[Sca-cooks] De Serres and Beet Sugar

[Terry Decker]

I got interested in this quote by Ralph Hancock from the Penguin Companion 
to Food which is the Oxford Companion to Food in hardbound and hiding on my 
shelf.

"As early as 1590 the French botanist Olivier de Serres managed to extract a 
sugar syrup from it.  In those days cane sugar was still very expensive, so 
his discovery might have been exploited, but nothing came of it at the 
time."

I was curious as to where he got his information as the bibliography does 
not reference de Serres's Theatre d'Agriculture.  I went looking.  These 
sentences appear in a number of places differing only in date, which is 
usually given as 1575, 1560 or 1590, and what was extracted, sweet syrup, 
sugar syrup, sugar-like syrup.  My opinion is Hancock wrote them and a lot 
of people copied his work and hardly anyone has gone looking for anything 
close to the original reference.  I still haven't located Hancock's source.

>From the variance in the dates, I would say no one knows when the actual 
experiment occurred.  The earliest publication date I have is 1600 and I 
have been informed that Theatre d'Agriculture underwent revision until the 
1608 edition.  I suspect the 1629 date referenced in a couple of sources is 
the date of an English translation of the book.

Stephen Nottingham ( 
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Stephen_Nottingham/beetroot2.htm ) 
states the following:

"The French agronomist Olivier de Serres describes a type of beetroot in his 
Théâtre d'Agriculture of 1629 as, "a kind of parsnip which has arrived 
recently from Italy". He records that it has a very red and rather fat root, 
with thick leaves, and all of it is good to eat. He especially recommends 
the root as a choice food and notes that the juice it yields is like a sugar 
syrup, which is very beautiful on account of its vermilion colour."

Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World (1919) ( 
http://www.swsbm.com/Ephemera/Sturtevants_Edible_Plants.pdf  ) provides the 
following two quotes:

"Olivier de Serres, in France, 1629, describes a red beet which was 
cultivated for cattle-feeding and speaks of it as a recent acquisition from 
Italy."

"The discovery of sugar in the beet is credited to Margraff in 1747, having 
been announced in a memoir read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences."

In 1749, Marggraf's work appeared in France as "Experiences Chymiques faites 
dans le dessein de tirer un veritable sucre de diverses plantes qui 
croissent dans nos cointrees."

William G. Freeman's Current Investigations in Economic Botany, New 
Phytologist, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Jan 31, 1907) quotes de Serres:

"the juice yielded on boiling is similar to sugar sirup."

>From these quotes, I think it is safe to say de Serres extracted juice from 
beets by boiling to produce a sweet syrup.  While this is the first step in 
commercial beet sugar refining, it is not the production of crystalline 
sugar (although the juice can be crystallized).  The apparent reason no one 
took any further action toward producing sugar was because the beet extract 
was not recognized as sucrose.  Had sugar refining techniques been used, 
recognizable sugar would have been produced, although the quantities would 
probably be too small for practical commercial extraction.

There is no particular evidence that Marggraf built upon de Serres's work, 
although a number of references suggest it.  Marggraf used an alcohol 
extraction process, crystallized the resulting juice and compared the 
crystals to other known crystals to demonstrate that beet extract was 
sucrose.

Marggraf's process produced too little sugar at too great a cost for 
commercial production.   Commercial production began only after Achard found 
White Silesian Beets with 4-6% sugar by weight.

In my opinion, de Serres's syrup is an anomaly with no real bearing on the 
history of beet sugar.  He performed the first step of a commercial process, 
but had no idea of what he had done and did no further work on the problem. 
As far as I can tell, his work did not influence Marggraf or Achard, so 
there is no connection that direction.

Bear