[Sca-cooks] Sugar was Clotted Cream

[Terry Decker]

> If sugar is only from cane or beet then what were they making candy out of 
> in different civilizations?

Honey has been used as a sweetner since the Paleolithic.  There is a cave 
painting showing honey gathering.

Sugar cane has been around almost as long, but was only introduced to 
Europeans around 325 BCE (reference Pliny) when Alexander's armies moved 
into Northern India.  Sugar cane moved north into Mesopotamia and was 
brought into the Mediterranean basin by the Islamic expansion in the 8th and 
9th Centuries.  Sugar refining may have occurred as early as 500 BCE and 
refining to white sugar was practiced by 500 CE.

Originally used as a medicine in Antiquity, after the introduction of cane 
to the Mediterranean it was used as a spice and a culinary ingredient for 
most of the Middle Ages.  Production and use increased in the late 15th 
Century leading to an explosion of use in the 16th Century and massive 
investment in cane plantations in the Caribbean in the 17th Century.

Beet sugar is strictly a modern innovation.  In 1747, Andreas Sigismund 
Marggraf determined that beets and carrots contained small amounts of sugar 
and he developed the initial extraction process.  In 1793, Franz Carl Achard 
introduces a commercial extraction process.  Around 1810, Napoleonic France 
started the first serious production of beet sugar after the Royal Navy 
began blockading French ports.  Beet sugar production collapsed after the 
Napoleonic Wars.

A high sugar variant of the Silesian white beet developed in the 19th 
Century and rising sugar prices made beet sugar production profitable.

> When using  honey to make candy is not one of the steps crystallization? 
> What would that be called ?
> Cealian

You need the candy makers to anwser this one.

Bear