à la mode is a French phrase that translates to “in the current fashion.” In the realm of sweets, it turns out to be even more American than apple pie (whose roots, in fact, lie elsewhere), because in the United States “à la mode” refers to a scoop of vanilla ice cream served with a piping hot slice of pie. See ice cream and pie.
The New York Times credits the spread of this term to Charles Watson Townsend. His 1936 obituary reported that after ordering ice cream with his pie at the Cambridge Hotel, in the village of Cambridge, New York, around 1896, a neighboring diner asked him what this wonder was called. “Pie à la mode,” Townsend replied. When Townsend subsequently requested this dessert at the famous Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City, the staff had no idea what it was. Townsend inquired why such a fashionable venue had never heard of pie à la mode. Bien sûr, the dessert found its way onto Delmonico’s menu and requests for it soon spread.
Not long thereafter several midwestern newspapers provided evidence that John Gieriet of Switzerland had previously invented the dessert in 1885 while proprietor of the Hotel La Perl in Duluth, Minnesota, where he served the ice cream with warm blueberry pie.
The term “à la mode” has become so established in the United States that it now extends to a variety of flavors added to all sorts of desserts. The phrase has also come to be used metaphorically, most recently by the musical group Destiny’s Child that in 2001 recorded a hit song titled “Apple Pie à la Mode,” to refer to a beyond-fabulous lover.
In France, however, à la mode, in a culinary context, refers to a traditional recipe for braised beef, which at one time was considered a new fashion.
addiction, in relation to sweets, refers to the hypothesis that sugar (in certain forms) may be capable of triggering an addictive-like process in vulnerable individuals. Changes in the food environment and the manner in which sugar is incorporated into food may be related to neurobiological and behavioral changes in our eating that resemble addiction. If sugar can be addictive, this may speak to why our relationship with food is so difficult to change, and why sugary products are a major contributor to the obesity epidemic.
The food environment that we live in has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Ultra-processed, highly palatable foods are cheap, easily accessible, and heavily marketed. The addition of higher levels of sugar has been one of the major drivers of this change, along with increased levels of fat, salt, refined flours, and food additives. Hyper-palatable foods (like ice cream, cakes, and candy) surpass the level of reward associated with more natural, minimally processed foods such as vegetables, fruits, and nuts. The rising rates of obesity and binge eating that have accompanied the influx of these types of foods have led to the hypothesis that hyper-palatable foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process.
Sugar is not inherently addictive. In fact, sugar (along with fat and salt) is important for our survival. The high-calorie content associated with sugar and fat ensures that we do not starve in times of food scarcity, and sodium derived from salt is essential for a number of important bodily functions (e.g., fluid balance, nerve function). Humans may even have evolved a greater reward response to these life-sustaining nutrients to ensure that we were motivated to seek out and consume them. See sweets in human evolution.
Nevertheless, the way sugar exists in our current food environment is significantly different from the naturally occurring foods our brains may have evolved to expect. In fact, many high-sugar foods have been altered in a manner analogous to the way in which drugs of abuse are created. Both the elevated potency of a substance and its rapid absorption into the bloodstream increase its addictive potential. Many drugs of abuse derive from plant materials that are refined into highly concentrated substances (e.g., grapes into wine) to become more potent, and to allow the active ingredient to be more quickly absorbed into the bloodstream. For example, when the coca leaf is chewed or brewed as tea, it produces only mild stimulation and is thought to have little addictive potential. Yet, when the leaves are refined into a powder form, such as cocaine, they become a very potent, quickly absorbed, and highly addictive substance. An analogous process has occurred with many high-sugar foods.
In many of the processed foods available today, sugar comes in higher doses and is coupled with other rewarding ingredients (e.g., salt, fat). For instance, one of the greatest sources of naturally occurring sugar is fruit. See fruit. A banana (a relatively high-sugar fruit) has approximately 16 grams of sugar. In contrast, modern candy bars can have up to 40 grams of sugar—over double the dose of sugar in the banana. Moreover, many candy bars combine sugar with high levels of fat, whereas most fruits have little to no fat. See candy bar. In fact, very few naturally occurring foods contain high levels of both sugar and fat (e.g., avocados and nuts have fat, but little sugar). Furthermore, many of these ultra-processed foods have been stripped of fiber, water, protein, and other components that would slow absorption of ingredients like sugar into the system, so their consumption leads to a bigger blood sugar spike and likely increases the brain’s reward response. Thus, in comparison with the food environment humans evolved in, our foodscape is composed largely of foods with unnaturally high levels of rewarding ingredients that are combined to increase palatability, to have a greater impact on the body.
Sugar-Addicted Rats
Much of the initial research on food and addiction emerged from animal models of eating behavior. Rats given intermittent access to sugar (in addition to standard rat chow) binge on progressively larger quantities of sugar, exhibit signs of withdrawal when sugar is removed, and display greater motivation for traditionally addictive substances (e.g., alcohol). Animals consuming sweets (like Oreos and cheesecake) are more likely to binge on these foods when stressed and will continue to seek out these sugary foods despite receiving electric shocks. Not only do these animals exhibit extreme behaviors, but also their consumption of these highly palatable foods is related to changes in their brains that have been linked with addiction, such as a reduction in dopamine receptors.
Sugar Addiction in Humans
Neuroimaging and behavioral research in humans also provide evidence of the addictive potential of sweet foods. Palatable foods (including high-sugar foods) and drugs of abuse activate similar brain systems (e.g., dopamine and opioid systems). Obese and substance-dependent participants exhibit similar patterns of neural response to cues (i.e., increased activation in motivation and reward areas) and consumption (i.e., decreased activation in control and reward areas) of palatable foods and drugs, respectively. Furthermore, healthy-weight individuals who consume ice cream more frequently display in the fMRI scanner a lower reward-related response in the brain when consuming a milkshake. This may reflect the development of tolerance to the hedonic effects of ice cream analogous to the way that people develop tolerance to the rewarding effects of drugs of abuse.
The Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) was developed to measure addictive-like eating in humans by translating the diagnostic criteria for substance dependence (e.g., withdrawal, loss of control) to evaluate food consumption. Sugary foods, such as chocolate, are often identified as problem foods on the YFAS. The prevalence of YFAS food addiction may be around 5.4 percent in the general population; addictive-like eating is associated with severe obesity and a higher percentage of body fat. Individuals exhibiting more symptoms of food addiction on the YFAS (regardless of body mass index [BMI]) showed a pattern of neural activation in response to cues and consumption that is implicated in other types of addiction; they also have genetic indicators associated with elevated risk for addiction. The similarities identified in the neural system converge with behavioral overlap between addiction and problematic eating. For example, diminished control over consumption, continued use despite negative consequences, elevated levels of craving, and repeated relapse to problematic behavior are key constructs for both problematic substance use and eating behavior.
If sugar is addictive, it would not affect adults alone. Children naturally prefer high levels of sugar and are motivated to eat sweet things (like sugar-sweetened cereals). Children are also more vulnerable to the negative effects of addictive substances, because their brains and psychological coping strategies are developing. Research in this area is just beginning, but children who report more food addiction symptoms on the YFAS have higher BMIs and are more likely to overeat due to emotions. Thus, addictive-like eating may start in childhood for some individuals, which could contribute to lifelong eating-related problems.
Sugar Addiction and Public Health
In summary, the research suggests that for certain people sweets (and other ultra-processed foods) may be capable of triggering an addictive process that results in compulsive food consumption. Yet, there are still more questions than answers in this burgeoning line of research. For instance, there have been almost no studies examining what might be the active ingredient in foods that would make them more addictive, although high levels of sugar are a likely possibility. Identifying which foods may be addictive is especially important when we consider the huge public health costs incurred by addictive substances. Although a significant proportion of people develop full-blown addictions, the number of people who develop “subclinical” problems with addictive substances is far greater. Take the example of alcohol. Around 5 to 10 percent of people develop an addiction to alcohol, but it is the third leading cause of preventable death in the United States. This statistic is driven in large part by individuals who exhibit enough of a subclinical addictive response to alcohol (e.g., binge drinking) that they overconsume it in a way that threatens their health and safety.
Like alcohol, addictive foods may have a huge public health cost that will be driven in large part by the group of adults and children who exhibit a subclinical response. This may be especially true in the case of hyper-palatable, high-calorie foods, as only a few extra hundred calories a day can lead to obesity. Thus, if someone is showing a subclinical-addictive response to these foods, such as struggling to control their level of consumption, that person could face elevated food intake and increased weight gain. Given that highly processed foods are cheap, legal, and more accessible than alcohol and tobacco, the public health costs associated with potentially addictive foods could be significant.
Greater understanding of addiction should suggest possible avenues to reduce negative consequences. Encouraging people to make behavioral changes and providing treatment for individuals with addictions are important, but it is also necessary to focus beyond personal responsibility or clinical disorders to reduce the public health costs of addictive substances. In the case of cigarettes, public policy has been an important tool. Specifically, policies focusing on changing the availability, marketing, and costs of tobacco products have resulted in huge public health gains. Similar environmental interventions may be needed to reduce the consequences of potentially addictive ingredients like sugar.
See also soda and sugar and health.
adulteration is the process by which foods are debased with extraneous, weaker, cheaper, harmful, or inferior ingredients. In terms of sweeteners, honey, fruit juice, jams, and agave nectar have been adulterated with cheaper additives made from cane sugar, beet sugar, rice, corn syrup (including high-fructose corn syrup), and other ingredients. Producers of “maple syrup” have added less expensive sweeteners or injected air into the syrup to increase bulk.
Most added sugars are not usually harmful to health. National and regional food agencies have developed tests to determine whether natural sweeteners have been adulterated with other products, but government agencies cannot test every product and often only do so when a complaint has been lodged.
There are less common cases, however, in which antibiotics, heavy metals, and other harmful impurities have ended up in natural sweeteners. This adulteration has been associated with honey imported from Asia, particularly China. Honey imported from these sources has been banned in Europe. In the United States, it is common to filter out the pollen from the honey in food processors. Often processors also infuse honey with hot water, which thins the honey, adds bulk, and makes it easier to process and less difficult for customers to remove from containers. Such tampering is neither illegal nor unsafe, but critics claim that honey without pollen or with added water is not natural honey. Filtering out pollen removes impurities, extends honey’s shelf life, and makes for a more consistent liquid product, which appeals to American consumers who generally dislike honey crystallization.
Critics have called for changes in the definition of processed sweeteners. They have also called for improved labeling that indicates whether natural sugars are processed or in their raw form, whether sugars and water have been added, and whether natural ingredients have been filtered out.
See also honey.
advertising, American is older than the United States itself; European colonists had brought the idea of advertising with them to the New World. In the early American colonies, most advertising was local and resembled current-day classified ads. In 1705 the first known ad for the chocolate trade appeared in the Boston Newsletter, offering cocoa, chocolate, and molasses among other commodities for sale. Twenty-five years later, the New York Gazette carried the first ad for an American sugar factory selling all sorts of “sugar and sugar candy.”
By the mid-1800s machines were mass-producing goods with uniform quality, and large companies had increased production. For the first time, it cost people less to buy a product than to make it themselves. In the Victorian era, factories also started to manufacture sweets, including individual hard candies, chocolate bars, the modern marshmallow, chewing gum, and toffee.
Post–Civil War to 1920s
Between 1870 and 1900 the price of sugar dropped, causing the commodity to lose its luxury status. Jam became an important product for the working class, and dessert gradually became standard as a sweet course after dinner. As more mass-produced consumer products became available, manufacturers looked for ways to tell people about them.
Brand Name Advantage
The key to a product’s success lay in the national advertising of a memorable brand name, attractive packaging, and a trademark that could differentiate one product from others on the market. For example, printed labels on pottery jars enhanced the appeal of Keiller’s Dundee marmalades, whereas a collection of “Choice Mixed Sugar Plums” from Stephen F. Whitman became the first packaged confection in a trademarked box. See chocolates, boxed. A change in packaging could also reposition a product. While other grocers were filling cheap containers, P. J. Towle filled a miniature, log-cabin-shaped tin with his blended table syrup. Customers willingly paid extra for the novelty.
