his toothlessness; dental decay and tooth loss were common throughout Louis’ glittering court, much more so indeed than among his poorer subjects. Acute observers noted that the poorest of street urchins – i.e. those with no access to costly, sugary foodstuffs and luxuries – seemed to have better teeth than their social superiors. In the words of Colin Jones, ‘Empty mouths were a fact of adult life of Europe’s Old Regime of Teeth . . .�
�6 As sugar spread lower down the French social scale, so, too, did dental problems.

  The French mixed sugar with their chocolate, coffee, tea and lemonade, and their cooks heaped it in profusion into their foods and delicacies. In polite and courtly circles, drinking and eating these sugary concoctions became rituals of polite and fashionable behaviour. Social fashion compounded personal taste and dictated the increasing enjoyment of sugar. All this (plus the growing addiction to tobacco) created widespread dental problems among the French. Again, the evidence is stark, and not merely in the portraits of the rich and powerful. Archaeologists working in French graveyards have found very different evidence from modern researchers at Pompeii; French teeth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were rotten.7 The dental problems of France’s ruling elites remain most vividly on display to this day in contemporary portraits. Like Rigaud’s picture of Louis XIV, any number of later paintings of the rich and famous rarely showed the sitter’s teeth, largely because they were so sparse or rotten, although it is also true that contemporary artistic conventions dictated strict facial postures and mannerisms. Smiling was a sign of vulgarity and low life, laughing even more so, an indication of those passions that were best kept from public view.

  In the course of the eighteenth century, however, the emergence of a new sensibility led to a marked stylistic change, and a growing acceptance that smiling – even the revelation of white teeth – was an acceptable social trait, both in public and on canvas. For that to happen, however, the skills of a new breed of dentists were required, men able to preserve teeth, to heighten their whiteness – men who could enable their patients to smile in public. Such skills – even in their basic eighteenth-century form – were beyond the reach of all but the richest members of society. Even then, there were limits to what could be achieved. They were struggling against the rising consumption of sugar.