Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  Still, the magazine’s proprietors had the full details for their readers. Here is Marggraf, in their translation, after he has explained how he showed that sugar could be dissolved in strong brandy, strained through a cloth, and then formed into crystals again:

  Having prepared the way by this experiment, I took the roots of white beets, and having cut them into small slices, I laid them by the fire to dry, taking care not to burn them: I then reduced them to a coarse powder, and laid it to dry a second time, because it is very apt to contract moisture: Whilst this coarse powder was yet warm, I put eight ounces of it into a glass vessel, and pour’d upon it 16 ounces of brandy, so strong that it fired canon-powder.

  After boiling, straining the mash through cloth and waiting, he obtained a small amount of sugar from this and other roots:

  By this method . . . I obtained from the three roots . . . the following quantities of sugar.

  1. From half a pound of the root of white beets, half an ounce of pure sugar.

  2. From half a pound of skirrets, an ounce and a half of pure sugar.

  3. From half a pound of red beets, one ounce and a quarter of pure sugar.

  It is evident from these experiments that lime water is not at all necessary to dry and thicken the sugar, as some pretend, since the sugar chrystalizes without it.

  Being thus assured that there was a real sugar in plants, I endeavoured to find out a less expensive manner of extracting it . . .

  Now the interesting point here is that while we recognise Marggraf as the discoverer of beet sugar, his trials had pointed another way, to the water parsnip or skirret as the best source. Significantly, the common English name skirret comes from the Dutch suikerwortel, meaning ‘sugar root’, so Marggraf was hardly making a major discovery here. Known to the botanists as Sium sisarum, but identified by Marggraf as Sisarum dodonaei, the skirret was introduced into Europe from China around 1548, and was soon hailed on all sides as ‘the sweetest of roots’. This was the plant he used.

  I took a certain quantity of skirrets; I cut the roots, whilst fresh, and pounded them as small as possible in an iron mortar. I then put them into a linen bag and pressed out the juice . . . I poured water upon the roots remaining in the bag, and pressed them a second time. I . . . let it stand to settle in a cool place for 48 hours: In which time it became clear, and a mealy substance settled to the bottom . . .

  The first clarification being thus made, I put some whites of eggs to the juice, and boiled it in a brass pan, scumming it continually, till no further impurities appeared upon the surface: I then passed it thro’ a linen cloth, and the liquor was as transparent as the clearest wine.

  After further boiling to condense it to a syrup, Marggraf let the syrup stand in a warm place, and after six months, he found crystals on the sides of the glass vessel. Collecting the crystals, he drained them of syrup, blotted them, dissolved them in water, and strained the solution through cloth. He then used methods we should recognise, for he:

  . . . boil’d it to the consistence of a thick syrup; then put a little lime water to it, and boil’d it gently until it became ropy. I then took it off the fire, and stirr’d it about until it cool’d and thickened a little; after which I poured it into well-burnt earthen vessels in the form of a cone, closed at the small end with a wooden stopper, which vessels I put into others that were deeper, and set them in a temperate place.

  THE NAPOLEON GAMBIT

  So with Marggraf claiming in Germany to have produced best Muscovado sugar, far from the sugar islands, and setting out the details for others to follow, why did it take two more generations for beet sugar to be produced commercially? The answer appears to be in two parts. Sugar could still be bought more cheaply from the tropics because the existing beet varieties demanded too much effort for the amount of sugar that resulted.

  It was clear that the beets varied, and Marggraf later identified white beet as giving the highest yield, followed by skirret and red beet, but he recommended the beet as a source of syrups for cooking, not as the basis of an industry. According to the usual account, that was as far as the sugar beet went until the supply of cane sugar to Europe by sea was stopped by the Napoleonic wars. In fact, work was continuing behind the scenes. Marggraf’s former pupil and successor in his chair, Carl Franz Achard, began a systematic study of beet sugar in 1786 at Caulsdorf. Thus, by the time Napoleon’s many wars caused sugar shortages, the technology to produce beet sugar was available.

