Four Uses of Sugar
Discover the ways sugar was used after the fifteenth century
SUGAR TRANSFORMED ENGLISH SOCIETY
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By 1650, elites and the nobility were compulsive sugar eaters
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By 1800, sugar had become a necessity
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By 1900, one fifth of people’s daily consumption of calories was sugar.
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Sugar was used as:
Decoration
Preservative
Medicine
Spice/Sweetener
1. Decoration
Sugar was a constituent ingredient in the kitchens of the rich and used as decoration at banquets from the fifteenth century. It was mixed with other ingredients such as almonds to create marzipan, as well as moulded into sculptures, also known as subtleties, and were used to display the host’s wealth, power and status; the ability to be able to afford luxuries from the New World.
For example, the sixteenth century saw the rise of ‘sugar banquets’ held in the Netherlands. Those of high society would compete with each other by displaying magnificent sugar sculptures on their table. Confectioners often mixed these sugar sculptures with other elements such as wax, plaster, textile and later even porcelain.
As sugar remained a luxury up until the 1850s and sugar’s decorative purposes remained at least initially, exclusive to the upper classes.
An Early Modern Sugar Banquet. © The Getty Research Institute
2. Preservative
Sugar was an important preservative in the early modern period.
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In an early modern kitchen, there were no fridges or freezers with no way to keep food fresh. Food had to be preserved with spices, sugar and salt or pickled with vinegar to make it last throughout the year. This was particularly important with seasonal food such as meat and vegetables. Sugar was mixed with other flavours to conceal and disguise the taste of other foodstuff.
The most obvious example is a delicious strawberry jam! Sugar was mixed with the rotting fruit and boiled together to become a sweet jam, and thereby avoiding throwing away excess food and preserving seasonable produce for use throughout the year!
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Would you rather the taste of rotting meat or one that is concealed with sugar and spice?
3. Medicine
Another initial use of sugar that was eventually phased out was sugar’s medical properties!
In the middle of the twelfth century, the English used sugar as a treatment for a fever, coughs, pectoral ailments, chapped lips, stomach diseases, and more. This usage continued and grew until the fifteenth century when at this point, sugar was a common medicine for a wide range of ailments.
The medicinal attributes of sugar were expounded upon by famed medicinal figures who expressed a favourable opinion of the ingredient. For example, Albertus Magnus in his De Vegetabilibus (1250-55) argued:
‘It is by nature moist and warm, as proved by its sweetness and becomes dryer with age. Sugar is soothing and solving its soothes hoarseness and pains in the breast causes thirst and sometimes vomiting but on the whole it is good for the stomach if it is in good condition and free of bile’
- Albertus Magnus
Fun Fact
Sugar was so useful to the medical profession, the expression: ‘Like an apothecary without sugar’ was popularly said to mean utter desperation and helplessness.
From the late sixteenth century, medicinal references to sugar occurred commonly in English texts.
Its use as a medicine became less prescribed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its medical role steadily diminished as it use transformed into that of a sweetener and preservative and a source of new calories!
4. Spice/Sweetener
When sugar was first introduced to Europe in 1100, it was primarily used as a spice- similar to pepper or nutmeg. It was added to sweeten recipes or used in combination with other spices.
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The earliest reference to sugar as a spice/flavouring dates from the twelfth century.
Evidence of its use is found in the records of royal income and expenditure for Henry II (1154-1189) as well as in 1226, where Henry III requested the Mayor of Winchester to purchase 3lb of Egyptian sugar on his behalf. 60 years later in 1287, Edward I’s royal household used 677lb of sugar, 300lb of violet sugar and 1900lb of rose sugar.
Sugar was more commonly consumed from the sixteenth century, yet only reserved for the rich who used to it to sweeten their food. Its use as a sweetener also came to the fore in association with three other exotic ingredients: tea, coffee and chocolate. Sugar was used to improve the taste of these hot beverages and is arguable the cause their success.
As sugar became more and more fashionable, consumers started to include the additional sweetener when ‘taking tea’. When hot chocolate was first introduced to Europe, it was preferably drank as a spicy hot beverage, however with the increasing popularity of sugar, it revolutionised how people consumed hot chocolate, altering it to the sweet taste we know today.
Two Ladies and an Officer Seated at Tea by the Dutch School (1715). ©Victoria and Albert Museum.
Over the early modern period, sugar was used for a variety of different reasons; for its medicinal benefits to its decorative attributes. Follow on the story, to discover the flourishing sugar industry in the eighteenth century.
