Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

THE TRUE INVENTORS OF SUGAR?

  All over the world, the word for sugar seems to come from the Sanskrit shakkara, which means ‘granular material’. We find words like the Arabic sakkar, the Turkish sheker, the Italian zucchero, the Spanish azúcar, the French sucre and, of course, the English ‘sugar’. It is sukker in Danish and Norwegian, sykur in Icelandic, socker in Swedish, suiker in Dutch and zucker in German. Yoruba speakers in Nigeria call it suga, Swahili East Africa calls it sukari, Russians call it sachar, Romanians say zahar and the Welsh call it siwgwr—and when you allow for the Welsh pronunciation of ‘w’ (rather like ‘oo’ in ‘book’), the pattern is retained.

  Bahasa Indonesia is one of the few languages where this pattern does not apply. Here, the name for sugar is gula, although when biochemists in Indonesia speak of ‘sugars’ as a group the name they give them is sakar. The Arabic origins of that are clear enough, but that expert among experts on Malay etymology, R. O. Winstedt, said in his early twentieth-century dictionary of the Malay language that he could see the Sanskrit origins of gula just as easily. But he said so without knowing that sugar cane originated on the island of New Guinea, at the far end of the Indonesian archipelago. Tradition then had it that sugar cane originated in India or China, and Winstedt was an old man when its true origins were worked out.

  Few Europeans know much of the immense Hindu influence on Java and Bali. The various Javanese empires traded with India over many centuries, and perhaps sugar in a prepared form was first traded to India from Java, not the other way around. In that case, when the art of sugar making was learned in India, a Sanskrit word similar to the established Indonesian word would have been applied to the product the Javanese knew as gula. So gula would have given its name to the Indian gur, rather than the other way around.

  Why would the Indians call it gur? The European linguists say the sugar came out of the boiling-pan as a sticky, treacly ball, and gur is a Sanskrit word for a ball. All the other lands heard about sugar as shakkara. Why would Indonesia alone have a different name for sugar, unless it was their word to begin with?

  Perhaps the Indians who brought the Hindu religion to Java came from a place where gur or gula or even guda was used in preference to shakkara, but it would be unfair to rule out an Indonesian origin for the first refining of sugar to crystals. Bronze drums were well known in the archipelago, and ironware could have been traded there quite early on, so an Indonesian origin of sugar is at least possible.

  I admit this is speculation, and the question has to remain an open one. The earliest records of sugar crystals seem to come from India, where a Sanskrit manuscript dating from about AD 375 refers to sito sarkara churna, but this ‘powdered white sugar’ may have been formed simply by drying gur. Manuscripts from that period are hard to date, but certainly by the fifth century AD, and quite possibly much earlier, we seem to see the first descriptions in Sanskrit of the preparation of sugar as we know it from cane. On the other hand, old manuscripts only rarely survive, so who can say what Indonesian records are missing?

  THE SACKING OF DASTAGERD

  The year AD 622 was a key year for three religions: the growing Islam under its prophet Muhammad, the Zoroastrianism of the Persians under the Emperor Chosroes II, and the Christianity of Byzantine Rome, based in Constantinople where Heraclius was emperor. Chosroes held the upper hand, and when an unknown Meccan sent him a letter, calling upon him to acknowledge Muhammad as the apostle of God, Chosroes rejected the invitation and tore the epistle to pieces. He had the Roman Empire on the run; what need had he of such an upstart as Muhammad, who called himself Prophet?

  A bit of background: Phokas, Emperor of Byzantium AD 602– 610, had been deposed by Heraclius, and Byzantium was tottering. A group called the Avars was attacking the European part of the Roman Empire. Chosroes was quietly taking Asia Minor, bit by bit, using the pretext that he was avenging Maurice, who had been deposed and murdered by Phokas.

  This vengeance claim rang a little hollow once Heraclius took the throne from Phokas, but Chosroes already held Syria when Heraclius was crowned, and he continued to advance in the name of Zoroastrianism—with Jewish, Nestorian and Jacobite Christian allies. In short, the Middle East in the seventh century was as troubled as it is in the twenty-first century.