The Franco-American Food Company, founded in 1887 by the French immigrant Alphonse Biardot, skillfully adopted early advertising practices to build its brands, which initially included sweet products. This late-nineteenth-century chromolithograph is from a set of advertising trade cards. private collection © look and learn / barbara loe collection / bridgeman images
Sales also soared for Cracker Jack, mostly due to the advertising of an appealing package. Street-food vendors Frederick and Louis Rueckheim first sold the new confection of popcorn, molasses, and peanuts at amusement parks. In 1896 they registered the name Cracker Jack, common slang for “first rate.” They then packaged their snack in a wax-sealed box, which kept it fresh for a long time, and marketed it to professional vendors at baseball parks. The slogan “The More You Eat, the More You Want” summed the product’s appeal. See cracker jack.
As companies moved from a production to sales orientation, they packaged and branded their products, and engaged in heavy national advertising. Among the early brands of this era, the image of the smiling Aunt Jemima first appeared on boxes of a self-rising pancake mix in the 1890s. The Davis Milling Company hired Nancy Greene, a black cook, to serve as a living trademark for the product. In this persona she traveled around the country and cooked thousands of pancakes at fairs, inspiring the ad line “I’s in Town, Honey.” See aunt jemima.
National Advertising Campaigns
By 1900 the majority of the revenue for newspapers came from advertising, and national brands appeared in regional and local papers. National magazines also became part of everyday life. Advertisers gradually began to turn their campaigns over to advertising agencies to be integrated into sound marketing strategies.
The National Biscuit Company (later Nabisco) set the standard for the well-coordinated advertising plan with the introduction of Uneeda Biscuit, a flaky soda cracker. With a brand name chosen, it created an airtight, wax-lined package that looked different from anything else but would ship well. Next it conceived a distinct image and then spent an unprecedented amount on advertising. This trademark identity theory essentially passed through Nabisco’s whole product line of cookies, including Fig Newtons, Oreos, and Animal Crackers. See animal crackers; fig newtons; and oreos.
Early brands of this era included Jell-O gelatin, Domino sugar, and Wrigley’s spearmint gum. See chewing gum; gelatin deserts; and american sugar refining company. The manufacturers of Jell-O embarked on a massive advertising campaign, calling the unheard-of packaged good “America’s Most Favorite Dessert.” They also reached the public with recipe booklets and promotional items, and hired artists like Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish to contribute illustrations for lavish ads. Similarly, the American Sugar Refining Company began labeling the company’s sugar products “Domino” after the sugar cube, to convince grocers to purchase its product in packages rather than in bulk.
Entirely new products like Crisco also joined the list of nationally advertised brands. When Procter & Gamble began processing its own oil, a key ingredient in soaps, the company also began to develop a vegetable shortening that would remain solid year round. One of the first Crisco ads appeared in the 1912 Ladies Home Journal, announcing “An absolutely new product. A scientific discovery that will affect every kitchen in America.” In addition to national advertising, P&G also sponsored cooking schools to promote its product’s benefits over animal fats. See shortening.
1920 to World War II
For the first time, more than half of the nation lived in urban areas, providing marketers with a ready-made mass market. Whatever they had to sell, most advertisers aimed their message at the American woman. For decades, statisticians estimated that women accounted for 80 percent of all household purchases.
Betty Crocker
By the 1920s there were well-developed advertising vehicles to reach the women’s market. When General Mills ran an ad in national magazines with a puzzle for its Gold Medal brand flour in 1921, the contest generated thousands of responses, many of which included questions on food preparation. Since the company could not personally respond to every letter, it decided to send recipes collected from its employees and sign them with the friendly but fictitious name of Betty Crocker. Betty Crocker served as a valuable persona. Actresses representing her ran regional cooking schools and, beginning in 1924, regional radio programs. See betty crocker.
One of the early products that came under the Betty Crocker brand was Bisquick. In 1931 the package appeared with the slogan, “Makes Everyone a Perfect Biscuit Maker.” While Betty’s name continued to be used, her picture did not appear in print ads until 1936. Despite the promises of convenience, biscuit, cake, pie crust, and muffin mixes were not associated with good eating until the 1950s.
Craze for Sweets
Sugar demand and consumption exploded in the 1920s and 1930s. The postwar crash in sugar prices allowed candy makers to sell chocolate bars at lower prices, and solid chocolate surpassed drinking chocolate in popularity. But the familiar wrapped candy bars did not appear widely until merchants put them adjacent to cash registers in grocery stores, drugstores, newsstands, and cigar stores. See candy bar.
The arrival of modern refrigeration led to affordable frozen novelties. In 1919 Christian Nelson, an ice cream parlor owner, found a way to dip blocks of frozen ice cream in chocolate. He called them “Temptation I-Scream Bars.” They were so popular that, with entrepreneur Russell Stover, he began to mass-produce them, wrapping each one in aluminum foil and changing the name to Eskimo Pie. However, Good Humor is credited as the first company to put ice cream on a stick, with the slogan “The New Clean Convenient Way to Eat Ice Cream.” See eskimo pie and good humor man.
Americans also enjoyed frozen ice on a stick in fruit flavors that had the same appeal as soft drinks. In 1923 Frank Epperson introduced frozen pop on a stick at amusement parks and beaches. See popsicle. The first ads for the product, which sold for a nickel, explained what it was by calling the popsicle (initially named “the Epsicle ice pop”) “the Frozen Drink on a Stick.” At the height of the Depression, when the company was looking for ways to make the treat more affordable, it produced a splittable popsicle with two sticks so that children could share it.
