The Blaine County Journal News-Opinion - We've Got The County Covered

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

The poet means a person, but many people would say this about their downfall.

Fortunate are you if you can take ‘em or leave ‘em—sweet things to eat, that is.

One woman already of grandmother age says she simply doesn’t dare have a cookie or piece of cake, because the taste of one of these would result in bingeing on such goodies till the whole plateful is gone, “and I’d go looking for more.”

Other people, granted, probably many fewer, are indifferent to the whole tribe of sweet things and actually prefer to avoid them.

One little boy when asked what his favorite food was, said, “Cucumbers and rice,” and he meant it.

In our time, sugar is everywhere. Great was my surprise when I read on the Internet that sugar has been grown and processed since 8,000 B. C.

For centuries it was considered a medicine and was very expensive. Producing it more cheaply was one reason the slave trade in the Caribbean was so brisk and lasted so long.

What set off the train of thought that led to my exploring this history was the wide range of names of forms of sugar which the British use.

Common forms of sugar include sugar cubes, a bit fancy; powdered sugar, to which is always added cornstarch or flour to prevent caking; light brown and dark brown sugar, flavored more or less with molasses; then molasses itself, light or dark (and surprisingly expensive, either way).

Through familiarity, none of these will excite much comment.

In contrast, treacle sounds interesting. Its other name is golden syrup. It is thick, almost like molasses, but is less strong in flavor and of a beautiful color—gold, of course.

Does anyone know what Demerara sugar is? The very name is musical and exotic. Is Demerara a place, fabled like the halls of Kubla Khan, or Shangri-La?

A careful search of sources revealed that Demerara was once a region of British Guiana.

The dictionary, never much given to flights of fancy, says that Demerara sugar is “raw cane sugar the crystals of which have a superficial yellow or brown color due to treatment with sulphuric acid.”

Do we need to beware of Demerara sugar lest sulfuric acid get into our coffee?

Turbinado sugar is another form of sugar never seen in these parts till about ten minutes ago.

It is made by “a process of separating sugar crystals and molasses (from each other?) by turbines or centrifugals.”

Turbinado sugar is coarse, crunchy, very light brown, and tastes mildly of molasses.

If you want very dark sugar and a strong flavor of molasses, Muscovado sugar is for you.

It seems to be available in this country but it must be rare because a chance encounter on the Internet was the first I had heard of it. There were hints there that Barbados sugar is similar.

Baker’s sugar recently appeared in my grocery store. Curiosity impelled me to buy it and try it.

The carton says it is “silky” fine, and it is. The same recipes you’ve always used will still work if you employ baker’s sugar but your results (it says) will be more airy and fine-textured. This not-quite-powdered sugar will feel different from regular granulated sugar.

An antique recipe for real mincemeat calls for moist sugar. This is simply what we call brown sugar, not exotic at all.

Sounding more like something from a lab than from a grocery store, glucose, dextrose, and fructose are also part of the sugar family.

A form of sugar coming from the tropics of Asia is known in English as jaggery.

A whole culture, livelihood and way of life center around production of this form of sugar.

Skillful climbers shinny up a suitable palm tree, make a cut where sap can rise up, and wait for sap to fill in.

At the right time, the sap is brought down to the ground and reduced to dryness by heat.

If jaggery is made from cane juice, the stalks are pressed, and the sap is cooked down to thick syrup in huge, shallow pans that could double as a toddlers’ wading pools.

When it is thick enough, the syrup is ladled into molds like oversized muffin tins. When it is solid, the half-spheres of very dark brown sugar are sold by the kilo.

To be used, jaggery must be soaked for hours and become syrup again, or to be hammered apart and used in smaller chunks.

The basic word from which sugar and other forms of the word, such as saccharine, come is from Sanskrit, sarkara.

Over time, the s sound, and sh and ch, change back and forth so that j and even g get into the act in different places and different ages.

Look at sugar. If we put a j sound in there for s, play with the u and make it into an a, which happens all the time in the evolution of language, and just for fun, put a y on the end, we have jaggery.

Spanish azucar is also from sarkara and is like sugar. Lop off the initial a and say the hard c as the g in sugar, and there is sugar again. It’s the consonants that tell the tale.

There can be no doubt: However it is spelled, sugar is fascinating and is here to stay.