Ingredient: Sugar - History
Category: Sugars & Syrups
Season: All
Sugar (the word stems from the Sanskrit sharkara) consists of a class of edible crystalline substances including sucrose, lactose, and fructose.
Human taste-buds interpret its flavour as sweet.
Sugar as a basic food carbohydrate primarily comes from sugar cane and from sugar beet, but also appears in fruit, honey, sorghum, sugar maple (in maple syrup), and in many other sources.
It forms the main ingredient in many confectionery and candies.
Excessive consumption of sugar has been associated with increased incidences of type-2 diabetes, obesity and tooth-decay.
Humans most commonly use sucrose as their sugar of choice for altering the flavour and properties (such as mouth feel, preservation, and texture) of beverages and food.
Commercially produced table sugar comes either from sugar cane or from sugar beet.
Manufacturing and preparing food may involve other sugars, including palm sugar and fructose, generally obtained from corn (maize) or from fruit.
Sugar may dissolve in water to form a syrup.
A great many foods exist which principally contain dissolved sugar. Generically known as "syrups", they may also have other more specific names such as "honey" or "molasses".
At first most sugar in Britain went into tea, but later confectionery and chocolates became extremely popular.
Many Britons (especially children) also ate jams.
Suppliers commonly sold sugar in solid cones and consumers required a sugar nip, a pliers-like tool, to break off pieces.
Sugar-cane quickly exhausts the soil in which it grows, and planters pressed larger islands with fresher soil into production in the nineteenth century.
In the last century, for example:
Cuba rose to become the richest land in the Caribbean (with sugar as its dominant crop) because it formed the only major island land-mass free of mountainous terrain.
Instead, nearly three-quarters of its land formed a rolling plain — ideal for planting crops.
Cuba also prospered above other islands, because Cubans used better methods when harvesting the sugar crops: they adopted modern milling-methods such as water-mills, enclosed furnaces, steam-engines, and vacuum-pans. All these technologies increased productivity.
After the Haïtian Revolution established the independent state of Haiti, sugar production in that country declined and Cuba replaced Saint-Domingue as the world's largest producer.
Long established in Brazil, sugar-production spread to other parts of South America, as well as to newer European colonies in Africa and in the Pacific, where it became especially important in Fiji.
In Colombia, the planting of sugar started very early on, and entrepreneurs imported many African slaves to cultivate the fields.
The industrialization of the Colombian industry started in 1901 with the establishment of the first steam-powered sugar mill by Santiago Eder.
Beet sugar
In 1747 the German chemist Andreas Marggraf identified sucrose in beet-root.
This discovery remained a mere curiosity for some time, but eventually Marggraf's student Franz Achard built a sugar beet-processing factory at Cunern in Silesia (in present-day Poland), under the patronage of King Frederick William III of Prussia (reigned 1797 - 1840).
While never profitable, this plant operated from 1801 until it suffered destruction during the Napoleonic Wars (ca 1802 - 1815).
Napoleon, cut off from Caribbean imports by a British blockade, and at any rate not wanting to fund British merchants, banned imports of sugar in 1813.
The beet-sugar industry that emerged in consequence grew, and today sugar-beet provides approximately 30% of world sugar production.
In the developed countries, the sugar industry relies on machinery, with a low requirement for manpower.
A large beet-refinery producing around 1,500 tonnes of sugar a day needs a permanent workforce of about 150 for 24-hour production
Mechanisation
Beginning in the late 18th century, the production of sugar became increasingly mechanized.
The first steam engine powered sugar-mill was in Jamaica, in 1768, and soon after, steam replaced direct firing as the source of process heat.
In 1813 the British chemist Edward Charles Howard invented a method of refining sugar that involved boiling the cane juice not in an open kettle, but in a closed vessel heated by steam and held under partial vacuum.
At reduced pressure, water boils at a lower temperature, and this development both saved fuel and reduced the amount of sugar lost through caramelisation.
Further gains in fuel-efficiency came from the multiple-effect evaporator, designed by the African-American engineer Norbert Rillieux (perhaps as early as the 1820s, although the first working model dates from 1845).
This system consisted of a series of vacuum pans, each held at a lower pressure than the previous one.
The vapours from each pan served to heat the next, with minimal heat wasted. Today, many industries use multiple-effect evaporators for evaporating water.
The process of separating sugar from molasses also received mechanical attention: David Weston first applied the centrifuge to this task in Hawaii in 1852.
As a food
Originally a luxury, sugar eventually became sufficiently cheap and common to influence standard cuisine.
Britain and the Caribbean islands have cuisines where the use of sugar became particularly prominent.
Sugar forms a major element in confectionery and in desserts.
Cooks use it as a food preservative as well as for sweetening.
|