Small, packaged desserts also became popular with both children and adults. In 1914 the Tasty Baking Company produced individually wrapped snack cakes with the catchy name Tastykake. Baked and delivered fresh daily, each boxed mini-cake sold for a dime. Five years later, Continental Baking introduced its first snack cake—a devil’s food frosted cupcake. Persuasive advertising contributed to the success of this new product line, called Hostess: “Now baking cake at home is needless … these famous cakes will eliminate all that drudgery.” See hostess.
After the Wall Street crash of 1929, the economy hit hard times. So did advertising. But radio surged ahead to become the nation’s first free entertainment medium, and advertisers could quickly reach a national audience. During this time Jell-O sponsored the Jack Benny Comedy-Variety Hour. The comic skillfully mentioned the sponsor’s name in the script both at the start and the end of the program (“Jell-O again. This is Jack Benny”).
While daytime soap operas were largely aimed at housewives, the roster of shows extended to adventure series and westerns targeted at children. The malted chocolate drink mix Ovaltine sponsored one of the most well-known of these programs, Little Orphan Annie. By redeeming box tops and a small amount of cash for “postage and handling,” young fans could receive such premiums as a whistling ring, mug, or secret decoder that could decipher the daily clues given at the end of the broadcast.
To improve its effectiveness, the National Confectioners Association decided not only to advertise its member companies’ products but also to market the industry as a whole. It commissioned a study to assess the amount of money the candy industry spent on advertising compared to the amount other groups spent on promoting their respective products. After discovering that candy was “the least advertised food product,” the confectioners launched the “Candy Is Delicious Food—Eat Some Every Day” campaign in 1938. A series of ads touted the message “Candy Is an Energizing Food” as part of the “Candy as a Wholesome Food” campaign.
When chocolate was promoted as nutritious, World War II soldiers found Hershey bars, Mars candy-coated chocolates, and Tootsie Rolls in their survival rations. See military. To support the war effort, the Kellogg Company also supplied packaged products. In 1941 it added the Rice Krispies Treats recipe to the back of the Rice Krispies cereal box and trademarked the simple dessert. This crispy yet gooey snack became a popular item to mail to soldiers serving overseas. However, since the consumption of butter, sugar, and chocolate among other staples was limited on the home front during the war years, few other new snacks were introduced until later in the decade.
1950 to 1990
The postwar economy recovered quickly. As more and more imitative products showed up in the marketplace, advertising’s emphasis shifted from product features to brand image to align brands with the most profitable market segments based on class, race, gender, and age. The emerging marketing concepts placed even more emphasis on research.
Elaboration of Target Markets
Where goods for the home were concerned, women represented a crucial market for frozen foods, precooked meals, and dry mixes. In 1947 Pillsbury hired the Leo Burnett Company to launch a new line of ready-to-use cake mixes aimed at this group. See cake mix. The ads repeated a simple message: just drop this mix in a bowl, add water, mix, and bake. But sales were slow. Motivational research revealed that the problem lay in the powdered eggs used in the mixes. So the manufacturers changed the package directions: “You add fresh eggs” or “You add fresh eggs and milk,” allowing women to feel more involved in baking, and the sale of cake mixes took off.
The ultimate in convenience came with Sara Lee’s cakes, which perfected a process in which cakes could be baked, frozen, and then shipped, a first in the food industry. In 1951 Sara Lee’s marketing strategy focused on the taste and quality of its ingredients, such as the number of pecans in its All Butter Pecan Coffee Cake. Later the emphasis shifted from product features to emphasis on the product as an everyday treat, using the memorable line “Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee.” See sara lee.
Children also represented an enormous demographic to food manufacturers, and the new medium of television provided a way to quickly reach a national audience. Howdy Doody, Miss Frances of Ding Dong School, and Captain Midnight all sold Ovaltine. The producers carefully worked the product into songs and ads. As the 1960s unfolded, advertising to children and youth began in earnest. In 1962 McDonald’s introduced advertising campaigns with cartoonlike characters to appeal to children. By 1970 the bulk of advertising on children’s TV programs pitched sugared foods. Among them, Nestlé Quik introduced the animated cartoon bunny wearing a “Q” on his shirt for its flavored milk mix. The bunny reminded young viewers: “It’s so rich and thick and choco-lick! But you can’t drink it slow if it’s Quik!”
The large volume of television advertising directed at children elicited concern from many parents, consumers, and legislators. As a result, the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CAU) was founded in 1974. The self-regulatory organization set high standards for the industry to assure that national advertising directed at the child audience was not deceptive, unfair, or inappropriate. When CARU found violations, it sought changes through voluntary cooperation.
By 1970 greater emphasis on the consumer began to take place, as the idea of market segmentation took hold in most companies. Recognizing social trends and increased income potential, advertisers began to segment and target more specific groups. They also tied their products to distinct lifestyles, immediate gratification, youth, and sexuality.
Yuppies—young urban professionals—were one of the earliest lifestyle target groups to receive attention. In the 1980s they exhibited an unlimited appetite for consuming premium goods. Häagen-Dazs offered luxury ice cream, making it exclusive, sophisticated, even sexy. Godiva chocolate ads presented classic images of prestige, luxury, and refinement. Pepsi then showed what money could buy, trotting out a list of celebrities from Michael Jackson to Madonna to get their message across: Pepsi was “The Choice of a New Generation.” See godiva and häagen-dazs.
The New World for Advertising
As the 1990s unfolded, the internet had a dramatic effect on the advertising industry. Within a very short time, new media options based on new technologies reinvented the very process of advertising. Sales messages once clearly labeled were now subtly woven into movies and TV shows, or made into their own entertainment. Other promotions involved play, like video games with brand messages embedded in colorful, fun adventures. Meanwhile, the M&M characters went “virtual Hollywood” across the internet. See m&m’s.
Within a very short time, computer technology had a huge impact. Advertising is no longer just advertising; it now involves consumers by soliciting their experiences and engaging them in conversation. An excellent example is one of the most talked about viral videos, the sublime “Cadbury Gorilla” playing the drums to a Phil Collins hit. Released in 2007, it has since been enjoyed by millions. There is no talk of chocolate at all; rather, the 90-second spot aims to make people smile, subliminally suggesting the same pleasure provided by a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate.
