Sweet as
Ray McVinnie
We have an inherent liking for sweet tastes.
In ancient Greek myths the food of the gods was nectar or ambrosia, which was characterised by sweetness. It is interesting to note that the ancestor of the word ‘sweet’ is the Latin suavis, which is the verb that means ‘to persuade or make pleasing to’. Sweetness has always been associated with goodness or desirability. In English we call someone we love ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’.
Sugar is not necessary to us as a food; it is a food of preference. This preference is so strong that after the 16th century, when sugar was widely available, it became what some would term an addiction.
The word ‘sugar’ is an Arabic imitation of the Sanskrit word karkara, meaning ‘gravel’ and the word ‘candy’ comes from the Sanskrit word for sugar itself, khandakah.
Sugar cane or saccharum officinarum is a giant grass that originated in the South Pacific and spread to Asia. It was first refined into sugar in India about 2500 years ago. Refined white sugar crystals are 99 percent sucrose. They come from sugar cane or sugar beet. There is no way of telling by taste whether sugar is made from cane or beet. Other sources of crystalline sugar are trees such as the maple or palms, including the coconut, toddy, date or palmyra palms. These trees produce sugars with a distinctive flavour and appearance.
The first shipment of sugar to England arrived in 1319. Too expensive to use as a general foodstuff, it was used like a spice as flavouring, often to make palatable the unpleasant mixtures used as medicine by medieval doctors. As Europeans explored the world, the tropical habitat needed to grow sugar cane was expanded. So, by the 15th century although sugar was still expensive, it was used more widely. By the 18th century, when European colonial rule was at its height in the West Indies, sugar consumption grew hugely with the middle classes using it by the pound. Labour needed for the West Indian sugar plantations was provided by the slave trade with Africa.
In 1747 Prussian chemist Andreas Marggraf developed a process of extracting sugar from beets. This process accounts for about 40 percent of sugar produced today.
Since 1900 sugar production has increased 700 percent, an increase unmatched by any other major crop.
Cane sugar is made by heating the green juice with lime (the chemical) to clarify and crystallise it. It is then spun in a centrifuge to get rid of the syrupy molasses, the distinctive tasting by-product of the sugar refining process. This process is repeated until almost pure sucrose is produced. The sucrose is then made colourless by using granular carbon to absorb undesirable molecules and then filtering out the impurities.
Finally, sugar is carefully crystallised into individual uniform white crystals of the sucrose or white sugar with which we are familiar.
According to Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking, Collier 1984), brown sugars are a mixture of white sugar and molasses and are made in the refinery by adding “... special syrups that have undergone the ideal amount of browning to refined, redissolved sucrose. This mixture is then crystallised, and the fine molasses film, instead of being washed off, is left on the crystals. The result is pure sucrose crystals with a thin coating that gives them a characteristic flavour, colour and moistness. Truly ‘raw’ unrefined sugar contains soil, microbes and other contaminants, and the FDA classifies it ‘unfit for direct use in food’.”
Turbinado or demerara sugar is a natural unrefined product. It is made by stopping the refining process as soon as the sugar has been crystallised, then steam-washing the crystals in a centrifuge.
Storing sugar
Store sugar in an airtight container. Moist sugars will dry out and go hard and lumpy if exposed to the air. This can be remedied by tipping it into a bowl and covering with a damp cloth until moist again. Re-store in an airtight container.
Which sugar to use?
Alw 
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