Saccharum officinarum (the noble cane of New Guinea) · S. barberi (the thin north Indian canes) · S. sinense (the Chinese canes) · with S. spontaneum and S. robustum as the wild ancestors from which all of them, and every modern commercial hybrid, descend
Origin: Three domestications across monsoon Asia: <em>Saccharum officinarum</em> in New Guinea, selected from the wild <em>S. robustum</em>; <em>S. barberi</em> on the Gangetic plain of northern India, where cane first met the technology of crystallisation; and <em>S. sinense</em> in southern China. Every cane grown commercially today is an interspecific hybrid bred from all of them
Sugar cane is a grass, and a giant one: a jointed perennial stem that may stand five metres high and store sucrose to something like a sixth of its own weight in the soft tissue between the fibres. It was domesticated in New Guinea, where Saccharum robustum grows wild along the river banks and where, by about eight thousand years ago, gardeners had selected from it the thick, soft, juicy, low-fibre canes of S. officinarum, the 'noble cane'. For the first six thousand years of that relationship there was no such thing as sugar. The cane was cut, peeled, and chewed, the sweet juice swallowed and the fibre spat out, and it was a garden crop, a hedge, a fence, and a gift, not a commodity. Two other domestications followed independently: the thin, hardy, cold-tolerant S. barberi canes of the Gangetic plain, and the S. sinense canes of southern China, both of them probably arising where the noble cane met the wild S. spontaneum and hybridised with it.
What turned a chewing cane into the most consequential crop in the history of the modern world was not a plant but a process, and it happened in India. Cane juice will not keep; it ferments within a day. Boiled down, it yields a dark, sticky, unrefined mass in which the sugar crystals sit amongst molasses, and that much is ancient, the gur or jaggery of the Indian village. But at some point before the middle of the first millennium CE, and certainly by the Gupta period, Indian sugar-makers learned to carry the process further, to crystallise the sucrose out and separate it from the molasses, producing a granular solid that would keep indefinitely, weigh little for its sweetness, and travel anywhere. Sanskrit called it śarkarā, gravel or grit, from the look of the grains, and that word, through the Persian shakar and the Arabic sukkar, is the ancestor of sugar in every European language. The crystal is the whole story: it converted a perishable regional plant into a storable, shippable commodity, and everything that followed, for good and for very great ill, followed from it.
The cane itself has one further peculiarity that shaped its history: it is propagated not from seed but from cuttings of the stem, each joint of which will root and grow. A prized cane can therefore be cloned indefinitely and carried across oceans as a bundle of sticks, which is precisely how it travelled. It also demands heat, water, and a very great deal of labour at harvest, since the cut cane begins to lose sugar within hours and must reach the mill almost immediately. That combination, a crop that could be planted anywhere warm and wet, that produced a commodity of high value and long life, and that required enormous, punishing, time-critical labour, is the reason the sugar plantation became the engine of the Atlantic slave trade.
The last chapter is genetic. By the nineteenth century the old noble canes were failing to disease across the world's plantations, and between about 1885 and 1930 breeders at the Proefstation Oost-Java in the Dutch East Indies and at Coimbatore in southern India crossed S. officinarum back with the hardy wild S. spontaneum and then repeatedly back-crossed to the noble parent, a technique known as nobilisation. Every commercial cane now grown on earth is a descendant of that work, and none of them is any single species.
The noble cane spread out of New Guinea with the Austronesian voyagers, east into the Pacific islands and west through the Indonesian archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, arriving in India perhaps four thousand years ago. There it met the local canes and, more importantly, the Indian genius for process. Crystalline sugar was being made on the Gangetic plain by the Gupta period, and the Chinese record is unusually precise about what happened next: in 647 CE the Tang emperor Taizong sent envoys to Magadha to learn the method, and Chinese sugar-making dates from their return. Westward the cane travelled with the Sasanian Persians, who took up its cultivation in the warm, irrigated lowlands of Khuzestan and whose physicians at Gundeshapur turned refining into a sophisticated art; from Persian shakar came the Arabic sukkar, and from the Arabic came every European word for the substance.
The Arab agricultural revolution then carried cane across the whole southern Mediterranean, and it is the classic case of that transmission: an irrigation-hungry tropical crop moved into a subtropical zone by the deliberate application of engineering. Egypt became the great refiner of the medieval world, and the sugar of Fustat, made in purpose-built refineries and clarified to a whiteness Europe could not match for centuries, was the luxury of every Mediterranean court. Cane went on to Sicily, to the Maghreb, and to the Granadan coast of Al-Andalus around Motril, the northernmost place in Europe where it will grow, where it left the dark miel de caña that Andalusian cooks still pour over fried aubergine. Crusaders met it in the Levant and brought home a taste for it, and Venice became the refining and distributing centre for a Europe that regarded sugar as a spice and a medicine, sold by the apothecary in loaves and prescribed by weight.