American advertising has come a long way since its first simple announcement for sugar candy. Sweets are now sold as an undeniable pleasure. They are fantastic, fun, and a sign of love. Over the years sweets have been promoted as a sinful indulgence while simultaneously being marketed as wholesome energy-dense snacks, at times even to help you keep slim. Through such associations, ads for sweets offer a connection with the product and a promise of guiltless pleasure.
See also cadbury; candy; children’s candy; confection; ice cream; nestlé; race; sugarplums; twinkie; and united states.
agave nectar (or syrup) is a sweetener made from agaves. The agaves are a genus of succulent plants, native to the Americas, with most species concentrated in Mexico. In the United States they are best known as ornamental garden plants and the source of tequila, which is made by expressing the liquid from the cooked core, piña, of Agave tequilana, fermenting the solution, and distilling it.
Patents for commercial production of agave sweeteners date from the 1980s. In the mid-1990s entrepreneurs began marketing agave nectar as an ancient, natural, raw health food, high in fructose and with a low glycemic index. Consumers seeking a less refined, less glucose-dense sweetener than cane or beet sugar, particularly those who adhered to a “Paleolithic” diet, enthusiastically adopted the syrup. Agave syrup’s aura declined as scientists and physicians argued that it is neither ancient nor significantly different from other calorific sweeteners in its chemical and dietary properties. See sugar and health. Various brands of agave nectar continue to be widely available in health food stores and supermarkets.
The traditional Mesoamerican way of extracting sweet liquid from agaves involves cutting an opening in the core of the mature plant. Using a long hollow tube, collectors could daily suck out 3 to 6 liters of sweetish sap, gathering 500 to 1,000 liters from each plant. After some processing, the sap is either drunk as aguamiel (“honey water”), widely and correctly believed to be nourishing and healthful, or fermented into pulque, the traditional mildly alcoholic drink of Mexico. By contrast, commercial production appears to involve chopping and centrifuging the starchy core of the plant, something not always obvious from labeling and promotional material. The resulting liquid is treated with chemicals to create the agave nectar.
See also fructose; glucose; and mexico.
akutuq is known by outsiders as Eskimo ice cream. Pronounced auk-goo-duck, the word “akutuq” means “to stir.” This indigenous dish (1 part hard fat, 1 part polyunsaturated oil, and 4 parts protein or plant material) has been the culinary lifeblood of Natives in North America’s Arctic for 600 generations, nourishing families and traveling hunters. In its savory form, akutuq is considered analogous to the Indian pemmican bar. In its sweet berry-filled form, akutuq remains a favorite dessert.
Although precise ingredients may differ, Inupiaq elders still adhere to a basic method of preparation. Traditionally, the best hard white caribou fat (from the area surrounding the small intestines) is softened and whipped until fluffy. Then seal oil, rendered until clear and golden, is slowly beaten into the mass. After 45 minutes of beating with splayed fingers, tablespoons of water are whisked in, lightening it further and making it fluffy. In appearance and texture aqutuq resembles a classic French buttercream stabilized with sugar syrup. But after icy flavoring ingredients from the permafrost cellar or freezer are added, the silky-smooth consistency “breaks.” The mass instantly loses volume, appearing curdled. No one minds. It is a classic texture and has always looked that way.
Classic flavorings include salmonberries and blueberries, which are folded into the whipped mass. The labor-intensive dish used to be kept in permafrost cold cellars, ready for impromptu get-togethers. Until the early 1900s, yearly trade fairs featured raucous akutuq cooking contests, with husbands cheering wives on to create new flavors with fermented fish eggs or seal flippers—the more outrageous, the better. Today, southern Native Alaskans prepare akutuq by whipping Crisco shortening with sugar in lieu of the original, indigenous ingredients that are low in saturated fat. Schoolteachers (whether Native or not) do the same, to the detriment of a healthy Native lifestyle and the culinary traditions of the Inupiaq.
Alkermes, confection of, is a sweet medicinal syrup of Arab origin, a cordial made with kermes or cochineal, two bitter red dyes derived from insects. The first recorded recipe, written by the Persian physician Yūhannā Ibn Māsawaih (777–857 c.e.), calls for kermes-dyed silk, apple juice, rosewater, sugar, gold leaf, cinnamon, ambergris, musk, white pearls, aloes, and lapis lazuli. This expensive concoction was prescribed to strengthen the heart and to cure melancholy and madness. Translators and practitioners brought the recipe to medieval Europe, where “confectio alchermes” became a valued remedy. During the Renaissance, variations on the confection appeared in many European medical treatises and handbooks, with spices replacing some of the more expensive original ingredients. By the early 1600s the defining ingredient of the confection, kermes (Kermes vermilio), had been largely supplanted by cochineal (Dactylopius coccus), a more intense red dye produced by a Mexican insect. Despite alterations, the confection’s reputation continued to grow, and it was prescribed not only for weak hearts and depression but also for plague, poisoning, and childbirth. Casanova used it as an ingredient in sugared comfits that also contained his paramour’s ground-up hair, and when made up in “Aromaticum Lozenges,” the confection was said to sweeten the breath. Often the confection was combined with alcohol before it was administered. This development reached its zenith in Florence in 1743, when the Dominican monks of Santa Maria Novella created an Alkermes liqueur. In the 1800s physicians increasingly questioned the efficacy of the confection, and it disappeared from the pharmacopeia, although Alkermes is still sold as a liqueur.
ambergris is a waxy calculus that is created in the digestive tracts of sperm whales in response to irritation caused by the sharp, indigestible beaks of ingested squid. It is usually found washed up on beaches or floating in the ocean. It turns up all over the world, but it is most commonly encountered on the coasts of the Indian Ocean, Australia, and New Zealand. This enormously variable substance occurs in irregular or round lumps ranging in weight from a few grams to many kilos. A piece weighing 336 pounds was sold in London in 1913. Ambergris is a brown, black, gray, or white grainy substance and has a faint odor that ranges from mildly fecal when relatively fresh, to “musky” or “earthy” when mature. It is thought to improve from spending a good deal of time in the ocean, but the quality of its scent varies from sample to sample. That of gray ambergris is said to be the best.