  In 615, when Chosroes held most of the Middle East, Muhammad predicted in the 30th surah of the Quran, called Ar-Rum (‘The Greeks’), that the forces of Byzantium (known to Muhammad as the Greeks) would be victorious over Persia. At the time this was a daring and improbable claim, for just a year earlier Chosroes had written scornfully to Heraclius from Jerusalem: ‘From Chosroes, the greatest of all gods, the master of the whole world: To Heraclius, his most wretched and most stupid servant: you say that you have trust in your Lord. Why didn’t then your Lord save Jerusalem from me?’ The future for Byzantium was looking bleak.

  When Muhammad moved to Medina in 622, Heraclius was just setting out on a series of campaigns that paradoxically would open the way for Islam to advance. The Roman emperor led his troops on 48-mile marches in 24 hours, out-fought and out-thought the Persians and tore apart their empire. He forced Chosroes into defeat after defeat and retreat after retreat, until in 627 Chosroes was deposed, to ‘die in a dungeon’ five days later, after seeing his eighteen sons killed. Peace was made and Rome regained all of its lost territory. Heraclius was freed at last of the burdens of war, but the two mutually weakened empires were ready to be taken over by forces which flocked to the once-obscure Meccan upstart. Byzantium and Persia had worn each other out and, in the last eight years of his rule, Heraclius saw all of his regained provinces fall to the Arabs.

  When Chosroes fled his royal palace at Dastagerd, the Roman forces found extremely fine pickings. Among the loot they found aloe wood, pepper, silk, ginger and sugar, described as ‘an Indian delicacy’—which by then it almost certainly was not. All the same, this is an important clue, because it suggests that while sugar making might have been unknown beyond the Persian empire, sugar itself had been heard of, and seen.

  Islam gained substantially from the Byzantium–Persia conflict, because the successful Quranic predictions like the one in ‘The Greeks’ were hailed as evidence that Muhammad was a true prophet. This gave Islam a dominant position in the Arab world, and it was now free to move into the power vacuum. Islam was on the move, and right in its path lay the places in Persia where sugar was being prepared by Nestorian Christians. Soon after, the Muslims would acquire many other areas where sugar cane would grow.

  THE WANDERING SUGAR CANE

  This foray into Middle Eastern history has taken the story slightly ahead of itself, however. From its early beginnings as a crop for chewing and sucking on, the sugar cane had spread first with coastal traders. The people of South-East Asia and the islands, like their Polynesian descendants, were excellent navigators, launching themselves out into the Pacific on trading journeys 4000 years ago. These people all speak languages of the Austronesian group, and they probably originated somewhere around Taiwan before spreading as far as Easter Island, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, Tahiti, Indonesia and the Philippines, and all the way across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar.

  We know where the early seafarers went in the western Pacific, because we find the signs of their travels in remnants of obsidian, a volcanic glass carried from New Britain to New Ireland some 15 000 or 20 000 years ago. They left adzes, used for making dugout canoes, at sites which appear to be 13 000 years old. Three thousand years ago, New Britain obsidian was travelling as far as Sabah in north Borneo. Then there are the marsupials that were taken from New Guinea, and perhaps Halmahera, to stock small islands, presumably for hunting purposes. The archaeological record shows the sudden appearance of both cuscuses (cat-sized nocturnal possums) and wallabies on the island of Gebe 10 000 years ago. But at least 30 000 years earlier, humans made sea crossings beyond any sight of land, as the first people travelled to Australia. Even when the Ice Age had lowered sea levels 100 metres or more, the crossings w
ere still daunting.

  English speakers and Europeans in general rarely know that Asia and the Pacific had brave and skilled seafarers long before the time of Leif Eiriksson. They have no idea that Chinese fleets visited East Africa before Vasco da Gama entered the Indian Ocean, or that giant bronze drums made by the lost wax method at Dongson, close to Hanoi, were carried to places like Bali well before the Christian era, as traders slipped from island to island, crept around coasts, and occasionally used seasonal winds to make longer ocean crossings. And at some stage, somewhere along the way, these seafarers carried sugar cane to wherever it would grow. Only later did it spread to Persia, the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.

  Taxation records clearly show taxes imposed between AD 636 and AD 644 on sugar grown in Mesopotamia. The sugar captured at Dastagerd in 627 had probably originated in Persia, but it was still an Indian product as far as most people were concerned. That was about to change, however. In 632 the prophet Muhammad died, and soon afterward the forces of Islam commenced their amazing expansion. In 637 the Persians were defeated at Kadysia, which meant the final collapse of the Sassanid empire, and now the Muslim forces were in a position to discover sugar (as opposed to sugar cane) for themselves.