The next movement was the catastrophic one. In the fourteen-twenties the Portuguese planted cane on Madeira, and there, on an uninhabited Atlantic island with Genoese and Venetian capital behind it, the elements assembled themselves into something new: a single-crop estate, a mill, and a labour force of enslaved people, first Guanches and North Africans and then Africans bought on the Guinea coast. The model was refined on São Tomé and then transplanted wholesale to Brazil, where the engenho of Pernambuco and Bahia became the first great slave economy of the Americas. When the Dutch were expelled from Pernambuco in the sixteen-fifties they carried the technology to the eastern Caribbean, and Barbados converted itself within a generation from a colony of small tobacco farmers into a sugar island worked by enslaved Africans, a transformation so complete and so profitable that it was simply copied: by Jamaica, by the French in Saint-Domingue, which became the richest colony on earth and then destroyed itself and its slaveholders in the revolution of 1791, and by Cuba, which took up what Saint-Domingue had dropped and became the sugar bowl of the world. Something approaching two-thirds of all Africans carried across the Atlantic went to sugar colonies. It is not possible to write honestly about this plant without saying so.
Abolition did not end the plantation; it changed the labour. From the eighteen-thirties the British, French, and Dutch replaced enslaved workers with indentured labourers shipped from India, and later from China and Java, to Mauritius, Trinidad, British Guiana, Fiji, Natal, and Suriname, a movement of well over a million people whose descendants now constitute the majority or near-majority populations of several of those countries; the doubles and the curries of Port of Spain are as much a product of sugar as the rum is. The Spanish colonial cane went the other way, to Mexico with Cortés and on through New Granada and Peru, where it settled into a quite different, small-scale, unrefined tradition of piloncillo, panela, and chancaca. And in the twentieth century the plant returned to the kitchens of monsoon Asia in its oldest form of all, pressed at the roadside and drunk on the spot, as the ganne ka ras of India and the nước mía of Vietnam.
Sugar cane is, by weight harvested, the largest crop in the world: something approaching two billion tonnes a year, well ahead of maize, wheat, or rice, though the great bulk of that weight is water and fibre. Brazil grows about two-fifths of it, India rather less than a quarter, and China, Thailand, Pakistan, and Mexico follow; roughly four-fifths of the world's sugar comes from cane and the remaining fifth from beet, which was developed in Napoleonic Europe precisely to escape dependence on a tropical crop controlled by the British navy. A very large share of the Brazilian crop is not eaten at all but fermented and distilled into ethanol for motor fuel, which makes cane simultaneously the world's principal sweetener and one of its principal energy crops.
The kitchen, however, sees the plant in half a dozen quite distinct forms, and the distinction matters. Refined white sugar is pure sucrose with the molasses removed entirely, and it is the same substance whether it came from cane or beet. The unrefined whole-cane sugars, in which the molasses is never separated out, are a different ingredient with a different flavour, and every cane-growing region has its own: gur or jaggery in India, panela in Colombia, chancaca in Peru and Chile, piloncillo in Mexico, rapadura in Brazil, muscovado in the Anglophone Caribbean. Between the two sit the partially refined sugars, demerara and turbinado, and the by-products of refining, molasses, black treacle, and golden syrup, which carry the mineral, faintly bitter, faintly sulphurous depth that a cake made with white sugar can never have. Then there is the juice itself, pressed and drunk within minutes across India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Then the crystallised rock sugar of China and Persia, bingtang and nabat, valued for dissolving slowly and cleanly. Then the vinegars of the Philippines and the Caribbean. And finally the distillates, rum, cachaça, rhum agricole, aguardiente, and clairin, which between them account for a very large part of what the world drinks.
A note on what is not cane, because the confusion is constant. Palm sugar, the gula jawa and gula melaka of the Malay world and the kithul jaggery of Sri Lanka, is boiled from the sap of palms and is a wholly different product from a wholly different plant, notwithstanding that English calls both of them jaggery. Pomegranate molasses, grape molasses, date syrup, sorghum syrup, and maple syrup have nothing to do with cane either. This entry follows the grass and its derivatives only, and the dishes wired to it are those in which a cane product is the substance of the thing rather than a spoonful of background sweetness, which would otherwise take in very nearly every sweet recipe in this atlas.
Historical Journey of Sugar Cane
The Highlands & River Valleys of New Guinea — c. 8000 BCE
Sugar cane was domesticated in New Guinea, and for the first six thousand years of that relationship there was no such thing as sugar. Along the river banks of the island grows Saccharum robustum, a tall, hard, fibrous wild grass, and from it the gardeners of New Guinea selected, over a very long period, the thick, soft, juicy, low-fibre canes that botanists call S. officinarum and that the trade still calls the noble cane. The archaeological record at Kuk Swamp in the Wahgi valley shows organised cultivation on the island from around eight thousand years ago, which places cane amongst the earliest domesticates anywhere. What was done with it was simple and is still done: the stem is cut into lengths, the hard rind stripped away with a knife or the teeth, and the pith chewed until the sweet juice is gone and the fibre is spat out. Cane was a garden plant, a windbreak, a boundary marker, and a gift exchanged at feasts, not a crop with a yield or a price. From New Guinea the noble cane travelled with the Austronesian voyagers who settled the Pacific and the Indonesian archipelago, east into the islands and west through Southeast Asia towards the Asian mainland, where it would meet the peoples who worked out what else might be done with it.
