Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 - (Page 58)

Sweet success The world’s favorite sweetener has a history that cannot be sugarcoated It’s so much a part of our daily lives that we no longer give it a thought. It’s in those small packets that we add to our Starbuck’s or PJ’s coffee. It fluffs out all over you from the beignets at Café du Monde. We gobble it down as pralines or as frosted breakfast cereals. From our first sip in the morning to the last tisane of the evening before bed, sugar is so much a part of out lives that we don’t give it a thought. If we spill salt, we have a whole ritual to save ourselves from bad luck. Sugar, though, has no such formality. It’s readily available and readily lost — we scarcely give it a thought. Auguste Cochin, would disagree. He said, “the story of a lump of sugar is a whole lesson in political economy, in politics, and also in morality.” When speaking of sugar, it all begins with cane, stalks that look very much like any other grass in the savanna. Some variants of it still grow wild in the fields of New Guinea, waving in the tropical winds. Tall and segmented like bamboo with its reed-like stalk filled with sweet sap, Saccharum robustum is thought to be the precursor of the other species of perennial grasses in the Andropogoneae group of the large family of grasses known as Gramineae. Along with Saccharum spontaneum, which grows in wild from eastern North Africa through New Guinea, these wild plants are the origin of the main cultivated sugar cane species we know today. Cane has been known for at least 2,200 years and is a curiously adaptable plant. A perennial with a deep root system, it can flourish from year to year and grow upwards of 15 feet tall. It is tolerant of a wide range of soil conditions and can grow on both hillsides and on flat land. No one knows whether by man or by weather or by spontaneous generation the cane moved, but cane spread from New Guinea. There is evidence that early on cane was growing in India in the area north of the Bengal state and possibly also in China. It was in India, though, where the sugarbearing reed gains importance and it there that its story begins. Cane is one of the first plants to inspire man to technology. It was discovered that the sweetness of the plant could be concentrated by crushing it and then boiling it rather than relying on chewing it to release its juice. Buddhist literature refers to sugar cane juice being extracted with a machine as early as 200 A.D. The words for sugar in the European languages confirm the substance’s long connection with the Indian subcontinent. The word sugar is derived from sacchari, which means sugar in Prakrit. In the Sanskrit original it was called sharkara, from which we get the Latin saccharum, and the Greek saccharon both of which turn up on the 21stcentury table as saccharine and may be at the origins of the word rum in English, French, and in Spanish (rum, rhum and ron respectively). Most of the European languages take their words from the Persian shakar and the Arabic sukkur or sukkar as many Europeans first became aware of sugar following the Crusades when European knights came into contact with the culinary riches of the Middle East. Ancient Europeans sweetened their foods with honey or concentrated grape must, but they had heard of sugar. Discorides, in the first century, remarked, “There exists a type of solid honey called saccharon that one finds in the reeds of India and Arabia Felix. It resembles salt in it consistency and cracks when chewed.” Darius, emperor of the Persians in the 6th century also knew of the “reed that bears honey without bees.” He brought the art of sugar production to the Persians from an expedition to the Indus Valley. The Persians would maintain a monopoly on the sweetener in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. Sugar was slow moving in its transit. Unlike chiles, which took over the taste of the world in less than a century, sugar took 700 years to make its way from the Indian subcontinent to the shores of the Mediterranean where it was firmly implanted by 700 A.D. Sugar historian J.H. Galloway reminds us that the several hundred years of pax islamica, when the Mediterranean was virtually an Islamic sea, created a climate in which cane and its cultivation flourished around the Mediterranean basin. It grew in such far-flung Muslim-controlled places as Egypt, Cyprus, Sicily, and southern Spain and was highly sought after by northern European aristocrats who used it first medicinally and eventually for its sweetening properties. Sugar caravans criss-crossed Europe where the sweetener was known as Indian salt, Asian honey, Arabian juice, or reed honey. It would be another 700 years after its introduction to the eastern Mediterranean before cane cultivation reached the Atlantic coast. Columbus brought sugar to his “New World” on his second voyage in 1493 and attempted to establish cane 58 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Summer 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs & Beyond Katrina The Historic New Orleans Collection After The Flood Faubourg Marigny: The Creole “Suburb” Preserving New Orleans Jazz, One Generation at a Time: Conversation & Music with Tom Sancton Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Architecture Baton Rouge Photographs, 1863-1910 Jazz Notes The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Louisiana Association of Museums Nature of the “Beast” Louisiana State Museum Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

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