Subject: Re: Ascorbic fix (was: Why desserts came about)

From: [email-masked] (pete)
Date: 30 Jul 1993 02:38 PST

I'm crossposting this to rec.food.historic, for obvious reasons.

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] 
(Cameron Laird) writes...
`In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] 
`(Chris Brewster) writes:
`>Ernest Kim writes:
`>
`>   Someone has suggested that desserts came about because they offered
`>   physiological advantages while someone else thinks they were created
`>   by a group of people who wanted to increase economic consumption.
`>
`>   Anyone else care to comment?
`>
`>Here's my hunch.  We (esp northern people) evolved in an environment
`>where we needed almost all the food and energy we could find, because
`>there was always the danger of going for a time with no food, as in
`>winter.  (Just watch how your local mammals are always interested in
`>food.)  Similarly we evolved to like sweet food because the sweetness
`>indicated energy as well as fresh food and good nutrition (fruits, in
`>other words).  When the colonialists discovered sugar, our taste for
`			.
`			.
`			.
`A slightly different specific argument is that a
`sweet tooth orients us to fruits, a Good Thing for
`an organism dependent on exogenous water-soluble
`vitamin C.

==========================================================================
Really, I am going to be leaving on my vacation  % Pete Vincent
any minute now.                                  %

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From: [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch)
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 21:31:40 GMT

[email-masked] (Chris Brewster) writes:
>`>...  Similarly we evolved to like sweet food because the sweetness
>`>other words).  When the colonialists discovered sugar, our taste for...

"The colonialists"?  I suppose the early Moslems could be called
colonialists, bringing the light of civilization to northern Africa,
the Near East, and the Iberian peninsula in the 7th and 8th centuries,
and they (at least by the 11th century) had sugar.  It was widespread,
though expensive and used as much for medicinal purposes as for
culinary, in Europe by the 14th or 15th century.  I don't know how
early it was in use in the Orient.

What "the colonialists" discovered (meaning the western European
colonialists of the 17th century) was a combination of trade routes,
Caribbean climate, and slavery that allowed them to produce sugar
more profitably and in greater quantities than before.

[email-masked] (Cameron Laird) writes...
>`an organism dependent on exogenous water-soluble

I've also heard it suggested that primates' color vision evolved to
help us find fruit.  I haven't heard the vitamin C argument for our
NEEDING to find fruit, and have just assumed it was a natural food
source for arboreal animals.

(I hope I've got those attributions right....)

-- 
					Stephen Bloch
				     [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (David Adams)
Date: 3 Aug 93 11:32:30 CDT

In article [email-masked], [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch) writes:

|  I suppose the early Moslems could be called
|colonialists, bringing the light of civilization to northern Africa,
|the Near East, and the Iberian peninsula in the 7th and 8th centuries,
|and they (at least by the 11th century) had sugar.  It was widespread,
|though expensive and used as much for medicinal purposes as for
|culinary, in Europe by the 14th or 15th century.  I don't know how
|early it was in use in the Orient.

What medicinal uses did sugar have?

---
David, N0WWN/AA
	November Zero Wiskey Wiskey November
--David C. Adams  Statistician  Cray Research Inc.  [email-masked]
     -Sourdough and Ham-              - Minnesotans for Global Warming! -
	(&gardner)

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From: [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch)
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 01:56:55 GMT

>|early it was in use in the Orient.

I've now had a chance to check at least my personal library.  Harold
McGee, in _On Food and Cooking_, writes
	Ordinary table sugar...was barely known to Europe nine
	centuries ago and was a luxury reserved for the fortunate
	few until 1700.... The sugar cane originated somewhere in
	the South Pacific and gradually spread into Asia, perhaps
	carried by early human migrations.  The technology of
	making "raw" sugar by pressing out the cane juice and
	boiling it down into dark crystals was developed in India
	around 500 B.C.

	Both sugar cane and the technique for extracting sugar
	were carried westward from India first by the Persians,
	who established them in the Tigris-Euphrates valley in
	the 6th century A.D., and then by the Arabs, who
	conquered Persia for Islam around 640 and introduced the
	cane to northern Africa, Syria, and Spain.  Christian
	Europe first encountered sugar during the Crusades to the
	Holy Land in the 12th century, and shortly thereafter
	Venice was established as the hub of the sugar trade to
	the West.  The first large shipment to England that we
	know of came in 1319.

>What medicinal uses did sugar have?

McGee discusses sugar's use in medicine for a page or so, but doesn't
mention any specific medicinal use except to hide the flavor of
something nastier or to form electuaries (the method of administering
medicines in tablets to be licked or sucked, like a cough drop).  He
does say, however, that "sugar was used both as a drug in itself and
as a material with which to bind up all the other ingredients and to
disguise their taste."

-- 
					Stephen Bloch
				     [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Sharon Stoned)
Date: 4 Aug 93 21:52:24 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch) writes:
>>>A good reference for this "Of Sugar and Power", which traces the life of
sugar from India to the New World until the 18th century. A Very good read,
that particularly shows the development of the sweet tooth in England. Th ink
it is by Sydney Mintz.

<<<<Gary>>>>

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From: Alan Deacon
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1993 12:43:14 GMT

So that's what electuaries are! Any idea about "glisters" - someone 
suggested pessaries. And what is actually involved in a "phlembotomy" or
in "neefing" (cutting?).

These terms all occur in a 16th Cent almanac, and are obviously health
related.

--
	Alan Deacon
	Central Computing Service		Email: [email-masked]
	University College London		Tel: +44 71-380 7359
	Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT		Fax: +44 71-388 5406

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From: [email-masked] (John Trimble)
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1993 18:57:59 GMT

The book by Sidney W. Mintz is Sweetness and Power, and I agree with Gary 
that the V in Very good read should be capitalized to indicate both that 
it is VEry readable and Very good.  

Mintz is an anthropologist, but one of my favorite historians has 
some good food stories in his work.  That's Fernand Braudel, in his three
volumes on civilization and capitalism, The Structures of Everyday Life, 
THe Wheels of Commerce, and The Perspective of the World.   Heavier reading
with less on food, but more on how the whole world came to be as it is.  
Compared to Mintz, a worthwhile challenge.  

Bon appetit.
 
John Trimble
[email-masked]