The Gangetic Plain & Northern India — c. 1000 BCE
India is where cane became sugar, and it is difficult to overstate what that meant. Northern India had cane of its own, the thin, hardy Saccharum barberi group that tolerates the cooler Gangetic winter, and the noble cane arrived from the east to join it; the Atharvaveda already knows the plant and uses it as a figure for sweetness and desire. Boiling the juice down to a dark, sticky, unrefined mass in which the crystals sit amongst their own molasses is ancient, and that mass, gur or jaggery, remains the everyday sweetener of the Indian village to this day. But at some point before the middle of the first millennium, and certainly by the Gupta period, Indian sugar-makers learned to carry the process a decisive step further, to crystallise the sucrose out and separate it from the molasses. The result was a granular solid that kept indefinitely, weighed almost nothing for the sweetness it carried, and could be shipped anywhere at all. Sanskrit named it śarkarā, gravel, for the look of the grains, and that word is the ancestor of sugar in every European language. India kept the older forms alongside the new one, and keeps them still: the cane pressed at the roadside and drunk on the spot, and the January festivals of Pongal and Makar Sankranti, when whole canes are carried into the house and the new jaggery is boiled and worked with sesame into the tilgul that Marathi speakers exchange with the injunction to speak sweetly.
Guangdong, Fujian & the South China Coast — c. 500 BCE
Southern China grew canes of its own, the Saccharum sinense group, and the Chu poet Song Yu names cane juice in the third century BCE. What China lacked was the Indian crystal, and the record of its acquisition is unusually exact: in 647 CE the Tang emperor Taizong sent envoys to Magadha in northern India specifically to learn the method of refining, and Chinese sugar-making dates from their return. By the Song period China was a substantial producer, and by the Ming the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian were exporting sugar across maritime Asia. The Chinese kitchen then took the material in a direction of its own. It prizes above all bīngtáng, ice sugar, the large clear crystals grown slowly from a supersaturated syrup, which dissolve cleanly and without the faint burnt note of granulated sugar and which are dropped whole into a pot. Rock sugar is what gives a red-braise its lacquer: in hóngshāo ròu the sugar is melted to a caramel before the pork ever meets it, and the finished dish takes its mahogany gloss and its rounded savour from that step. It sweetens the medicinal tang shui sweet soups of Guangdong and the steamed pear that southern China gives for a cough, and in the north it is spun into the lacquered coating of the bīngtáng húlú skewers sold on winter streets.
Gundeshapur & Khuzestan, Sasanian Persia — c. 600 CE
Cane moved west out of India into the hot, flat, irrigated lowlands of Khuzestan under the Sasanians, and Persia did to sugar what it would later do to the rose: it refined it, in both senses. The physicians and scholars of Gundeshapur, the great academy of late Sasanian Persia, treated sugar as a pharmaceutical material as much as a food, and Persian refiners worked out how to clarify the dark boiled juice with lime, milk, or ash and to recrystallise it repeatedly until it came out white; the sugar loaf, the conical qand moulded in an unglazed clay cone that lets the molasses drain away, is a Persian invention that survived unchanged into the twentieth century. From the Persian shakar the Arabs took sukkar, and from the Arabic came every European word for the substance, so that the whole vocabulary of sugar in the West is a fossil of this transmission. Iran still takes its sugar in the old forms. Tea is drunk qand pahlu, with a lump of loaf sugar held between the teeth and the tea drawn through it, and beside the glass stands nabāt, sugar grown into large clear crystals on a stick or a length of thread, usually turned deep yellow with saffron, which is stirred slowly into the tea and is also the household remedy for an unsettled stomach.
Fustat, Cairo & the Nile Delta — c. 900 CE
The Arab agricultural revolution carried cane the length of the southern Mediterranean, and Egypt became the great refiner of the medieval world. The Nile provided what cane demands above all, which is water on command, and by the Fatimid period the sugar refineries of Fustat and the Delta were substantial industrial concerns, boiling, clarifying, and recrystallising on a scale nothing in Europe approached. Egyptian sugar was the standard of quality across the Mediterranean and beyond, exported to Byzantium, to Italy, and to the Crusader states, and Egyptian confectioners built upon it an art of sugar-work whose descendants are everywhere in the region: pulled and moulded sugar figures, candied fruit and nuts, and above all the sugar syrup, the ater, that is poured over pastries the moment they leave the oven and that defines the whole Levantine and Egyptian sweet tradition. The most domestic expression of it is basbousa, the coarse semolina cake baked in a tray, cut into diamonds, and drenched whilst still hot in a cold syrup of sugar, lemon, and flower water, so that it drinks the syrup up and turns dense and glistening. Sugar figures in Egyptian religious life as well, in the moulded sugar dolls sold for the Prophet's birthday, a tradition traced to the Fatimid court.
Palermo & Arab Sicily — c. 950 CE
Sicily is where Europe first grew sugar. The Arabs who took the island from Byzantium in the ninth century brought cane with them along with the irrigation works it requires, and by the tenth century it was being milled around Palermo; the geographer Ibn Hawqal, visiting in 973, describes the cane fields. Cane went on being grown in Sicily for six hundred years, and the island became the source of the cuttings later carried to the Atlantic islands, so that every cane in the Americas traces back through Madeira to a Sicilian or an Andalusi field. What Sicily also produced, and kept long after its mills closed, is the European confectionery tradition itself. Arab sugar-work, candied fruit, and almond paste settled into the island's convent kitchens and never left: the candied citron and pumpkin of the cassata, the sweetened ricotta of the cannolo, the sugar-crusted granita, and above all pasta reale, the almond and sugar paste that Palermo models and paints into astonishingly lifelike fruit for the feast of All Souls. Those frutta martorana are named for the convent of the Martorana, whose nuns are said to have hung marzipan fruit in their garden trees to impress a visiting bishop out of season, and they are the direct ancestors of every marzipan in Europe.