Ambergris was an important flavoring in high-status renaissance and baroque confectionery and cookery. It was frequently used in the production of dragées and biscuits, often in combination with musk. To perfume these items, most professional confectioners used a tincture or essence of ambergris, which was made by macerating the ambergris in alcohol in a closed vessel exposed to the heat of the sun or in a stopped glass immersed in hot dung. Lady Anne Fanshawe (1625–1680) included ambergris in combination with rosewater in a circa 1664 ice cream recipe. Sir Edward Viscount Conway (1564–1630), Principal Secretary of State to Charles I, gave his name to a sweet ambergris pudding, recipes for which were published in a number of seventeenth-century cookery texts.
ambrosia is “the food of the Gods” in Greek mythology, but in the earthly realm it is a cross between a salad and a dessert. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word “ambrosia” referred to a drink; the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “a mixture of water, oil, and various fruits anciently used as a libation; also a perfumed draught or flavored beverage.” It is uncertain exactly when the leap from cup to plate occurred, but published American recipes for ambrosia date to the late 1800s. The earliest, such as the one in Woods Wilcox’s Buckeye Cookery (1877), call for sprinkling sugar between layers of peeled, sliced oranges and grated “cocoanut.” By the early twentieth century cut-up pineapple found its way into the recipe. Mid-twentieth-century versions included whipped cream, marshmallows, bananas, nuts, and raisins.
The growing popularity of ambrosia throughout the United States followed the widespread distribution of citrus fruits from Florida. Ambrosia took hold especially in the American South, most likely due to the South’s fondness for sweets. Sparkling cut-glass bowls adorn groaning sideboards during the winter holiday season, when serving ambrosia is traditional, and family feuds are fought over dried versus freshly grated coconut. Although ambrosia is classified under “salads” in most Southern cookbooks, it can be eaten after the meal as well as along with it.
American Sugar Refining Company is the world’s largest refined cane-sugar producer and the maker of Domino Sugar, among other major brands. Trademarked in 1906, the name Domino was derived from the fact that the rectangular shape of the company’s sugar cubes resembles the pieces used in the namesake game.
The company traces its roots to the so-called Sugar Trust, known as the Sugar Refineries’ Company when “Sugar King” Henry Osborne Havemeyer organized it in New York in 1887. See havemeyer, henry osborne and sugar trust. Modeled on the nation’s first trust, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, this then-new form of industrial entity was created by a merger of many separate refineries in several eastern seaboard cities. A near-perfect monopoly, fully legal at inception, it was designed to fix prices, limit supply, keep down labor costs, and discourage competition.
In 1890, however, the company was confounded by passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Havemeyer was not deterred. After a New York State court forced the company’s dissolution, he simply tweaked its name, reorganized it as a holding company, and chartered the American Sugar Refining Company—the American, for short—in New Jersey. “From being illegal as we were, we are now legal as we are: change enough, isn’t it?” Havemeyer remarked.
Havemeyers & Elder was the company’s flagship—a half-dozen massive structures situated on a quarter-mile parcel along the Brooklyn waterfront. Almost completely destroyed by an 1882 fire, the site was rebuilt two years later to become the largest sugar refinery on the planet. In 1905 the company was selling about 1.5 billion pounds of sugar a year. Havemeyer once remarked that he had the capacity to supply the sugar demand of the entire country, plus 20 percent.
As the company forged linkages between its refineries and banks, retailers, coal companies, railroads, and the like, legal tangles and government scrutinies were never far behind. In 1911 a special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives began a major investigation. A prolonged affair interrupted by World War I, it was finally concluded with a 1922 decision stating that although the firm had once violated antitrust laws, it was no longer doing so.
The judgment was fair enough, not because the company’s philosophy or tactics had changed but because the sugar business itself had. Factors such as increasing competition from high-fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners, artificial and otherwise, were diminishing the company’s share of the market. See artificial sweeteners and corn syrup. Also, the leaders who took over after Havemeyer’s death in 1907—Havemeyer’s son Horace being among them—intensified the company’s focus on its already existing interests in Caribbean sugar plantations, where it was more difficult for the U.S. government to intervene.
The 1920s brought the so-called Dance of the Millions to Cuba, when that country’s sugar prices soared, due to World War I’s destruction of the beet industry in Europe. The American profited, until the crash. What hurt the American even more badly than the Great Depression was World War II. First came disruption of unrefined sugar deliveries from the Caribbean and Central America, then the double whammy: sugar rationing. See sugar rationing.
A slow decline in the industry occurred over the next several decades as high-fructose corn syrup rose to the ascendancy and health advocates condemned refined white sugar as nothing less than “White Death.” See sugar and health. In 1970 the American became the Amstar Corporation, the name change reflecting a growth in its activities beyond sugar refining. In 1984, still struggling, the company was bought at a bargain price by the private investment banking firm of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company and, after almost 100 years, ceased to be publicly traded. (The American had been among the original 12 Dow Jones stocks to be traded when the index debuted on 26 May 1896.) Merrill Lynch owned Amstar for one year (1986–1987). The following year the large English sugar company Tate & Lyle acquired Amstar’s American Sugar Division. See tate & lyle. Tate & Lyle renamed it the Domino Sugar Corporation in 1991.
In 2001 the company was sold to the Florida Crystals Corporation, headed by Alfonso “Alfy” and José Pepe Fanjul Sr., whose family founded vast sugarcane plantations and sugar mills in Cuba in the nineteenth century—all of it lost when Castro assumed power in 1959. See plantations, sugar and sugar barons. Their former mansion in Havana is now a museum. After immigrating to the United States, the Fanjuls began anew, establishing plantations and mills in the Florida Everglades, Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. In recent years, the Fanjuls have been excoriated in the media for their labor practices, treatment of the environment, ties to politicians from both parties, and a gilded lifestyle that rivals Havemeyer’s. But what the Sugar King wrought can no longer be ascribed to any individual’s might. Big Sugar is what this bittersweet empire is aptly called today. See sugar lobbies.
