Alcademics.com

Primitive Sugar Production

In studying sugarcane and sugar, we've looked at its biology, origins, spread to the West, and its previous nefarious association with forced labor. (Go here for the project index.)

In today's post we'll look at how sugarcane was processed in the olden days to make cyrstallized sugar. Most of this information comes from the sources cited here.

Sugarcane is first harvested. This was (and still is in many parts of the world) done by hand. First the cane fields are burned to remove excess vegetation and to kill off things like rodents and snakes, then it is cut. I believe that when using modern machines to harvest cane they don't need to burn the fields first. 

Then the watery juice must be extracted from the cane. A while back I purchased a stick of cane and tried to get the juice out myself. It was a pretty massive failure. 

Sugar cane is chopped, pressed, pounded, or soaked to remove the liquid from it. I don't know how the soaking method might work though - anybody have an idea? I am guessing the fibers are shredded and it is washed with lots of water to get the sugar to separate from the fibers. Tequila (post-baking) is shredded and washed to release its sugars so perhaps that's what my book meant by 'soaking.'

Anyway, then the sugary liquid is heated. This removes water and concentrates the sucrose that eventually becomes supersaturated in the solution. (This is the opposite of adding sugar to water. At first the crystals dissappear into solution until it can't hold any more, then crystals will no longer go into solution. In sugar production, they take an un-saturated sugar/water liquid and remove the water until it becomes saturated.) Crystals then begin to appear in the liquid and then must be separated out.

The hot crystal-containing liquid was then poured into conical containers with a hole at the pointy part on the bottom. As it cooled, the solid sugar would stick to the sides and the liquid molasses would drip out the bottom.  What was left was a solid cone of sugar. 

White sugar was preferred to (and more expensive than) the brown stuff that forms naturally. One method to create a whiter product was to put wet clay on top of the cone. Water would drip from the clay through the cone and wash it. This was called "clayed" sugar and was one of many categories used to describe the quality of the sugar, along with muscovado, refined, and double-refined. Sugars from different regions were considered superior to others: Brazilian sugar was once considered inferior to sugar from Jamaica and Barbados, for example. 

The liquid that remains at the end of the process is molasses. It still contains sucrose but not enough to crystalize. But as we know, it can still be fermented and distilled into rum...  

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

Sugarcane and Slavery

Boy is this ever a topic I'd rather avoid! However there is no denying the historic link between sugarcane production.

We were tracing the spread of sugarcane and the sugar industry from the Old World to the new. But slave labor used to harvest and process sugarcane began long before sugarcane was brought to the Caribbean.  

Before sugarcane made its way to the Atlantic islands off the coast of Spain and Portugal, slave labor was used in Crete, Cyprus, and Morocco. Warfare and plague had diminished the local labor force so slaves were 'needed' to harvest it.

Slavery and sugar remained tied for a very long time, most notably so in the New World. 11 million African slaves were exported from their homelands. Six million of them went to work making sugar- the most of any profession. When the Haitian Revolution occurred near 1800, ending slavery there, it cut off 43 percent of Europe’s sugar supply.

One cool note: female slaves were often the distillers of rum in the islands. 

Abolition

(Anti-Saccharites parody cartoon.)

The abolition movement in England linked sugar to slavery, and encouraged people to boycott sugar. The movement was largely lead by women, who purchased the sugar for the home. They were known as anti-saccharites. 

1807 the British House of Commons made the slave trade- but not slavery- illegal.  It wasn't until the 1830s before it was by British law. 

The Emancipation Proclamation that finally freed the American slaves took effect in 1865.

After the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1884, all Caribbean sugar was made by non-forced labor.

Sugar After Slavery

After slavery ended, new labor was needed to harvest sugar cane, as many former slaves weren't about to take it up again.

Laborers came from many places, but especially from China and India. They worked as  indentured servants, paying off their ride to the new island for several years. Indentured workers were called coolies.

This and other policies kept former slaves from buying land and becoming economically equal to whites.  

After 1869, Trinidad granted small parcels of land to people who completed their indenturship. They bought up 23,000 acres between 1885 and 1895.

