Want Some Khandakah?

It may seem like people must have always had sugar to eat, but that's not true. The story of sugar (actually, sucrose) production spans 2500 years and involves much of world history (and some science, too!). Humans used honey as a sweetener for thousands of years, but in about 500 BCE, people in India figured out how to change the juice of the sugar cane plant into solid sucrose crystals. Within a few hundred years (things moved slower back then), this knowledge had moved into Persia (now Iran) and Arabia. In fact, an Arabic/Sanskrit word for "sugar" is "khandakah", from which we probably get our word "candy"!

From about 1000 - 1200 CE, Europeans invaded the Middle East (primarily the land that is now Israel and Syria) for a variety of religious and political reasons that won't be discussed here. One of the things that the Crusaders brought back to Europe was sugar. Sugar was mostly used as a medicine (although it wouldn't really cure anything) until someone created the first candy, sugar-coated almonds, in around 1200 CE. By the 1300's, sugar had become fairly common, but was very, very expensive. At this time, it was grown in Italy, Greece, India, and Arabia. In the 1600's and 1700's, colonies were established in the "New World", and many of them also grew sugar cane. In fact, the need for labor on sugar plantations was one of the main reasons why African slaves were brought to the Americas.

Today, table sugar (sucrose) comes from the juice of either sugar cane or sugar beets. These juices naturally contain a lot of different chemicals, such as water, proteins, starches, coloring agents, and fibers. In fact, only 10-15% of the juice is actually sucrose. The plants are harvested and mashed, and the juice is collected. It is then heated to evaporate the water. The type of evaporator that is still used today was developed by the African-American inventor Norbert Rillieux of New Orleans; this device was faster and safer than the older methods. Once the sugar crystals form, they are cleaned and dried. White cane sugar, the kind most commonly used in the U.S., is 99% pure sucrose.