  Certainly we can reject the legend that Marco Polo brought the art of sugar refining back from the east in the thirteenth century, because he commented on the similarities between the Chinese and Egyptian methods of making sugar. All we can say for certain is that sugar cane came from New Guinea, was traded along a variety of coasts, spread inland, hybridised with other species in India and travelled some more, and that somewhere between Indonesia and Persia, about 1500 years ago, somebody discovered how to make sugar from the juice of the sugar cane. From that point, sugar and the technology it demanded began to travel, and as the technology spread it started changing things. Garden cane for chewing could spread by simple diffusion, but the idea of sugar technology was different, because people were able to carry that across continents and oceans. It was an idea as much as a crop.

  Wherever it was encountered, sugar was highly valued. It is hardly surprising that Columbus took sugar cane to the West Indies or that the First Fleet carried sugar cane from the Cape of Good Hope to Australia. Later, when refined sugar reached New Guinea, it was named siuga in Pidgin English. Sugar had come all the way back home, but along the way it had changed remarkably, from a sticky sweet sap sucked from the cane to pure white crystals in paper bags.

  More to the point, by the time sugar came home again it had helped change the world. It had proved a troublesome crop—it had made fortunes, caused rebellions, battles and bloodshed, made and broken empires, led to the enslavement and death of millions and, in the process, to the transplanting of blocks of humanity around the world, taking 20 million Africans to the Americas, Japanese and Chinese to Hawaii, Indians to the West Indies, the Pacific, Mauritius and Natal in South Africa, and Pacific Islanders to Australia, all in the interests of making other people rich.

  FLATHONYS

  Take mylke, and yolks of egges and ale, and draw hem thorgh a straynour, with white sugur or black; and melt faire butter, and put thereto salt, and make faire coffyns, and put hem into a Nowne till þei be a little hard;.þen take a pile, and a dish fastened thereon, and fill þe coffyns therewith of the seid stuffs and late hem bake while. And þen take hem oute and serue hem forthe, and caste Sugur ynough on hem.

  Harleian ms 279: fifteenth-century cookbook

  2

  THE

  SPREAD

  OF SUGAR

  The sugar trade began slowly because it was competing with an ancient and established honey trade. There is a Neolithic painting from the Araña cave at Bicorp in Spain which is usually interpreted as a man robbing a bees’ nest on a cliff (though the waist and hips look more feminine than masculine). Until about 650 BC, hives were robbed, but after this, apiculture (beekeeping) became more common.

  The honey makers had no monopoly on sweetness. Sorghum had been domesticated in Ethiopia around 3000 BC, before spreading to the rest of Africa and also to India somewhere between 1500 and 1000 BC. Fig and date syrups were both common around the Mediterranean Sea but honey was used widely, from India to northern Europe. Honey, which is used to make mead, is medd in Welsh and meodu in Old English, while it is mádhu in Sanskrit and med in the Czech tongue, the similarities suggesting a single origin. The Romans called honey mel, showing the same consonant shift we see in guda/gula. They also boiled grape juice to increase the concentration of sugars to a point where nothing could live in the thick fluid.

  Although syrup is obtained from maple trees and sugar beet, and many fruits contain sugars, honey was the main sweetener for most early societies. The Romans of the first century AD were very partial to sweet tastes. Virgil wrote Georgic verse on the art of bee-keeping as a source of sweetness. Pliny actually mentioned sugar, noting that the largest pieces were the size of a hazelnut, and that sugar was reserved for use as a medicine (ad medicinum tantum usum).

  In AD 698 Ina, king of Sussex, allowed rents to be paid in honey, and his people drank mead, but by 950, when Hywel the Good in Wales set out a code which extended special protection to the brewers of mead, sugar cane was already growing in Spain and throughout the Mediterranean. Sugar was poised to become an essential commodity.

  SUGAR AND ISLAM

  While there is no mention in the Quran of sugar, the Prophet was extremely clear about fermented drinks of the sort that Nearchus had noted in India almost a millennium earlier. Alcohol was forbidden to those who held the faith; for refreshment, good Muslims were restricted to sweet drinks with no alcoholic content, which must have made sugar a highly desirable discovery. For 800 years after the fall of the Sassanids, the production of sugar generally followed Islam, not because of any great advances in technology, but because Islam covered a large area in which existing technologies could be combined and spread.