  In 1799 Achard presented Frederick William III of Prussia with a loaf of sugar prepared at a Berlin refinery from raw beet. With regal assistance, Achard set up a sugar works. Unfortunately it failed, mainly due to his lack of business acumen, although insufficient research and development may have played a part as well. Achard also told the Institute of France of his results; but because the French were investigating getting sugar from grapes, nothing came of it then. Soon, though, France needed to find a replacement for the 100 000 tons of sugar that had come from Haiti each year, where the former slaves were no longer willing to carry out the back-breaking work required.

  A Königsaal refinery in Bohemia produced beet sugar in 1797, and another beet sugar factory opened at Horowitz in 1800. Achard was by no means alone in his discovery, but it was the French who now took over, crossing various strains of beet and carrying out systematic tests of the new plants. The factory of Freiherr Moritz von Koppy started production in 1806; his ‘White Silesian’ beetroot has provided all of the modern strains of sugar beet. Achard also told the Tsar of his work, and a factory soon opened in Russia. By 1809 there were eight factories working there; three years later, there were eight factories around Magdeburg alone. Napoleon ordered an expansion of the French beet sugar enterprise, and by 1813 France had 334 factories producing close to 4000 tons of sugar.

  Unfortunately, the bubble was about to burst. As Napoleon’s armies retreated, Europe opened up again to English trade and to sugar from the English colonies. That started a long-lasting Gallic complaint of English sugar policy wiping out a delicate French industry, but the various tales of British attempts to kill off the sugar beet industry are at best dubious and at worst, total fabrications, probably having more to do with French domestic politics, and the need for a perfidious Britannic bogeyman, than to any planned English action.

  If anything, the French sugar industry was doing better than the British. By 1815 France was at peace and subsidising her beet sugar industry, keeping beet sugar in competition with British cane sugar as prices plummeted. Having already lost most Caribbean sources of sugar, France also lost Mauritius in 1816, leaving little option but to develop beet sugar for domestic consumption. By 1826 some 1900 factories were making around 24 000 tons of sugar a year, and by 1833 consolidation into 400 factories had done no harm: production reached 40 000 tons of sugar annually, a third of the nation’s needs. From there, it became a war of attrition between the two types of sugar.

  GUNPOWDER

  Take pulverized saltpetre, moisten it, and subject it to the action of a slow fire until completely dried and granulated, of this take 75 parts, purified sugar 12 and a-half parts, moisten and grind together till completely blended, which will require several hours, pulverize on heaters till dried.

  Daniel Young, Young’s Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets, Toronto, 1861

  10

  THE RISE OF

  TECHNOLOGY

  Many problems faced the sugar cane planters of the Americas in the nineteenth century. They were beset by the loss of their slaves, by competition from new sugar-producing areas (both tropical cane and temperate beet) reducing the local demand and even competing for the export markets, and by irrational taxes and duties, all combining to reduce their profits.

  They were left with no choice but to improve their performance. That meant applying the lessons of the Industrial Revolution and improving their crops by finding better canes and better ways to grow the canes. In the process, some people lost fortunes, others were thrown
out of work and into grinding poverty, while a few made vast fortunes. The first step was to improve the technology—and that meant the end of the Jamaica Train, just as Brazilian growers were beginning to adopt it.

  Sugar syrup boils at temperatures far higher than water boils, and one of the problems that Richard Ligon had noted around 1650 was that the great heat tended to burn out the copper pans in which the syrup was heated, especially as the level became lower. The last of the syrup would often ‘catch’, leaving a flavour and colour in the next batch of sugar. The cost of replacing burnt-out copper pans was high, but replacing them with cheaper iron pans increased the amount of ‘catching’, thus reducing the quality of the sugar, which was judged largely by colour.

  Today, we would solve that by turning down the flame, but in those days, in the places where the sugar cane grew, gas was unavailable. The only real answer was to reduce the heat that was required, and that needed a vacuum pan, a sealed vessel under low pressure where syrup would boil at a sufficiently low temperature to stop the sugar catching.

