SUGAR
1st January 2024
Photo Credits: weissch & Luis Echeverri Urrea (Getty Images), CANVA
If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked. If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned. If to be fat is to be hated, then Pharoah’s lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord, banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.
FALSTAFF: Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2, Scene 4
SUGAR (Saccharum officinarum)
Sugar from the Sugar Cane was an important luxury used for cooking, preserving and confectionary, as well as for making certain drugs and medicines. Sugar appears as a ‘pennyworth of sugar’, sugar in a sauce and also a metaphor for sweetness of character or words.
John Gerard gives us details of how sugar was used at the time: of the juyce of this reed is made the most pleasant and profitable sweet, called Sugar, where of is made infinite confections, confectures, syrups and such like, as also preserving and conserving of sundry fruits, herbes and floures as Roses, Violets and Rosemary Flouers. He also tells us that the “Sugar Cane groweth in many parts of Europe at this day, as in Spaine, Portugale, Olbia and in Provence. It groweth also in Barbarie, generally almost every where in the Canarie Islands, and in those of Maderia, in the East and West Indies, and many other places. My self did plant some shoots thereof in my garden, and some in Flanders did the same: but the coldness of our clymate made an end of mine, and I think the Flemmings will have the like profit of their labour.”
Sugar Cane is a species of grass native to Papua New Guinea. Domesticated Sugar spread from here through China and South Asia. Sugar came to Europe via the Islamic world and was brought to the Americas by the Spanish and Portugese. Sugar from Sugar Beet did not become widespread until the 18th century. Sugar production became integral to the forced migration of millions of people in the crime against humanity that was the transatlantic slave trade from the 1500s to the 1800s. The British Museum traces the story of sugar in England from the 12th century onwards.
More Information
BBC Bitesize: Sugar Production Britain and the Caribbean
British Museum: The story of sugar in 5 objects
John Gerard, 1597 first edition, The Herballe, or General Historie of Plantes (1636 edition accessed via archive.org)
Kew Plants of the World Online: Saccharum officinarum
