By Joel Denker
The counterman plunges a three-foot long stalk of sugar cane into an opening of a juicing machine, which looks like a large metal cube. The apparatus grinds away and juice flows from the spout into the waiting glass. My wife and I were sampling sugar cane juice in an eatery in the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey. Many customers of Latin heritage came to Play Ball to satisfy their longing for this sweet, refreshing “guarapo.”
How many of us connect our everyday granulated sugar with this primordial, bamboo-like stem? The journey of sugar from sap to its varied shapes, forms, and colors begins with cane.
If you are like me when I started work on this story, you are probably puzzled about where the sugar saga began. Not, as some might think, in the Caribbean or Latin America – they were a much later stage in its travels. The tropical grass, as it classified by botanists, journeyed from the wild to the garden in the Pacific Ocean region. The aboriginals of New Guinea, many scholars believe, domesticated cane sometime between 8000 and 4000 B.C. They probably took pieces of the stalks that were the sweetest, chewiest, and juiciest and planted them.
Sugar cane appeared in India around 500 B.C. “There is a kind of concreted honey . . . found in reeds in India . . . like in consistence to salt, and brittle to be broken between the teeth, as salt is,” the Greek botanist Dioscorides reported. The word “sugar” derives from the Sanskrit sakkhara, or gravelly, and “candy” comes from khanda, pieces of sugar.
Consuming sugar, Indian physicians instructed, was invigorating. Sucking sugar cane juice, one authority wrote, “increases the semen.”
The Arabs found the Persians, whom they conquered in the 7th century A.D., growing the “sweet reed.” As they occupied new lands, the invaders transplanted the crop and introduced methods of planting and manufacturing sugar. “Sugar followed the Koran,” it was said. By the 10th century, settlers in Syria, Sicily, Spain, and North Africa were harvesting large fields of cane. In Egypt, a superlative sweet was produced from the plant grown in the Nile Delta. Simone Sigoli, who visited Egypt during the Middle Ages, called its sugar “the best in the world, white as snow, hard as stone.”
The Arabs had accomplished a major feat. They had taken sugar from the East to the Christian West. They carried it to the Mediterranean, an inhospitable place for a tropical plant. In Spain, which the Moors occupied early in the 8th century and held for 800 years, settlers constructed an ingenious irrigation system to water cane.
During sugar’s long march, the Europeans had stood on the sidelines. This was to change. A turning point was the Crusades (1046-1272), when the Christian adventurers got their first impressions of the peculiar plant. Albert van Aachen remembers their exposure to sugar in what is now Lebanon: “In the fields of the plains of Tripoli can be found in abundance a honey reed called zuchra; the people are accustomed to suck enthusiastically on these reeds, delighting themselves with their beneficial juices. . . .”
A brisk sugar trade developed between East and West. Trafficking in sugar and spices, Venice dominated this commerce.
Now that conical loaves of sugar were arriving on the Continent, Europeans had to figure out how best to enjoy the peculiar product. They learned much from the Arabs, who were not only expert cultivators but also gifted cooks and confectioners.
In the Arab world, sugar was looked on as a distinct flavoring, a spice like cinnamon or cloves. Sugar infused sauces in savory dishes of meat and chicken. “Now mince red meat with seasoning and make into cabobs,” a recipe in the Baghdad Cookery Book (1226), which influenced medieval cuisine, told readers. “When the saucepan is boiling, throw in the cabobs. Take sweet almonds . . . and add to sauce pan. Sweeten with sugar.”
The whiter the grains of sugar the more the Arabs cherished them. Crystalline sugar, an Arab poet wrote, “flashed and gleams, like light personified.” An emblem of purity and holiness, sugar was invested with spiritual power.
The Europeans imitated the Arabs, who were supplanting honey with sugar. The royalty and nobility shunned honey in favor of the more prestigious sweetener. Honey preserves, the seventeenth century writer Olivier de Serrer said, “are opportunely used when people of moderate standing call. . . . Preserves made with sugar . . . are reserved for the most honorable people.”
Inventive Arabs used sugar in combination with other flavorings to mold new sweets. They fashioned candies redolent of roses and violets. Seventeenth century writer Sir Hugh Platt in his book, Delights for Ladies, suggested pouring sugar syrup on roses and then letting them dry on the bush.
Flowered confections added another ostentatious flair to festive gatherings of the rich and titled. Considered digestifs to comfort the stomach, they were often served at the end of a banquet. King Edward I’s household, anthropologist Sidney Mintz notes, consumed at least 1900 pounds of rose, and 300 pounds of violet, sugar during his reign.
Sugared fruits, shipped from Spain and Portugal, also gained popularity. Pieces of orange and lemon peel were boiled in sugar syrup, an Arab technique. Whole lemons, oranges, and limes were also sugar-coated.
European physicians, following Arab tradition, also prescribed sugar as a curative. “Sugar water alone, also with cinnamon, pomegranate, and quince juice, is good for a cough and a fever, “ Tabernaemontanus recommended.
Sugar was still a plaything of the leisure classes. To reach a larger market, a greater volume of the sweet, a less expensive commodity, would have to be produced. The feverish pursuit of this goal by the Europeans is the theme of the next installment.
Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/