  An Englishman, the Hon. Edward Charles Howard, took out the first patent for a vacuum-pan method of evaporation in 1813, but it was a patent for a process, not a device. By 1827 there were just six of the systems in operation. The main aim was to concentrate the sugar solution while keeping inversion, the change to simple sugars, to a minimum. With its reduced temperature, the vacuum pan was a wonder, but it was largely an unused wonder.

  Part of the problem was the taxation system then in place and the continuing attitude of the British government to sugar being refined in the colonies. The first vacuum-pan sugar arrived in England in 1833, and was deemed to be above the level of muscovado sugar, and so liable to a duty of £8 8s. per hundredweight. By 1845 it was accepted that this sugar should come in at 16s. 4d. per cwt, against 14s. for other sugars, the two classes being called ‘equal to white clayed by any process’ or ‘yellow muscovado’, and ‘not equal to white clayed or muscovado’— though this lesser product was then paradoxically called ‘brown muscovado’.

  In 1837, the ‘centrifugal’ was invented in France. There called an essoreuse and designed originally to dry textiles, this device inspired an English patent directed at sugar in 1843, which had an immediate effect. The centrifugal produced a drier sugar, allowing it to be transported in bags for the first time rather than in the more expensive barrels. In simple terms it was a spin-dryer—using the same principle as today’s washing machines—and it led to yet another leap in the quality of the sugar produced in the sugar colonies. Bags also packed together tighter, allowing steamships to carry more in their holds.

  In the same year of the English patent on a sugar centrifugal, Norbert Rillieux in Louisiana introduced, if he did not originate, multiple-effect evaporation, which was more efficient than other vacuum systems. There are other claimants to the invention, including Degrand and Derosne, but Rillieux had multiple-effect evaporation systems operating in Louisiana in 1848, three years before the rival patents, and he clearly deserves a major share in the credit. Delicately termed a ‘man of colour’, he had trained in France, and his technique revolutionised sugar production.

  While the planting, cultivation and harvesting of cane remained manual, after about 1820, even as world sugar prices plunged, steam engines began to appear, just here and there, as power sources for the mills. In 1845 the first railway in Cuba, or Latin America for that matter, was opened. From Havana to Güines, a distance of 70 kilometres, the railway could be used to transport cane much faster than horses, donkeys or cattle could haul it; this opened up the possibility of central mills servicing a number of owner-growers, a model previously discarded in a number of growing areas. The problem with a centralised mill had been that too much sugar might arrive in a short period, over-taxing the workers—but now mills could be made big enough to absorb the peaks of cane supply. More importantly, they could be powered by machines and required fewer workers.

  In 1847 Earl Grey recommended that the British colonies use more central factories. The problem was commitment: most plantations were already set up with individual mills and, with capital hard to raise, nothing came of it. In 1871, when Antigua suffered hurricane damage, there was a chance for reform, but although a committee recommended a central factory system, there was no follow-up. Properties were selling so cheaply after the storm that people were able to make a profit still, even after rebuilding the small and inefficient mills.

  By 1850 the vacuum pan was in wide use in other parts of the world, but Sir Henry Barkly, Governor of British Guiana, pointed out that the differential duties applied to vacuum-pan sugar by the home government had the effect of hindering the introduction of this method in the British colonies. On Java, where there were no restrictions on refining methods, 54 of the 95 contract factories used the vacuum pan in 1856, and after about 1865 it became the normal equipment in all new mills.

  DEPRESSION AND BEET SUGAR

  The war between beet and cane was far from over. In 1836 the best beet sugar yield was about 5.5 per cent by weight; by 1936 it was 16.7 per cent. Part of this increase came from improved plants, but more came from better methods of extraction. In 1866 Jules Robert developed a diffusion process for extracting sugar from beet, in which thin slices are treated to systematic extraction by circulating dilute juice at 90°C, leaving most of the albuminoids behind in the unruptured cells while extracting the sugar. Albuminoids carry large amounts of protein into the syrup, which must be removed. With Robert’s new method, beet sugar could now be produced more cheaply. By 1880 beet sugar began to threaten cane sugar in price and volume; in 1884 the price of sugar plunged, and in 1885 the world produced more beet sugar than cane sugar. And after about the 1850s, sugar beet was growing in places like Utah, where it gained a benefit from the high cost of freighting cane sugar from anywhere else.

