There is food for the body, and is - for the soul. Delicacy! What to entertain and baby, and the old man? Candy. What is comforted in a moment of psychic troubles? The choice - cake or chocolate...
It is believed that the sweet life chose his humanity - as payment for a quiet life of farming. While the hunter man running through forests and meadows, while in the food component was dominated by animal meat, simply speaking, a vegetarian food was not the primary and permanent - until sugar it does not cause it. But it began to loosen the soil, cultivate cereals - it took a rather poor taste, fresh food - bread, cereal - flavor something to enrich the taste. G required - and our hero, sugar!
Therefore, even in ancient times, people looking for the source of sweets around him. The choice is not very large: the juice of plants and berries. Well, all the honey, the product is special, the embodiment of sweetness, a symbol of it. But it is very expensive.
Maybe Russian, faute de mieux, because so attached to a birch tree - for its sweet juice? Especially coveted is because it is time to account for most hungry for Russia during the year. And the affection that they inherited from their predecessors in the current Russian lands from the Finno-Ugric tribes.
Indians of North America was more fortunate: they gave the sugar maple sap is much sweeter, it was even possible to store for future use, stored in a peculiar form of pieces of ice-candies.
Each nation sought out for himself saharonos - different kinds of trees, birch, maple, and beans - is like, just to sweeten the food!
It was supposed to be the world sugar cane - a gift, a curse, a source, so to speak, vegetable honey, cheap and incredibly sweet! He appeared - in Bengal. There, in ancient India, the Europeans first saw the rushes, which gives honey - about such divas reported in their reports generals of Alexander of Macedon.
The Europeans have seen - and nothing more. A mastered, vengeance began to use the Arabs. During the Arab conquests (VII-IX century), sugar cane came into use in Egypt, Spain. Trading tried to sugar the Venetians (966 years), who were, so to speak, on the border between the Europeans and Arabs. However, this trade has not turned out - were too small shipments.
The Europeans had to move to mass crusades to close to meet with sugar cane in the Holy Land. Not all at once they understood what to do with the plant, the children imitated in dealing with this sweet cereal: chewed and sucked the juice. Then he learned from the "infidels" sugar refining.
But processing technology - this one, and the availability of sufficient resources - both. Sugar cane had to grow up sometime, and it succeeded only in the south of France (do not believe the south of Spain - the land still belonged to the Arab world), the Canary, Azores, Madeira.
Sugar still remains a rarity, a luxury. In 1513 the Portuguese king as a gift to the pope presents made from sugar sculptural: the lord of the Holy See itself, surrounding his twelve cardinals (figures - life-size! ), And three hundred candles, each a half a meter. "No sugar does not spoil the meal" - a saying that was common at the same time in Germany. In a word, felt a kind of sugar, rare spices.
The next breakthrough came with the discovery of America. Antilles nature seems to be specially created for cultivation of sugar cane. And the Europeans to help nature, organized flow of African slaves on the plantation. Or - European slaves, what turned out to convicts sent to the island (remember the fate of the protagonist, "The Odyssey of Captain Blood").
This period, from XV to XX century was the time of the broadest expansion of sugar in the world, for the most part - sugar cane. In the XVI century from Brazil to Europe, delivered a year for about 1,600 tons. In 1676 Jamaica only sends four hundred ships of 72,000 tons of sugar.
And nature, and ruthlessly exploited by the slaves. Planters expected revenue, but production of sugar turned out costly - if only because the ships were brought to Europe, raw sugar, raw materials, require additional handling, cleanup. And in America the same ships carried everything needed for the extraction of sugar: slaves, food, tools for cultivation, copper cooking pots (to cook the sugar! ) Tissue...
and technology, among other things! The technology was Portuguese, the Portuguese learned how to get raw sugar in Madeira. In contrast to the French, who, at first, soaking the reed in the water instead of sugar received something like vinegar. However, the hitch was short, and French planters bearings in the intricacies of sugar refining.
These transport across the seas, oceans cool burdened cost of sugar. In the middle of the XVIII century, sugar, British colonies cost seventy percent more than the sugar colonies of France. We determined this difference is the high cost of food that Britain supplied the colonies. By the way, England, getting over the sea road, against the French, sugar, and consume it at the same high prices, the rich already had the country (ie - the rich were its citizens).
So, it turned out that the planter, using this unique plant, sugar cane, recycling is almost-free, faster and even more have benefited from the sale of raw sugar is not - somewhere in Europe Which, incidentally, was obtained by distillation in the distillery wastes sugar factory. Pierre du du Tertre told in the middle of XVII century, the technological intricacies of this process: "Foam of the second and third boilers and all the rapidly rotating liquid drops in the stock ovens and drains into a canoe, where everything is stored for the formation of living water, negros do drink out of it, however, tolerate this state of the planters did not want to. Yes, and Europe at some point realized that a good idea there, beyond the seas, to make all the work (polluting) cleaning of sugar - and to supply the European market the finished product.
And what was this finished product, for example, in the middle of the XVIII century - will help to understand the quote contained in the work of the historian Fernand Braudel. Braudel describes the various types of sugars present in the French market:
«Moscouade, cassonade, sugar to seven livres, royal sugar, sugar polukorolevsky, candy red and sugar, which is also called Cyprus. Good moscouade should be whitish in color, as far as possible less fat and almost no smell of burning. Cassonade, which is also referred to as the sugar island must choose a white, dry, granular, with the taste and odor of violets. The most beautiful are from Brazil, but they almost ceased trading. Cayenne is the second largest sugar, and sugar, the island should be behind him. Confectioners in his jam and use a lot of Brazilian island cassonade and even more of its value, rather than refined sugar: jam, koi are prepared from it, more good... And less prone to zasaharivaniyu. "
This quote describes the range of cane sugar market in France in 1760. Meanwhile, in neighboring Germany already in 1747 a chemist Marggraf made a discovery - in sections of beet root, he discovered the sugar crystals. However, it took another few decades, the issue of obtaining sugar from beets became important.
And it happened thanks to Napoleon and his wars - and the blockade which the British established for the supply of their enemies in Europe, all from overseas, including sugar. Well, change has been good, although the fans and judges all are manage to distinguish cane sugar from sugar beet, and even more - to prefer brown to white cane. Or vice versa - then, they are lovers.
It appears that the sugar - it is not just a provocateur progress of dentistry. In the more sugar - the driving force of civilization. The Crusades, the discovery of America, the crystallization of a special nation - blacks, the Napoleonic wars, the creation of a great British fleet - it turns out that all this was done... Sweet life for the sake of humanity!
