SC - Rum and Brown Sugar (was: Isles Anniv Feast)

[david friedman]

Kinuko wrote:
>Hello!
>I thought rum and brown sugar were period ingredients.  Granted, they probably
>were not combined with butter, but I wanted it in there anyway. :)

Rum means spirits distilled from sugar products such as molasses.  It
apparently was not made until sugar became cheap, which means during the
17th c. when sugar plantations were established in the West Indies by
Europeans. Both Anne Wilson (_Food and Drink in Britain_) and the Oxford
English Dictionary have as their earliest mentions of rum mid-17th c.
references to the West Indies. So as far as I can tell, rum, though not all
distilled spirits, is out of our period.

Brown sugar these days means refined white sugar which has had a little of
the molasses mixed back in. In period, some of the sugar would have been
thorough refined, but there would also have been less refined, lower-grade
suagr with (particularly in the middle of a sugar loaf) a good deal of the
molasses left in; there is at least one 15th-c English recipe which uses
"black sugar". So some form of brown sugar does seem to be period.

Elizabeth/Betty Cook


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