See also fructose; sugar cubes; sugar refineries; sugar refining; and sugarcane.
See chemical leaveners.
ancient world is a general term for the classical Greek and Roman civilizations that flourished in southern Europe from about the seventh century b.c.e. to the fifth century c.e. Greeks developed a high culture in gastronomy, as they did in many other aspects of life. Romans, imitating and at the same time despising the Greeks, transformed this culture and spread it, along with their empire, from end to end of the Mediterranean.
For Greeks and Romans, “sweet” was merely one taste quality among many. To dieticians in particular, who based their prescriptions on humoral theory, sweet substances and ingredients were in general classed as “hot” and were to be taken sparingly or avoided by those with hot constitutions. Since alcoholic drinks were also hot, as were most spices, honeyed and spiced wines were extremely hot and were taken before the meal: their heating effect would be mitigated by the “cold” foods to be served later. See medicinal uses of sugar.
If sweets are now almost defined by their inclusion of sugar, sugar as we know it had no part in ancient dining. The Greeks and Romans knew of cane sugar, a rare spice imported from distant India by way of Alexandria, but it was so expensive that it was used only as a medicine: sugar is not called for in any surviving food recipe from the ancient world. Instead of sugar, the sweets of the ancient world were sweetened with dried fruits, or grape syrup, or honey. See honey and pekmez.
Sweets came last in ancient Greek and Roman meals, as they do in modern Europe. They formed a separate, smaller course and were prepared by specialized pastry cooks; hence, there is no section on sweets in the Roman cookbook Apicius. Yet these were the flavors that lingered in the mouth when the earlier course had already slipped from the diner’s memory. In ancient dining the frontier between “first tables” and “second tables” was, as the very names suggest, an almost physical thing. Tables being small and portable, the first tables, smeared with the remains of the meat and fish dishes, the beans, and soups and stews, were taken away to be replaced by the second, laden with sweet foods. Music and dancing intervened to make the break even clearer.
Greek and Roman writings, when they describe dinner at all, are sadly unspecific about second tables. We fall back on a few rare, specialized sources that supply names and (in rare cases) brief recipes for cakes and sweets. Unexpectedly useful is the earliest of all Latin prose texts, Cato the Elder’s short work On Farming from about 150 b.c.e., which includes a dozen recipes for cakes. A few similar recipes survive from Greek textbooks on baking and patisserie. These sources say little or nothing about the occasions on which sweets were eaten. For example, whether Cato’s cakes were intended as religious offerings or as a commercial sideline has been a matter of guesswork.
The earliest Greek texts, up to early fifth century b.c.e., suggest that second tables consisted simply of tragemata—“things to be chewed”—raisins, dried figs, dates, hazelnuts, and walnuts. See dried fruit and nuts. This is not the full picture, however. Contemporary vase paintings of feasts show conical or pyramidal cakes on the tables as frequently as they show meat. Thus, coming to the late fifth century, it is no surprise that the comic poet Aristophanes mentions among others a cake named pyramous, which ought, from its name, to be pyramidal. Mentioned about this time are oinoutta, a cake that incorporated must (grape juice) as flavoring and raising agent; melitoutta, which must have been honey soaked; and sesamis, a cake or sweetmeat in which sesame evidently contributed taste and texture.
The next cake of note, first mentioned about 350 b.c.e. by two Greek poets, is plakous. See placenta. At last, we have recipes and a context to go with the name. Plakous is listed as a delicacy for second tables, alongside dried fruits and nuts, by the gastronomic poet Archestratos. He praises the plakous made in Athens because it was soaked in Attic honey from the thyme-covered slopes of Mount Hymettos. His contemporary, the comic poet Antiphanes, tells us the other main ingredients, goat’s cheese and wheat flour. Two centuries later, in Italy, Cato gives an elaborate recipe for placenta (the same name transcribed into Latin), redolent of honey and cheese. The modern Romanian plăcintă and the Viennese Palatschinke, though now quite different from their ancient Greek and Roman ancestor, still bear the same name.
Some of the other cakes for which Cato gives recipes have significant histories, though no others survive under their ancient names. Encytus was unusual in shape and method. It was made by injecting a narrow stream of cheesy batter into hot fat. Already in the fifth century b.c.e. the satirical Greek poet Hipponax noticed, and played on, the analogy between this procedure and the sexual act. Encytus was not in itself sweet, but Cato instructs that it is to be served with honey or with mulsum, the honeyed wine that Romans often drank as an aperitif. The names of Cato’s cakes are all originally Greek, with the single exception of globi, which may have resembled modern zeppole. They were deep-fried in oil or fat and soaked in honey. See fried dough. Their Latin name is shared with that of a geometrical form, from which we know their typical shape: they were spherical or globular. Globi clearly resemble a Greek cake with a quite different name, enkris, mentioned in the sixth century b.c.e. by the archaic poet Stesichoros, perhaps the earliest Greek author to have named any sweet or cake.
Another cake known to Romans and Greeks under different names deserves mention, although Cato omits it—perhaps it was too simple for him. But Galen, a second-century c.e. author on diet and medicine, had watched the frying of pancakes and describes the process carefully. Pancakes (lucunculi in Latin, tagenitai in Greek) recur regularly in ancient writings. Not in themselves sweet, pancakes were served with honey and—as early as Hipponax—sprinkled with sesame seeds. See pancakes.
