HERB - sugar

[Gaylin Walli]

Within the corpus of recipes we have for cooking, there are a few
which call for sugar and instruct the reader to actually refine the
sugar. It typically involves boiling the sugar as a heavy syrup and
then clarifying that with eggs whites (much like you would for a
consumme today). Honestly, we have little evidence that I can
find that medieval sugar resembled the granulated sugar of today,
other than the fact that the whiter sugar was the more highly
valued type. Granulation itself is a modern invention for sugar.
 From what I can tell, sugar mostly came in cone-shaped cakes and
had to be ground by hand in order to use them.

Some people in the SCA, cooks on the Ansteorran-based cook's
list believ that turbinado sugar may be one of the best modern
interpretation of period sugar. Others believe that a mexican
product sold in hispanic markets may be closer to the original.
Ultimately, we cannot really say because we do not have any
true archaelogical evidence and can really only guess based on
what books tell us about the cake and clarification process.

My sugar was a loaf of not brown sugar. That is, sugar that was
not quite refined as granulated sugar, but not the brown sugar in
the market today that we find colored with a bit of molasses.
I got this loaf in a local hispanic market of my father's home town
when I was home on vacation from school. The lady at the store
called it "piloncillo" if I'm remembering correctly (it was over
10 years ago, afterall). And the only way I could get that to work
in the recipe was to pound the crap out of it and then dissolve it
in water. I couldn't use a grater on it.

Some of the best mail order sources for cone sugar, I'm told, are
early American reenactment sources like Colonial Williamsburg.
I have heard mention that the following are also good sources but
I have not ordered from either of them myself:

Jas. Townsend &sin, Inc.
P.O. Box 415
Pierceton, NJ 46562
1-219-594-5852 --Information
1-800-338-1665-- orders

King Arthur Flour Company
PO Box 1010
Rt. 5 South
Norwich, VT  05055
1-800-827-6836
http://www.kingarthurflour.com


I hope this helps. I wish I had more information. I'm still waiting on
some history of sugar books from ILL. When I do some more research
I'll let you know.

jasmine
Iasmin de Cordoba, gwalli at infoengine.com
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