[Sca-cooks] Sugar beets

[Terry Decker]

This needs to be considered in the economic context.  In the 16th and 17th 
Centuries, sugar from the West Indies was relatively inexpensive and 
plentiful.  During the 18th Century, slave rebellions in the sugar 
plantations threatened to cut off supplies of sugar, so the idea of beet 
sugar became more practical.  Germany, which had few colonies, would have 
been a major beneficiary, but Achard's plant and one or two others 
established about the same time proved to be economically unviable.

The British blockade of France made cane sugar unavailable and beet sugar 
profitable.  Benjamin Delessert established a factory at Passay to provide 
France with sugar in 1810.  By 1813, France had 334 sugar plantations 
producing 35,000 tons of sugar per year.  In 1814, Napoleon abdicated and 
the blockade ended.  Cane sugar undercut the price for beet sugar and most 
of the beet sugar plants went under.

The process improved and by the mid-19th Century France had 60 beet sugar 
plants and the beet sugar industry was beginning in the Western US.  About 
15 percent of the sugar being produced was beet sugar.

Bear

> Info below derived from:
> The Oxford Companion to Food
> edited by Alan Davidson
> paperback edition as The Penguin Companion to Food
>
> page 919
> In about 1590, French botanist Olivier de Serres managed to extract some 
> sugar syrup from sugar beets. But no one seems to have pursued extracting 
> beet sugar.
>
> Then in 1747 the German chemist Andreas Marggraf Marggraf did it again. 
> Again, interest was light.
>
> Then, in 1800 [1801 according to a different source], one of Marggraf's 
> students, Karl Franz Achard, supported by Frederick the Great of Prussia 
> set up a small sugar beet refinery in Selesia [in northeastern Germany, 
> which was Prussia then].
>
> When the Napoleonic Wars cut off supplies of cane sugar, beet sugar 
> production began in earnest.
>
> -- 
> Urtatim, formerly Anahita