Motril & the Granadan Coast, Al-Andalus — c. 1000 CE
The narrow, frost-free coastal strip between the Sierra Nevada and the Mediterranean, around Motril, Salobreña, and Almuñécar, is the northernmost place in Europe where sugar cane will grow, and Arab agronomists planted it there with the irrigation works that made it possible. It is the only part of continental Europe with a continuous cane tradition, and mills operated on that coast for a thousand years; the last of them, at Salobreña, closed only in 2006. What Al-Andalus produced was not chiefly refined sugar but miel de caña, cane honey, the dark, bitter-edged molasses drawn off during boiling, and it survives as one of the most distinctive ingredients in Andalusian cooking. Its classic use is a dish that startles anyone meeting it for the first time: berenjenas con miel de caña, aubergine sliced thin, battered or floured, fried until crisp, and then drizzled hot with cane molasses, the sweetness set against the salt and the bitterness of the vegetable in a manner that belongs unmistakably to the Islamic Mediterranean and not to the rest of Spain. Cane sugar also underwrote the Andalusi confectionery, the marzipans, the candied citron, and the syrup-soaked fritters that passed into Spanish convent cooking after the Reconquista and travelled from there to the Americas.
Venice & the Veneto — c. 1300 CE
Europe north of the Mediterranean could not grow cane and did not, for a long time, regard sugar as food. Crusaders had met it in the Levant, where the plantations of Tyre and the Jordan valley supplied the Frankish states, and what came home with them was a taste and a trade rather than a crop. Venice became the pivot of it. Venetian merchants bought Egyptian and Levantine sugar, and Venetian refiners reprocessed it into the hard white loaves that were sold across the continent by weight, at prices that placed sugar amongst the spices; it was kept in the apothecary's shop, prescribed by physicians as a warming and restorative drug in the humoral scheme, moulded into sculptures for princely banquets, and used in the kitchen as a spice alongside pepper and cinnamon rather than as a sweetener in the modern sense. This is the reason so many medieval European recipes sweeten meat and fish, and it is why sugar in that period is a mark of wealth and not of appetite. Venice held the trade until the Atlantic islands broke it, and the Italian capital and expertise that financed and staffed the first Atlantic plantations came very largely from the same Genoese and Venetian houses that had grown rich on the Levantine traffic. Modern Italy kept no distinctive cane tradition of its own, and the point is recorded here as the hinge it was rather than for any dish.
Funchal, Madeira & the Atlantic Islands — c. 1425 CE
On Madeira, an uninhabited Atlantic island claimed by Portugal in the fourteen-twenties, the elements of the modern world assembled themselves for the first time. Cane cuttings came from Sicily and from the Granadan coast, the two places in the Mediterranean that already grew it; Genoese and Venetian capital financed the mills; and the labour was unfree, first Guanches taken from the Canaries and North African captives, then, decisively, Africans bought on the Guinea coast. What emerged was something that had not existed before: a single-crop estate worked by enslaved people, producing a storable commodity for a distant market. Within fifty years Madeira was the largest sugar producer in the Western world, the model was transplanted to São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, where it took its fully racialised plantation form, and from there it went to Brazil. The island's own kitchen still keeps the cane. Madeira produces mel de cana, the dark cane molasses, and its emblematic sweet is bolo de mel, a dense, dark, heavily spiced honey cake made with that molasses rather than with bees' honey, traditionally baked on the eighth of December and kept, improving, for a year, and broken apart by hand because to cut it with a knife is held to bring bad luck. Beside it stands poncha, the fisherman's drink of cane spirit, honey, and lemon juice, worked together with a ridged wooden stick called a caralhinho.
Lübeck, Nuremberg & the Hanseatic North — c. 1450 CE
Sugar reached northern Europe as a Venetian import and remained, for two centuries, a luxury of the merchant cities that could afford it. The Hanseatic ports handled it, and Lübeck, the head of the League, became the northern centre of the sugar confectioner's art: the city's marzipan is documented from the fifteenth century and is protected today by a geographical indication fixing its almond content far above the German legal minimum, and the local legend that it was invented during a famine when the town had nothing left but almonds and sugar is charming, false, and endlessly repeated. Inland, Nuremberg sat at the junction of the spice and sugar routes and built upon them Lebkuchen, the honey and spice cake studded with candied peel that its bakers have made under guild regulation since the fourteenth century. Both are confections of scarcity rather than plenty: sugar in fifteenth-century Germany cost something approaching its weight in silver, which is why such things were made in small quantities by specialists, sold at fairs, and given as gifts, and why they survive as Christmas foods rather than everyday ones.
