By Joel Denker
The cane shoots “succeeded very well” in the soil of Hispaniola, the voyager reminisced. In 1493, Columbus had carried five seedlings from the Canary Islands to the West Indies. The journey of sugar, first cultivated in New Guinea, grown soon after in India, and transported from the East to the Mediterranean by the Arabs, culminated in the Americas.
Columbus, a Genoese captain, had family ties to the Atlantic sugar trade. Married to the daughter of a Madeira sugar planters, he had traveled the route from Lisbon to Madeira carrying cargoes of sugar.
The West had overtaken the Orient in the sugar race. The Portuguese and the Spanish set the pace. Seeking a warmer climate for the crop, the Iberians, with the help of slave labor, planted it in the islands of Atlantic. By 1500, Madeira, which the Portuguese colonized, had become the world’s largest sugar exporter. Spain grew cane on the Canary Islands..
The Portuguese moved the center of their sugar operations to Brazil, which dominated cane production in the sixteenth century. Later the British and other European powers set out to challenge the Portuguese. From Barbados and Jamaica, the British, who wrested control of the sugar trade in 1655, maintained their supremacy for two centuries.
After trying tobacco, indigo, ginger, and other crops, English planters became maniacally devoted to sugar. They converted all the arable land on the Barbados to grow it. They established factory-like plantations that integrated cultivation, harvesting, grinding, boiling, and other processing. During their reign, they shipped more than two hundred thousand slaves from Africa to labor in the industry.
The owners, who had invested major capital, could not afford to waste any resources. At first, molasses, the viscous residue left over after crystalline sugar had been produced, was discarded. The colonists soon figured how to distill a potent drink from it. The rough-hewn liquor was aptly named “kill devil.” An anonymous visitor to the Barbados, quoted by historian Richard Curtis, called the product s “hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.”
This drink, rum, got its name from English slang for a “brawl or violent commotion.”
New arrivals in Jamaica, writer Charles Leslie observed, consume rum “with excessive Pleasure, get drunk, expose themselves to noxious Dews, are seized with fever and die.”
Rum caught on with British sailors docking in the West Indies. Seamen started receiving a daily allotment of grog, a diluted form of the drink, in 1740. Watering down rum, Admiral Edward Vernon argued, would prevent a “stupefying (of) their rational qualities, which makes them heedless slaves to every passion.” Later lime or lemon juice was added to the grog to prevent scurvy.
“Limeys” were soon lugging casks of molasses and rum into ships bound for the American colonies. The sugar products had become valuable commodities. “A sugar planter expects that the rum and molasses would defray the whole expense of his cultivation,” the economist Adam Smith observed.
The British colonies traded briskly with each other. North America provided the West Indies with vital goods in exchange for molasses and rum. Dried cod, fed to slaves, beef, flour, rope, and other items were exported from New England. Farmers made shingles and staves, which were assembled into barrels, sent to the Caribbean. Hogsheads filled with sweet riches were shipped back.
Distilleries that converted molasses into rum sprang up. By 1770, 140 firms, largely in port towns, were churning out liquor.
Americans began quaffing more rum than beer and cider, the previous favorites. In 1770, historians Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald note, the average American downed more than two-and-a-half ounces of rum a day.
Taverns in towns like Boston were the principal outlets for rum. Tempting pieces of salt cod hung near rum barrels in these gathering places. Rum was drunk “neat” as well as in variety of creative mixtures. Milk, sugar, and nutmeg livened up a summer rum drink. It was “good for dysentery and loose bowels,” the writer Israel Aurelius said.
Flip was the most celebrated rum drink. A pitcher or mug was filled two-thirds with beer, five ounces of rum, and sweetened with molasses. In the piece de resistance, an iron implement was plunged into the potion. The loggerhead, historian Wayne Curtis writes, was “a narrow piece of iron about three feet long with a slightly bulbous head the size of a small onion.” The instrument was “plunged red-hot into a beer-rum-and-molasses concoction. The whole mess would foam and hiss and send up a mighty head.”
Rum also served more nefarious ends. Ports, like Newport, specialized in exporting rum to Africa where it was used to procure slaves. Fur traders seduced Indians with the “demon” drink.
The New Englanders’ proclivity for rum aroused the ire of the clergy. “They that are poor, and wicked too, can for a penny or two-pence make themselves drunk,” Increase Mather said.
Molasses and brown sugar gradually replaced maple sugar or “Indian molasses,” as New Englanders called it. In the early days, settlers perked up their bacon and bean pot with the flavoring they had discovered from Native Americans. As new sweeteners became more abundant, Saturday night dinners of molasses-laden beans and brown bread took root wherever Yankees migrated.
Over time, white sugar won over the American palate. By the 1770s, 26 refineries in New England manufactured the product. It became pervasive in new refreshments like tea and coffee, and infused jellies, preserves, and cakes. A century later, the victory of inexpensive, mass produced white sugar over its lowly cousins was complete.
Sugar’s triumph, however, has come at a price. Originally renowned as a “spice,” it has lost its allure and its bite. Once prescribed as a curative, it is now proscribed.
Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/