On Mauritius, nearly half a million Indian workers imported between 1834 and 1910. At one point they produced 9.4 percent of the worlds sugar supply, mostly providing it to Britain.

Though it was far from smooth sailing, eventually things worked out. According to Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott:

 “Mauritius is an anomaly in the colonized sugar world. Its minorities, Creole and white, have accepted its Indianness- at 68 percent of the population, it has the largest concentration of Indian outside India- and a succession of Indo-Mauritian leaders have governed. An elite minority speaks English, the country’s official language, while everyone else speaks French-derived Creole. Hindu and Muslim holidays are observed, and since 1877, the Mauitian currency has been its rupee. Mauritius’s unique circumstances and the dynamics of its society have enabled its people to unite in racial harmony. Ironically, they have embraced sugar as their common denominator.” 

In Hawaii, the indentured laborers were Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino. Chinese workers were later banned from immigrating because the powers that be felt there were too many who stuck around after their indenture time expired. 

What fascinates me about the post-slavery indentured servant era of sugar production is the racial and cultural makeup of Caribbean islands that results from it. There are interesting mixes of whites, blacks, and Asian/Indian populations that vary depending on the island. The cross-cultural pollination over many years has lead to some fascinating local customs, celebrations, and cuisines that we think of as unique local island traditions when we visit on vacation. You go to Martinique and it's all very French and people drink champagne on the beach. You go to Trinidad and eat roti and other Indian food for every meal. As it turns out, those traditions developed due to the unique mix of people from diverse parts of the world, united under a shared history of sugarcane.  

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

 

The Spread of Sugarcane in the New World

When we last left off looking at sugarcane's spread from India/Indonesia to the rest of the world, the sugar industry had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal, including Madeira and the Canary islands. 

During this time, the powers in Europe were developing a taste for sugar. 

Sugar was only known in Europe after the 8th century. This is about the time that references to growing cane in the Mediterranean appear. Molasses reached England by late 1200s, coming from Sicily. 

King Henry III (in the 13th century) ordered three pounds of sugar “if so much is to be had,” as it was rare luxury item.

But by 1319 one Venetian trader carried 100,000 pounds of it to London. The sweet tooth for sugar developed fast. 

Starting in 1470, European countries radically changed how sugar was produced. They imported crude sugar and refined it locally. This changed the power dynamic – refineries had power and profits - and plays into how the sugar colonies in the New World were treated.

Sugar's Voyage to the New World

Columbus carried sugarcane from the Canary islands to New World on his second voyage to Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1493. However they were more concerned with finding gold than farming, so the sugarcane failed.

Later they brought in experts from the Canary Islands to help get it established. It was first grown in the new world in Santo Domingo (though it failed a few times first) and was first shipped back to Europe in 1516.

Portugal soon got into the sugarcane farming business as well. Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon Portugal by 1526 in large quantities. The Portuguese ruled the 1500s in terms of sugarcane dominance.  

In early 1500s, Spain conquered the Mexican mainland, and used the Caribbean islands more as protected harbors along shipping routes than as sugar growing islands. From 1580 to 1650 (when the English and French got into the game on smaller islands) the Caribbean didn’t produce all that much sugar for export. 

In 1625 Brazil was still supplying nearly all of Europe with sugar, but when English colonies got into full swing they drove Portugal out of the Northern European trade areas.

Until the mid-1600s, the British navy drink was "beer sometimes supplanted by brandy." Then the British started making rum. Barbados was settled in 1627 and sugar was grown there. Then after the 1655 British conquest of Jamaica, they started replacing the  brandy ration with Jamaican rum. (Rum is distilled from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production.)

In 1731 rum became part of the official ration all the way up until Black Tot Day in 1970. Navy rum didn't just provide tasty nutrients, it killed bacteria in the drinking water. 

Though the Portuguese, Spanish, and British were growing sugarcane, French prices were the best in Europe. Unable to compete, England just supplied its own needs from its islands, keeping pace with increasing demands. 

As we touched on before sugarcane was even grown in the New World, England  eventually forbade colonies from refining their own sugar. This kept the sugar colonies“infantilized and dependent.” Europe kept all the control, kept wealthy landowners in power in the colonies. The sugar colonies were to be used, not respected. 