São Tomé & the Gulf of Guinea — c. 1490 CE
Between Madeira and Brazil lies São Tomé, and it is the point at which the plantation became what it would remain for four hundred years. The island sits on the equator in the Gulf of Guinea, uninhabited when the Portuguese reached it in the fourteen-seventies, hot and wet enough for cane to grow prodigiously, and lying directly off the coasts from which captives were taken. Settlement began in 1493 with a population of convicts, exiles, and Jewish children seized from their parents, and within thirty years the island was the largest sugar producer in the world, worked by thousands of enslaved Africans brought across a few hundred miles of water. It was here rather than on Madeira that the elements hardened into the form the Americas would inherit: a monoculture estate, an absentee proprietor, a labour force entirely African and entirely enslaved, and a mortality rate requiring continuous replacement. The Portuguese planters who crossed to Pernambuco in the fifteen-thirties carried that model with them entire. São Tomé's own sugar collapsed within a century, undercut by Brazil and disrupted by repeated revolts of the enslaved, and the island turned to cocoa; it has no surviving cane cuisine, and it is recorded here for what it transmitted rather than for anything it cooks.
Veracruz, Morelos & New Spain — c. 1530 CE
Cane reached the American mainland with the Spanish, carried from Andalusia by way of the Canaries, and Cortés himself established a mill in Morelos in the fifteen-twenties; Veracruz, Morelos, and later San Luis Potosí became the cane country of New Spain, worked by enslaved Africans and by coerced Indigenous labour. What distinguishes the Mexican tradition is that it never became chiefly a refining industry for export. The trapiche, the small animal-powered or water-powered mill, boiled the juice down and poured it into conical moulds to set as piloncillo, the hard brown cone of unrefined whole-cane sugar that remains a distinct and irreplaceable ingredient in Mexican cooking; a recipe calling for piloncillo is not improved by white sugar, because the molasses left in it carries a smoky, mineral, faintly liquorice depth that refined sugar has had removed. Piloncillo sweetens and colours the whole domestic repertoire: café de olla, the coffee brewed in a clay pot with cinnamon and piloncillo and drunk from earthenware cups; calabaza en tacha, the pumpkin candied for the Day of the Dead in a syrup of piloncillo, cinnamon, and orange, the name preserving the word for the copper boiling pan of the old sugar works; the maize drink champurrado; and the Christmas ponche navideño, in which lengths of fresh cane are simmered whole amongst the tejocotes and guavas and chewed at the bottom of the cup.
Pernambuco & Bahia, Brazil — c. 1532 CE
The Portuguese took the Madeiran model to Brazil and industrialised it. The first mill was built in São Vicente about 1532, but it was the north-east, the wet coastal zona da mata of Pernambuco and Bahia, that became the centre, and by the end of the sixteenth century Brazil was the largest sugar producer on earth. The engenho was not a farm but a works: cane fields, an ox- or water-driven mill, a boiling house running day and night through the harvest, a purging house, a chapel, and the barracks of the enslaved Africans who did all of it. Something approaching five million Africans were carried to Brazil across the whole period of the trade, more than to anywhere else in the Americas, and sugar is the reason. From that history the Brazilian kitchen keeps two things above all. Rapadura, the whole cane juice boiled down and poured into wooden moulds to set into hard bricks, is scraped or broken and eaten as a sweet in its own right across the north-east, where it is also a byword for toughness. And cachaça, distilled from fresh cane juice rather than from molasses and therefore quite unlike rum, is the national spirit, drunk neat in the interior and, crushed with lime and sugar, as the caipirinha, or warmed with ginger and spices as the quentão of the winter festivals.
Antwerp & Amsterdam, the Low Countries — c. 1600 CE
Growing cane and refining it are different trades, and northern Europe took the second. Antwerp refined the sugar of Madeira and São Tomé through the sixteenth century and held perhaps nineteen refineries by 1550; when the city fell to Spain in 1585 its refiners, their capital, and their expertise moved north, and Amsterdam inherited the business. By the middle of the seventeenth century the city held sixty or more refineries and dominated the European trade, and the Dutch West India Company seized the Brazilian sugar coast at Pernambuco in 1630 and held it for a quarter of a century expressly to feed them; when they were expelled in 1654 the technicians who left carried the Brazilian method into the Caribbean. Cheap refined sugar and a great quantity of colonial spice are the foundation of the whole Dutch and Flemish sweet tradition, of the speculaas pressed in carved boards for St Nicholas and of the stroopwafel, the Gouda thrift sweet in which a thin waffle is split whilst hot and filled with dark caramel syrup, and which is still eaten laid across the top of a hot cup so that the steam softens the filling.
Barbados & the Lesser Antilles — c. 1643 CE
When the Dutch were driven out of Pernambuco in the sixteen-forties they carried the technology of the engenho with them to the eastern Caribbean, and Barbados converted itself within a single generation. In 1640 it was a colony of small farmers growing tobacco and cotton with indentured English labour; by 1660 it was a sugar island, its land consolidated into large estates, its population majority African and enslaved, and its exports worth more than those of all the rest of English America combined. Historians call the change the sugar revolution, and it was copied wholesale across the region because it was so extraordinarily profitable. The island's Slave Code of 1661, drafted to hold the new system in place, became the model for slave law in Jamaica, the Carolinas, and beyond. What Barbados also produced, from the froth and molasses that the sugar works threw off, was rum: the word itself appears first in Barbadian documents of the sixteen-fifties, and the island claims the oldest continuously operating rum distillery in the world. Barbadian sugar work survives in falernum, the sweet, clove- and almond-scented, lime-sharpened cane syrup that is the island's contribution to the world's bars, and in the rum punch whose proportions the whole Anglophone Caribbean fixed in a rhyme.