  An intoxicating brew could be made from sugar, just by leaving a sugar solution or even the ordinary juice lying around to ferment. Preventing fermentation required cunning. The cane juice had to be boiled down to a syrup so sugary that no organism could ferment it—a cordial—which could later be watered down to make a refreshing drink. The traditional cordial sekanjabin, a sweet mint drink, was mentioned by the author al-Nadim as far back as the tenth century. A variety of other drinks were stored as syrups in medieval Islamic society. (This method remains in use to this day, with modern Coca-Cola and similar drinks being distributed as syrupy concentrates for post-mixing.)

  The spread of Islam brought a Pax Arabica, permitting trade over a wide area, and also allowing scholars to travel, to observe, and to spread ideas, all the way from China to the Atlantic, from Norway and Russia to the Indonesian archipelago, and south into Africa. And with no disrespect intended, there were almost certainly those Muslims who adhered to the letter of the words of the Prophet and avoided wine, while leaving their sugary drinks to stand for a day or two to add a bit of zing. Here is how Sir John Mandeville, who claimed to have travelled to Palestine, described the practice in about 1366:

  . . . Saracens that be devout drink never no wine. But some drink it privily; for if they drunk it openly, they should be reproved. But they drink good beverage and sweet and nourishing that is made of gallamelle and that is that men make sugar of, that is of right good savour, and it is good for the breast.

  In reality, Mandeville did not travel in the area at all, and often told the most outrageous lies about Jews and Muslims. Nonetheless, the interesting intoxicating effect of fermented cane juice was known in many societies.

  The mid-600s saw a massive expansion of Islam and sugar. Islamic forces took Cyprus in 644, and even in the first half of the century there were references to sugar cane cultivation in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. By the end of the century sugar had spread all around the Mediterranean, wherever irrigation was available. By 700 the water wheel or noria had been brought into use in the crushing of cane, and a peri
od of consolidation followed. Islamic forces reached Spain by 711, but it was only in 755 that the ruler Abd-ar-Rahman I felt things were peaceful enough to send an expedition to the eastern Mediterranean for sugar cane and other plants for his garden in Cordoba.

  On a domestic scale, existing technology was adequate for the new crop. The cane was cut into short lengths and crushed under an edge-runner mill, where a stone wheel rolled on its edge around a circular groove. This extracted some of the juice, and more was obtained from a beam press or a screw press. The edge-runner mill had long been used to crush olives, nuts and mineral ores, while the presses were commonly used on grapes and olives. At first, Mediterranean sugar production was essentially a family industry.

  At the same time, Muslim travellers visiting tropical areas invariably found sugar cane growing. In 846 a traveller called Ibn Kordadhbeh saw sugar being made in Java, while in 851 an Arab master mariner called Soleiman noted the presence of sugar cane on Madagascar. In the 900s Muslim expansion began to slow. They lost control of Crete in 960 and Cyprus six years later, but their cane fields and sugar mills remained. We know Sicily had mills by this time, because Ibn Hauqal wrote in 950 that the ‘Persian reed’ was growing on the banks of the rivers and streams around Palermo, and that juice was obtained by feeding cane into pressing mills. By the eleventh century, sugar cane was being grown in Morocco and Tunisia.

  In 1060 the Normans invaded Sicily and by 1090 the balance of power in the Mediterranean was changing fast: the Normans controlled Sicily, and the Arabs lost Malta in the same year. The first Crusade began in 1099, and soon enough,

  Sugar in the Mediterranean after AD 700.

  returning Crusaders were spreading the word in Europe about sugar and sugar cane. Sugar was imported into northern Europe, initially as a medicine, and then as an addition to food and drink.

  The medical uses of sugar have a venerable tradition. Buddha declared that it was no sin for a sick person to ask for gur, and Pliny had noted sugar’s medicinal uses. The prophet Muhammad recommended dates, which have a very high sugar content, as medicine. In the thirteenth century, a theological debate in the Catholic church dealt with the status of sugar. Was it medicine, nourishment, or just for pleasure? Thomas Aquinas took the view that those who resorted to sugar during Lent did so for health reasons, not for nourishment—and in 1353 a French royal decree required apothecaries to swear never to use honey when sugar was prescribed.