  The problems of cane sugar did not stop there. Beet sugar could be produced as white granules, and lost no weight in transit, something the wholesalers appreciated. Beachey reports that one prominent confectioner said in 1889:

  No self-respecting confectioner will be bothered with the huge dirty casks and syrupy bags in which cane sugar is imported now; he may buy some of it for special work (as for gingersnaps) but can rarely use it without special examination.

  In one market though, the whiteness of beet sugar was a drawback. In the 1890s an estimated 1500 tons of dyed beet sugar with a strong chemical smell sold as ‘Yellow Demerara’ every week in London. The sugar crystals were doctored to look like Demerara by adding a small amount of sulfuric acid to the clarified beet juice: the cost was only a few shillings a ton, but provided a premium of £1 or £2 a ton.

  The name ‘Demerara Crystals’ was in fact a trade name for brownish yellow sugar coming from Demerara, later part of British Guiana, but in November 1913 a High Court appeal in London upheld the decision of a Metropolitan Police Magistrate that the name applied to a type of sugar, and not to its origin. One of the appeals judges argued that the prepared sugar in question was Demerara in every respect other than its origin, and that if people were offered natural sugar from Demerara, in its natural state and colour, they would probably refuse it.

  As well as competition of this sort, sugar makers everywhere had to deal with taxes and bounties written to win votes and gain favours. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth century, there was a continuing international brawl over sugar bounties, especially those paid by France and Germany, which were mainly paid for exported sugar. In October 1900 the Sugar Bounties Conference met once more and France, Germany and Austria agreed to end direct bounties, with France ending some of the indirect bounties. This was encouraged in part by India having placed a countervailing duty on subsidised sugar to help the Indians on Mauritius. It was also aided by the revelation that Germany’s sugar cartel had been making huge profits. The French voters were now incensed that the British paid less than half of what they paid in France for the same s
ugar—to the benefit of the beet-growers and the refiners.

  Many foreign governments, but especially America, revelled in the idea of countervailing duties, which involved placing a tax equal to the subsidy on any sugar coming from the nation subsidising their sugar. In simple terms, the nation applying the countervailing duty was able to milk a nice little cash cow at the expense of a foreign government and its taxpayers. What could be sweeter?

  The sugar prices were down because there was just too much sugar around. One solution, of course, was to turn the excess into alcohol; but the European rum made from the white crystals of beet sugar lacked flavour. This did not faze the German rum makers, who sent commercial agents to scour the Caribbean for strong-flavoured rums that could be diluted as much as 7:1 with German spirits. The German rum industry prospered, and by 1914 Germany had 6000 distilleries producing 66 million gallons of alcohol per year. The First World War put an end to German ships carrying flavoursome rum from the West Indies, but that mattered little, because Germany had a greater need for all that unflavoured alcohol. It would be used to fuel the German war machine.

  IMPROVING THE CANE

  Sugar cane is a grass and, like other grasses, it reproduces by setting seed, while fragments that are placed in the ground will also take root. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, the only variety of cane that came out of Persia into the Mediterranean lands, and then into and across the Atlantic, was a sterile form.

  Over time, with growers habitually using cuttings to plant new crops and start new areas, the sugar cane had become a giant sterile clone that never produced flowers or set seed. This did not matter for production, since the cane grew so well from setts. The crop had no genetic diversity, however, and any pest that became established had a clear run, especially as sugar cane tended to be planted as almost the only crop, with fields lasting three or four years before they were retired and replanted in rotation. It was an ideal situation for wandering pests, and may explain why sugar production died out in many places.