Jamaica & the Greater Antilles — c. 1670 CE
Jamaica, taken from Spain in 1655, was larger and better watered than Barbados and became the greatest of the British sugar colonies, with an enslaved population that by the seventeen-eighties exceeded a quarter of a million against some thirty thousand whites. Its significance for the kitchen lies less in the sugar than in what was left over. Molasses, the dark bitter syrup drained off the crystallising sugar, was a low-value by-product on the island and a valuable commodity abroad: it was shipped north to New England, where it was distilled into rum, and that rum went to the Guinea coast to buy the people who cut the cane, closing the circuit that historians call the triangular trade. The heaviest and most mineral grade of it, blackstrap, and the dark unrefined muscovado sugar alongside it, gave the region and then Britain a distinct family of very dark, very spiced baking. Jamaican ginger cake is the plainest and best of them, a sticky, almost black loaf in which the muscovado and the treacle do quite as much work as the ginger, and the island's rum runs through everything from the Christmas black cake to the coffee grog of the Blue Mountains.
Bristol & Liverpool, England — c. 1700 CE
Britain was the consuming end of the whole apparatus, and the scale of the change it underwent is the reason the sugar plantation existed at all. English sugar consumption rose roughly twentyfold across the eighteenth century and again through the nineteenth, until what had been an apothecary's luxury in 1650 was, by 1900, a staple of the poorest diet in Europe. The mechanism was the meeting of sugar with three other colonial imports, tea, coffee, and cocoa, all of them bitter and all of them taken sweetened; sweetened tea with bread became the working-class meal of the industrial cities, and the refineries and slaving houses of Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow, and London grew rich on both ends of the traffic. The by-products shaped the national baking. Black treacle, the British name for the dark molasses of refining, and golden syrup, the pale invert syrup that Abram Lyle put on the market in 1885, are both cane-refinery products and both are structural rather than optional in the dishes built on them: Yorkshire parkin, the oatmeal and treacle gingerbread baked for Bonfire Night and left to go sticky in a tin for a week before it is eaten, and treacle tart, which is golden syrup and breadcrumbs and lemon in a pastry case and nothing else at all.
Saint-Domingue & Hispaniola — c. 1750 CE
The French colony of Saint-Domingue on the western third of Hispaniola was, by the seventeen-eighties, the richest colony on earth and the source of perhaps two-fifths of the world's sugar and half its coffee. It was worked by about half a million enslaved people against some thirty thousand whites, under a regime of such lethality that the enslaved population could not reproduce itself and was maintained only by continuous importation. In 1791 they rose, and after thirteen years of war against the French, the Spanish, and the British in turn, they founded Haiti in 1804, the first state anywhere created by a successful revolt of the enslaved. The sugar economy did not survive it, and neither, in the end, did Haitian prosperity, since France extracted an indemnity in 1825 that the country was still repaying more than a century later. What survives in the kitchen is the sugar itself in its least industrial form: cane is still cut and pressed at the roadside, and the small confections of the Haitian street are built on raw cane sugar boiled to a hard crack. Tablettes, the brittle sheets of caramelised raw sugar set with peanuts, cashews, coconut, or ginger and sold in twists of paper, are the plainest and most eloquent of them.
Nantes & Bordeaux, France — c. 1770 CE
France's sugar came from the French Antilles and above all from Saint-Domingue, and it made the fortunes of the Atlantic ports. Nantes fitted out something like half of all French slaving voyages, Bordeaux and La Rochelle the greater part of the rest, and the refineries along the Loire and the Gironde turned the raw sugar of the islands into the loaves that supplied northern Europe; the hôtels particuliers of both cities were built on that traffic and are still standing. What the cheap sugar met in France was the most developed confectionery tradition in Europe, and the meeting produced a great deal. Sugar cooked to caramel became a technique in its own right in the French kitchen, from the burnt crust of a crème brûlée to the caramel that lines a mould, and the trade of the confiseur separated itself from that of the pastry-cook. Its most characteristic regional expression is Breton: Brittany was exempt from the gabelle, the salt tax that applied across most of the kingdom, and therefore salted its butter where the rest of France did not, and the marriage of colonial sugar with local salted butter gives caramel au beurre salé, in which the salt suppresses the cloying quality of the sugar so completely that the caramel tastes less sweet than an unsalted one made from the same weight.