In the early 1600s, the British, Dutch and French all established Caribbean plantations. Years later in the 1800s, Cuba and Brazil were the major producers. Between these eras, sugar production increased as people got a taste for it. The technology to grow and refine sugar didn't change much in this era, but consumer demand did. 

In the next post we'll look at sugar production and the labor used to do the work. 

*Bonus fun fact* The West India Docks in Jamaica had gang members with the best names: The River Pirates, Night Plunderers, Heavy Horsemen, Scuffle-Hunters, and Mud Larks.

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

 

The Spread of Sugarcane in the Old World

In the last post we looked at what sugarcane is. Now we'll see where it came from and how it traveled around the world.

 

Sugarcane is a tall grass native to the region of the India and Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated in New Guinea, perhaps independently in Indonesia.

 

In 325 BC Alexander the Great’s general Nearchus said, “A reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit.”

 

Around the same time, sugar was referred to as khanda, from which we probably derive the word candy.

 

In China there are references to sugar in 286 BC. Sugar spread with Buddhism and the Buddha was even referred to as the “King of Sugarcane.”

 

Sugar loaves were probably first produced in India 2000 years ago. Sugar loaves are hardened in ceramic molds or cones from which the more liquid molasses was drained, leaving behind the dark-brown, crystalline loaf.

 

Dioscorides (circa 40—90 AD) wrote, “There is a kind of concentrated honey, called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, like in consistence to salt, and brittle to be broken between the teeth, as salt is. It is good for the belly and the stomach being dissolved in water and so drank, helping the pained bladder and the reins.” This shows he was familiar with the crystalline form of sugar. 

 

Sugar making in Egypt probably came before Arab conquest. The Arabs were experts at irrigation and used their skills to grow sugarcane and spread it to new places. Arabs spread it to the Mediterranean, Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, and Spain. 

 

During the First Crusade (1096-99) Christians discovered Arab cane farms. Soon they were growing and transferring sugar cane to new locations.  

 

From the Canary Islands it traveled to the New World. We'll pick up sugar's spread to the West in the next post. 

 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

 

Sugar Spirit: What is Sugarcane?

In the Sugar Spirit project, we're going to look at sugar's history and production, but first we should establish what sugar and sugarcane are. 

Sugar and Sucrose

When we talk about sugar, we mean table sugar, or sucrose. 

To chemists, sugar refers to a class of 'edible crystalline carbohydrates' that also includes fructose and lactose. But most of us aren't chemists so we won't use the word 'sucrose' so much as just 'sugar.'

Except for now: Sucrose occurs in all green plants. It is a plant food manufactured photosynthetically from carbon dioxide and water.

For table sugar, the plants harvested to make it are sugarcane and sugar beets. We'll get to sugar beets later.

(Sugarcane harvest demo in Guatemala.)

Sugarcane

Sugarcane is a large grass of the family Gramineae. There are six known species. 

The most widely grown is saccharum officinarum, which depending on your source is called “noble cane” or “sugar of the apothecaries.” Its stalks that grow as thick as two inches, and 12-15 feet high.

Sugarcane is a subtropical and tropical crop requiring large amount of water and labor. In farming, it is propagated asexually from cuttings of the stem. It becomes ripe in the dry season after anywhere from 6 to 18 months depending on the climate. 

In the next post, we'll begin to look at the spread of sugarcane from the Indian Subcontinent to the rest of the world. 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

 

Announcing the Sugar Spirit Project

Today marks the launch of the second Sponsored Project on Alcademics: The Sugar Spirit. The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. 

Rum is made from any sugarcane derivative and is the real sugar spirit, but in this research project I'll primarily be studying sugar itself.

In writing about cocktails, we often come across recipes calling for different forms of sugar: demerara, muscovado, evaporated organic cane, superfine, etc. I've wanted to study the differences in those sugars for quite a while now so I'm thankful to Bacardi Rum for giving me the support to do so. 

Along the way, I'll be looking at the history of sugarcane, its byproducts (including molasses, of course), modern and historical production methods, forms and uses, and much more. 

