I was 9-years old, sitting in a car with my brother who had just turned 5. We were traveling from the house of my grandfather - who I had only met a few days earlier - through the Dole plantation fields in O’ahu on our way to Hale'iwa. My grandfather, who I would never see again after this visit, drove ahead of my parent’s rented car. My mom and dad were tense. My grandfather was not just a stranger to me, he was also a complete unknown for my dad, who last saw him when he was a small boy, living at his grandparents’ pineapple plantation in Aiea.

Grandpa Louie pulled his car to the side of a road next to a field of something that looked like tall, thick grass with woody stems and frilly tops. Taking a machete from his car (because apparently he always had one on hand) he chopped a piece of the purplish-green grass and handed it to me. Sugar cane.

"One end yours," he grunted in his local accent, "one end his," he pointed with the machete toward my little brother. The two of us sat in the back seat of the car, gnawing on our fibrous ends of the sugar cane to taste the sweet sap for the first time. I haven't looked at a candy bar the same way since.

In The Scribe, Henri of Maron lives on an estate with 21 villages that produce, lemons, cinnamon, and sugar. Because this was the 13th-century, there is a lot to learn about sugar and sugar production, as it differed in scope and importance from the 16th century, when production in the Americas caused an increase in supply and human misery. Sugar has a long and tragic history where it is connected to humans. I made a very short and awkward tiktok video about it if you want the short version of this post. If not, let’s dive right in.

How does sugar become sugar?
Sugar production is labor-intensive. The thick, fibrous stalks of the cane grow close together and have to be cultivated from existing stalks and the shoots planted by hand, similar to rice. Once the canes were grown and harvested, they are transported to a processing facility, pressed to release the thin, mildly sweet sap, and then boiled in to reduce the sap into a syrup that could be set out to dry. The process is essentially unchanged, although the tools and labor required are now quite different. In the 13th century, once the sap was sufficiently reduced, it was poured into a special cone-shaped mold that rested on top of a vase. The molasses dripped into the vase and the sparkling, brownish sugar cone was leftover.

As probably everyone is aware, sugar is very susceptible to dampness (have you ever tried eating cotton candy in the tropics?) so shipping it over long distances was impractical, as the cargo could easily become damp or spoiled in the cargo hold of a ship. Sugar is a finicky crop to grow; it wants a lot of water and a hot, humid climate. This limited the spread of the canes to a narrow band of the world, which excluded medieval Palestine until the Islamic Golden Age (approx. 8th - 13th centuries) produced Arab scientists and engineers who were able to create advanced irrigation techniques. FRom there, sugar cultivation spread to Egypt and Palestine. Things were rolling along sweetly until the arrival of Frankish crusaders in the 11th century, who had one taste and immediately became hooked. IN order to ensure that they had a safe supply of sugar that they could control, they planted crops on the island of Cyprus, and eventually the canes made their way to parts of Italy. By the 16th century, the production of sugar had ramped up in the Americas, resulting in the tragic and inhumane chattel slave trade, the consequences of this still hurt the world today.

Another consequence of growing and refining sugar that sometimes is overlooked is deforestation. It required enormous quantities of wood to stoke the fires and ensure that the copper pots of boiling syrup maintained the right temperature. In addition to forced labor for harvesting, pressing, and boiling the syrup, slaves were also put to work cutting and transporting wood from forests until there were no more trees left to cut.

A spoonful of sugar helps the sugar go down
Sugar was originally used as medicine, but its arrival in Europe was relatively late. Arab doctors had been using it for years as a way to help “warm the stomach” or assist with digestive issues. In 11th-century Europe, scribes finally translated Arabic medical texts into Latin (or, in some cases, back into Latin), which opened up a new world of scientific and medical knowledge previously unknown.

I can speak from my own experience about the effectiveness of sugar as an analgesic. When my son was 7-days old we discovered a strange bump under his arm. The emergency room doctors needed to lance it and culture whatever they found inside, but because my son was so little (he was born premature and still hadn’t reached his actual due-date yet) they did not want to give him anesthetics. Instead, he was given a little pipette of oral sucrose to suck on while a doctor cut him open. It worked. He felt no pain. To a brain that has never experienced sugar, the effects can be overwhelmingly pleasant. (It was a staph infection, by the way. In a 7-day old baby. Lovely way to get started in the world).

When sugar really became sweet
We start to see sugar mentioned as a sweetener alongside honey in Europe and eventually making its way into cookbooks by the 14th century, including the famous Forme of Cury. My 10th-century Arabic cookbook (Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchens by Nawal Nasrallah - HIGHLY recommend!) lists many names for different types of sugar, indicating a sophisticated understanding of how to process and use it for different purposes in everything from cosmetics to sweets to savory meat dishes.
Sukkar = sugar
Qanr = Crystalized cane sugar
’asal al-qasab = sugarcane syrup
daqiq al-sukkar = powdered sugar
fanidh = sugar candy (a type of pulled taffy)

The rest of sugar’s history becomes steadily more and more evil. Christopher Columbus took sugar cane with him to the island of Hispanola in 1493 during his second voyage, and once the crop was established, he and his men enslaved the local population to cultivate and refine the canes, thus establishing the horrific American sugar trade. Now, of course, the abundance of sugar is responsible for diabetes and cancer, among other modern-day diseases, which are often distributed unevenly across demographic lines. The history of sugar is written in blood.

So, the next time you bite into a hard candy, a piece of chocolate, or take a sip from a soda or a cocktail, take a minute to think about the incredible, multicultural, tragic history of your favorite treat.

The history of Sugar is SO MUCH longer than I have summarized here! Some of my sources are below if you want to learn more. To learn about how Henri, the viscount of Acre, manages the sugar refinery on his land, check out The Scribe and The Land of God, available at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.

Sources:
https://books.openedition.org/momeditions/10169
https://theconversation.com/a-history-of-sugar-the-food-nobody-needs-but-everyone-craves-49823
https://www.medievalists.net/2020/10/medieval-sugar/
https://www.sugar.org/sugar/history/