New Orleans & Louisiana — c. 1795 CE
Louisiana had grown cane without much success since the seventeen-fifties, the subtropical winter being marginal for a tropical grass, and it was the collapse of Saint-Domingue that changed everything. Refugee planters and their technicians fled to New Orleans, bringing capital, expertise, and enslaved people, and in 1795 Étienne de Boré achieved the first commercially successful granulation of sugar in Louisiana on his plantation above the city. Within a generation the river parishes were a sugar country, worked by enslaved labour under conditions that even by the standards of American slavery were notorious for their mortality, and after 1803 the crop was American. What New Orleans made of it culturally is inseparable from the free women of colour who sold sweets in the streets of the Vieux Carré: the praline, taken from a French almond confection and remade with the pecans of the Gulf South and the local cane sugar and cream, became the city's emblematic sweet, and the technique of boiling sugar and cream to the soft-ball stage and beating it until it clouds runs through the whole Creole dessert repertoire, from the praline itself to the sauce poured over a bread pudding.
Havana & Matanzas, Cuba — c. 1820 CE
When Saint-Domingue destroyed itself and its sugar, Cuba took up what it had dropped. Spanish Cuba had been a modest producer; within three decades of 1791 it was the largest in the world, and it held that position for most of the nineteenth century. The Cuban industry was the most technically advanced anywhere, adopting the steam mill, the vacuum pan, and, from the eighteen-thirties, its own railway network, built before Spain had one, purely to move cane; and it was also the last major sugar economy to abolish slavery, in 1886, having imported around eight hundred thousand Africans and, latterly, indentured Chinese labourers besides. Sugar continued to define the country after independence, through the American-owned mills of the republic and the Soviet-subsidised quotas of the revolution. The Cuban table keeps the plant in its simplest form: guarapo, the juice pressed from fresh cane at a roadside guarapera and drunk on the spot over ice with a squeeze of lime, sweet, grassy, faintly grey-green, and undrinkable an hour later. And the island's rum, distilled from molasses in the light Cuban style, produced the two drinks that carried Havana's name around the world, the mojito and the daiquiri, both of which are arguments about how much lime and sugar a glass of cane spirit will carry.
Java & the Dutch East Indies — c. 1830 CE
The Dutch had refined other people's sugar for two centuries; on Java they grew their own, by a method with few parallels. The cultuurstelsel or Cultivation System, imposed from 1830 to pay off the debts of the Netherlands after the Java War, required peasant villages to give over a fifth of their land, and in practice a great deal more, to export crops for the colonial government, with sugar the chief of them; the labour was compulsory and unpaid, rice land was displaced, and the famines of the eighteen-forties in Cirebon and Demak were the direct consequence. The system made the Netherlands solvent and Java one of the largest sugar producers on earth. Its scientific legacy is more benign and is the reason the crop survives at all: the Proefstation Oost-Java at Pasuruan, working from the eighteen-eighties, crossed the failing noble canes with the hardy wild Saccharum spontaneum and back-crossed the offspring repeatedly to the noble parent, a technique called nobilisation, and the POJ varieties that resulted rescued the world's cane fields from disease. Every commercial cane now grown descends from that work. Javanese sugar itself goes into the tea: teh poci, brewed strong in a small clay pot and drunk from a glass with a lump of gula batu rock sugar left to dissolve of its own accord.
Trinidad & the Southern Caribbean — c. 1845 CE
Abolition ended slavery in the British Empire in 1834 but not the plantation, and the planters replaced one coerced labour force with another. From 1838 in British Guiana and from 1845 in Trinidad, ships began carrying indentured labourers from India under contracts of five years, and over the following eight decades more than a million people were transported in this way to Mauritius, Trinidad, British Guiana, Fiji, Natal, and Suriname; the historian Hugh Tinker called it a new system of slavery, and the conditions of passage and estate life frequently justified the phrase. Their descendants are now the largest or near-largest population group in several of those countries, and the consequence for the kitchen is one of the great culinary fusions of the modern world, in which Indian technique met African, Creole, and Amerindian ingredients on the sugar estates. Trinidad's national dish carries the marks of both parents: pelau begins by burning sugar in hot oil until it smokes and turns almost black, then browning the meat in that caramel, a technique inherited from West Africa and made possible by the estate's own product, and finishes with rice, pigeon peas, and coconut milk. The same burnt sugar, sold as browning, colours the region's stews and its Christmas black cake, and the tamarind balls rolled in raw sugar are sold at every roadside.
The Cauca Valley & the Colombian Andes — c. 1850 CE
Cane followed the Spanish south from New Spain through New Granada and on into Peru, and in the Andean countries it settled into a form quite unlike the export plantation. The trapiche panelero is a small mill, often family-run, that presses the cane and boils the juice down in a row of open pans until it is thick enough to pour into moulds, where it sets into blocks of panela: whole-cane sugar with every trace of its molasses still in it, tasting of smoke, mineral, and grass, and utterly distinct from anything refined. Colombia is the largest consumer of panela per head in the world and the second largest producer, and the blocks are broken up with a knife or a hammer in every kitchen in the country. Its plainest use is also its most universal: agua de panela, panela dissolved in hot or cold water, drunk at breakfast, given to children, offered to a visitor, taken with lime for a cold and with a wedge of fresh cheese dropped in to melt, and infused with mint as the hierbabuena version of the Bogotá highlands. The same sugar sweetens the Ecuadorian quinua con leche, and under the Quechua-derived name chancaca it makes the dark spiced syrups of Peru and Chile, poured over sweet potato, over picarones, and over the wheat and dried peach of the Chilean mote con huesillos.