I've put up an outline of future topics for discussion and experimentation. The outline is on the project index page, which can be reached by following this link or clicking the Sugar Spirit project logo above from any blog page you see it on. 

This is going to get pretty nerdy, and I know that's how you like it. 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

Tales of the Cocktail Seminar: Let's Not Sugar-Coat It

These are some notes from the seminar: Let's Not Sugar Coat It at Tales of the Cocktail. 

• Sugar Beet Syrup: 2 pounds of sugar beets, shredded, 32 oz water: In a pot combine sugar beets and water, over a med heat cook the beets until mixture becomes thick. Remove from heat, strain through fine mesh, discard solids. Should have the consistency of honey. 
• Stone fruit: Great example of fructose
• Rickey Ricardo: 1.5 oz Hendrick's Gin, 1 oz Cantaloupe juice, 3 oz Coconut Water soda, 1/2 lemon, 1 oz Lemon Juice: In collins glass, squeeze and drop half lemon into glass, then add ingredients, fill with coco soda. This drink doesn't taste tart, yet doesn't taste sweet. 
• Do not muddle citrus too much: It gets bitter. 
• If you cut a fruit and leave it, it won't oxidize that much. If you juice it first or shred it, it will oxidize faster. This is due to the sugars. 
• Even in Washington, DC, you can tend bees. 83% full is when you harvest your honey. 
• Situation Rum After-Hours: 1.5 oz Chairmans reserve spice rum, 1 oz lime juice, 1 oz honey ginger syrup, .5 oz coconut espuma, pinch lime zest (so tht coconut doesn't smell like feet). Shake/strain/foam.
• Honey can be damaged by overheating fructose, which is half of the sugars in normal honey, is especially delicate and burns easily. Honey contains protein from plants, so if heated it should be high heat for short period of time.  (Think of cooking meat, how it changes/shrinks.)
• Honey is a very pure form of energy, 64 calories per tablespoon.
• When you charge coconut milk (or anything with protein) with nitrogen, makes it expand and brings out its natural sweetness. 
• (Note: WOW!) Honey is actually an acid, with about the same pH of citrus. It is 3.42 pH. You have to dump a lot of honey in a drink to make it sweet. 
• Lighter honeys are milder in flavor than dark honeys. 
• Honey can be stored for 20 years! (But it's not good when it's old)
• Sugar is like an anti-freeze, so when making a sorbet/frozen things, you can't add too much sugar or it won't freeze.
• Stevia is a plant. You harvest it before it flowers. Can be used as a sugar substitute. Has a slower and longer finish than sugar. 
• Truvia brand is made from a part of the stevia plant. Popular in Japan.  
• Truvia is in Firefly Skinny Tea Vodka
• We tasted a raspberry mint lime drink with Truvia - tastes weird. The flavor of the fruit totally pops but you don't have the body, the texture/weight of sugar. I feel like this stuff could use a thickener/filler of some sort...

Simpler Syrup

In my latest post for FineCooking.com, I look again at simple syrup.

You may recall a few years ago I compared the spoilage time of simple syrup with different ratios (1:1, 2:1) and with a shot of vodka added as a  preservative.

Since then I've learned a couple of things. First off, you don't need to heat simple syrup to get it into a solution. 1:1 and 2:1 syrup will go into solution just by shaking the bottle of sugar and water. 3:1 syrup apparently will not go into solution without heat. The picture on this post is my attempts to try, repeatedly shaking the jar for three or four days. Some of the sugar always settles to the bottom.

Also, I learned that unheated simple syrup is more viscous than syrup made by heating.

Professional syrup maker Jennifer Colliau explains, “Sucrose is comprised of a fructose molecule and a glucose molecule bonded together. When you heat it with water, you begin the inversion process whereby the bonds are broken, and you end up with glucose-fructose syrup, also known as invert syrup. It takes a while to fully invert it, but heating it at all makes it partially invert. Sucrose is more viscous than either glucose or fructose. So cold-dissolved simple is more viscous.”

As with everything, simple syrup seems just that, until you start messing with it.