Sugarcane

Cane sugar was (probably) available in the West from the early centuries BCE – as some of the following descriptions attest – but evidently didn’t grow there and would have been treated as another spice brought over from the East.

Dioscorides mentions sugar, describing it as a kind of hardened honey found in reeds in India and Arabia, and Pliny made similar comments, adding that it was brittle to the teeth, but only used in medicine.¹⁴ Strabo also made an early reference to sugarcane in India: ‘He [Nearchus] says that reeds [sugarcane] yield honey, although there are no bees.’¹⁵ This implies knowledge of sugarcane even if it wasn’t cultivated in the West at that time. Eratosthenes (276–194 BCE) wrote about the same sweet reeds. So, a few centuries BCE sugar seems to have been known in the Graeco-Roman world, but not used much (it would have been expensive), and when it was, it seems mainly to have been used as a medicine. Sugar’s absence from Diocletian’s Price Edict and Justinian’s Digest seem to affirm the limited use of the time.

According to G. Watt, sugarcane wasn’t known in China until the second century BCE (despite its presence dating back long before that) and a man was sent to Bihar (in north-east India) in the early seventh century to learn the art of refining sugar, which was first developed in India.¹⁶ Watt commented that the ancient Sanskrit name for white sugar is sarkara, and that the word khanda, which means ‘to crush’, denotes sugar derived from sugarcane and has been adapted to the modern English ‘candy’. Marco Polo noted the production and export of sugar in China in the thirteenth century.¹⁷

Sugarcane needed to be crushed or ground to extract the juice, which was then boiled to concentrate the sucrose into a raw granular solid. Raw cane sugar is a brownish colour; further refining removed impurities and the black treacly molasses to provide a white crystalline product.

By the sixth century CE, or possibly earlier, sugarcane had reached Persia. The Byzantine Emperor Heraklios’ army found sugar amongst exotic eastern spices in the spoils of their victorious 627 CE Persian campaign. The Muslim conquest of Mesopotamia and then Persia in 642 CE accelerated the introduction of sugar to the West via the conquered lands of the caliphate, including North Africa, Spain and Sicily. Cane was being grown in Egypt by the eighth century. Furthermore, it had spread to Zanzibar by the tenth century.¹⁸ Sugarcane was found in medieval deposits at Quseir al-Qadim on the Red Sea.¹⁹ The Arab appetite and enthusiasm for sugar was phenomenal. In 1040, the Sultan of Cairo used 73 tons of sugar to celebrate the end of Ramadan, and sugar statues, trees and flowers were in abundance.²⁰

Sugar is common in European recipes from the thirteenth century. Sugar came from Sicily, Cyprus, Crete and Alexandria, among other places – and was very expensive, usually more so than pepper.²¹ One of the earliest recipes is from the Sion Manuscript, of the late thirteenth century, which used sugar as an ingredient in frumenty, a popular porridge dish.²² It appears in many dishes in The Forme of Cury (1390) and by that time was beginning to take the place of honey, though the two were still commonly used together, or as alternatives.²³ It came from the East via Damascus, Aleppo, Genoa and Venice, etc. Sometimes the source of the sugar was specified; in the recipe for Cawdel Ferry (a sweet pudding) ‘sugur cypre’ is mentioned – sugar had been cultivated in Cyprus since the tenth century CE:

Take flour of Payndemayn [white bread] and gode wyne. and drawe it togydre. Do therto a grete quantite of Sugur cypre. or hony clarified, and do therto safroun. boile it. and whan it is boiled, alye it up with zolkes of ayrenn [egg yolks]. and do therto salt and messe it forth. and lay theron sugur and powdour gyngur.