Negros & the Visayas, Philippines — c. 1855 CE
Cane is native to the Philippine archipelago and had been chewed and pressed there for as long as anywhere in island Southeast Asia; what arrived in the nineteenth century was not the plant but the plantation. The opening of the port of Iloilo to foreign trade in 1855, and the arrival of the British vice-consul Nicholas Loney, who advanced credit and imported iron mills, turned the neighbouring island of Negros within a generation from forest into a sugar monoculture worked by migrant labour from Panay under a hacienda system whose inequalities have shaped Philippine politics ever since. Negros still produces more than half the country's sugar and is known as the Sugarlandia. Its distinctive product is muscovado, the unrefined whole-cane sugar boiled in open pans and dried to a moist dark crumb, which the Philippines exports and which the local kitchen uses in preference to white. Its plainest use is also the most universal: banana cue, saba bananas skewered and deep-fried in oil into which brown sugar has been thrown so that it caramelises hard around the fruit, sold at every roadside and school gate in the country.
Durban & the Colony of Natal — c. 1860 CE
The colonists of Natal planted cane along the humid subtropical coast in the eighteen-fifties and immediately met the problem every sugar colony met: the crop demands enormous, punishing, time-critical labour, and the Zulu, who had land and cattle of their own, declined to provide it. Natal therefore turned to the same expedient as Trinidad and Mauritius. The Truro landed the first Indian indentured labourers at Durban in November 1860, and over the following half-century more than a hundred and fifty thousand followed, on five-year contracts and under conditions that a succession of official inquiries found harsh even by the standards of the system; a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi arrived in 1893 to act in a commercial case, stayed twenty-one years, and developed the methods of mass civil resistance very largely in response to the treatment of that community. Their descendants make Durban home to one of the largest Indian populations of any city outside India, and the mills of Tongaat and Illovo still stand. Cheap sugar shaped the settler kitchen too, and its emblem is the koeksister, a plaited strip of dough fried and then plunged still blazing into ice-cold spiced syrup, so that the inside floods with sweetness whilst the crust stays glassy.
Mackay & Queensland, Australia — c. 1863 CE
Australia's cane belt runs up the Queensland coast from the Clarence River to Mossman, planted from the eighteen-sixties with varieties brought from Java and the Pacific, and it was built on coerced labour. Between 1863 and 1904 some sixty thousand Pacific Islanders, chiefly from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, were carried to the Queensland fields under a system of deception, debt, and outright kidnapping known as blackbirding; the schooner Don Juan landed the first sixty-seven at Brisbane in August 1863, and a succession of official inquiries into abduction and killing did little to stop it. After Federation the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901 deported most of the survivors under the White Australia policy, and the descendants of those permitted to remain, the Australian South Sea Islanders, were recognised as a distinct cultural group only in 1994. Queensland is now amongst the world's larger raw sugar exporters. What its sugar left in the national kitchen is golden syrup, the pale refinery by-product that is the defining sweetener of Australian and New Zealand home baking: it binds the oats of an ANZAC biscuit, darkens a Queensland ginger nut, and makes the syrup in which golden syrup dumplings are poached under a lid until the sauce turns to caramel.
Auckland & New Zealand — c. 1884 CE
New Zealand grows no cane at all, and that is what makes it interesting: it is a country whose entire sugar culture is one of refining and eating rather than growing. The Chelsea Sugar Refinery opened at Birkenhead on Auckland's harbour in 1884 to process raw sugar shipped in from Queensland and Fiji, and for well over a century almost every grain of sugar and every tin of golden syrup in the country has come from that single plant on the water. The consequence is a national baking tradition built on refinery products to a degree found almost nowhere else. Golden syrup binds the ANZAC biscuit and the ginger crunch, and it is the making of hokey pokey, in which syrup and sugar are boiled to the hard crack and then flooded with bicarbonate of soda, which decomposes in the heat and aerates the molten sugar into a rigid amber sponge in about two seconds. Broken up and folded through vanilla ice cream it became hokey pokey ice cream, for decades one of the two best-selling flavours in the country and regarded, with some seriousness, as a national possession. The name is older than the sweet and probably descends from the patter of nineteenth-century Italian street ice-cream sellers.
Huế & Central Vietnam — c. 1900 CE
Cane has grown in Vietnam for as long as it has grown anywhere in mainland Southeast Asia, and the Vietnamese kitchen uses it in a way found almost nowhere else: not only as a sweetener but as a physical object in the cooking. Chạo tôm, a speciality of the old imperial city of Huế, is a paste of pounded prawn, pork fat, and seasoning moulded around a peeled baton of fresh sugar cane and grilled over charcoal, so that the cane perfumes and moistens the prawn from within, and when the paste has been eaten the stick is chewed for its juice; it is served with rice paper, herbs, and nước chấm, and the cane is both skewer and dessert. Elsewhere the cane is simply pressed. Nước mía, cane juice run through a hand- or motor-driven roller press at a street stall, very often with a whole kumquat or a piece of pandan fed through the rollers alongside it and poured over ice, is the ordinary hot-weather drink of every Vietnamese town, and the presses stand at every market and outside every school. Vietnam is now a substantial cane producer in its own right, and the crop carries the same festival associations it does across monsoon Asia, whole canes being set beside the ancestral altar at Tết.