Cakes were often ritually offered to Greek gods, a gentler form of worship than the slaughtering of a sacrificial animal. Probably people ate the cakes when the ritual was over (but not the pankarpia, an offering of “every kind of fruit” in the form of a honey-soaked cake: herbalists buried this in the ground as thanks giving for rare medicinal plants). We have the names of offertory cakes, but few of the details. Amphiphon was a cheesecake decorated with lighted candles, offered to Artemis the huntress on the full moon of the month Mounychion. Basynias, honey cake garnished with a dried fig and three walnuts, was offered to Iris, the rainbow goddess, on the island of Delos. Myllos, shaped like female genitalia, was offered by the Greeks of Sicily to the goddess Demeter and her lost daughter, abducted from a Sicilian meadow by the underworld god Pluto. There are others: the hebdomos bous or “seventh ox” was offered alongside six phthoeis, but what form did it take? At least the phthoeis can be described: also called selene or “moon,” they were round and white, made with wheat flour, cheese, and honey, and eaten alongside the entrails of a sacrificial animal.
Romans, too, offered cakes to the gods. The commonest Roman offertory cake was a libum, and Cato supplies a recipe for it: cheese, wheat or durum wheat flour, and an egg, all mixed, formed into a large cake, and then placed on bay leaves to bake. There was more than one kind, however: the poet Ovid, in his religious poem Fasti, tells us that millet was an ingredient in the libum offered to Vesta, the goddess of the hearth.
From the fourth century b.c.e. onward, a few narratives of dinners mention the cakes, sweets, and other delicacies that were served at second tables. The oldest is the Dinner of Philoxenos, probably describing an entertainment among the Greeks of fourth-century b.c.e. Sicily. Philoxenos noted sesame cakes and sweets of several kinds (sesame remains a favorite flavor in modern Greek sweets). Then, in early-third-century b.c.e. Macedonia, comes the wedding feast of Karanos, enthusiastically described in a letter by Hippolochos, one of the guests at this lavish—perhaps royal—entertainment. Hippolochos mentions sweets that were local specialities of Greek cities, Cretan, Samian, and Athenian. One of those Cretan sweets might have been gastris, for which a recipe survives in a different source. See gastris.
Fictional narratives of Roman meals give an impression of lavish disorder. Second tables at the overly elaborate “Feast of Trimalchio” in Petronius’s Satyricon were served at least twice, and on both occasions were savory rather than sweet, but they had been preceded by a pompa or set piece, presided over by a pastry Priapus and featuring sweets made to look like fruits and filled with saffron sauce. See priapus. At the meal at Scissa’s, described as an aside in the same episode, a cold scriblita or “cheesecake” was served with hot honey sauce: a good idea, but it arrived among the meats at first tables.
Returning to history, the poet Statius gives us the fullest menu for Roman second tables. In this case, admittedly, there are no tables. Around the year 95 c.e. the emperor Domitian entertained the citizens of Rome to a Saturnalia feast in the Colosseum. Meats were served in hampers; then, as a battle among Amazons was staged in the arena, sweets descended from the skies, including hazelnuts, Syrian dates, Egyptian dates, Damascus prunes, lucunculi, and little Amerine cheeses. Domitian, surely the most generous of imperial hosts, was murdered at his wife’s instigation a year later.
See also cheesecake; dates; dessert; hippocras; and mead.
angel food cake, one of the sweetest and lightest of all cakes, gets its name from its whiteness and cloud-like texture. According to two authoritative sources, the Confectioners’ Journal of April 1883 and Jessup Whitehead’s The American Pastry Cook (1894), angel food cake was created by a St. Louis baker. They do not agree, however, on who this baker was.
Confectioners’ Journal identifies him as Mr. George S. Beers, a frequent contributor to the Journal. The American Pastry Cook simply credits S. Sides. Both sources report that the recipe was for sale. A few months after the April Confectioners’ Journal article, the Journal published an angel food cake recipe without attributing it to anyone.
It turns out that the angel food cake has an earlier beginning than that reported in Confectioners’ Journal. Culinary historian Pat Reber has found mention of a cake called “Angel’s Food” in The Home Messenger Book of Tested Receipts (1878), although that recipe is imprecise. It was not until 1884, when a detailed recipe called Angel Cake appeared in the now-classic Boston Cooking School Cook Book, that angel food cake gained immortality.
Aside from egg whites, flour, sugar, and flavoring, the key to the success of an angel food cake is cream of tartar, an acidic powder derived from sediment produced during wine fermentation; it stabilizes egg whites and contributes to the cake’s volume and whiteness.
By the 1930s the method of making angel food cake and the ratio of ingredients that went into it were firmly established. What had not been determined was the science behind why the cake was such a success.
In 1936 M. A. Barmore approached the topic in a highly technical way. He chose angel food cake because it had few ingredients, and he conducted his experiments in Colorado in a room pressure-adjusted for altitude to over 10,000 feet. He decided to measure the specific gravity of egg whites to determine the optimum for cake volume, the tensile strength of cakes baked at different altitudes, and the effect of oven temperature on the volume and texture of the cakes. He also tested different mixing methods to see which gave the tenderest results.
Barmore found that cream of tartar produced cakes with the finest texture, much better than citric and acetic acids. Baking cakes at different temperatures had minimal effects on texture and volume because the temperature of the cake itself remains fairly constant. For tenderness and cakes with a tight crumb, fresh egg whites proved to be superior to those a few days old. Cakes baked at 10,000 feet were more tender but had less tensile strength than cakes baked at sea level, because of the reduced air pressure.
Another investigator, E. J. Pyler, showed that baking an angel food cake at 450°F (232°C) for 21 minutes produced a cake that rose significantly more than the same batter baked at 325°F (163°C) for 45 minutes. The air cells expand so quickly that the protein meshwork around them is shocked into setting as soon as the cake gains maximum volume.
Other studies revealed that cakes rise best if put into a cold oven before turning it on. Gradual heating allows the air cells to expand less rapidly and slows the setting of the proteins around them, ensuring that the cake will not collapse.
Hanging the baked cake upside down maintains the structure of the air cells as the cake cools. Do not be afraid, though. It will not fall out of the pan while your back is turned.
See also cake.
angelica is the common name for Angelica archangelica, a stout, umbelliferous plant that starts out as a rosette of large (30–70 cm in length), compound leaves with hollow, tubular leaf stalks. In its first year or two (occasionally longer), it will accumulate nutrients in a thick taproot. Then it will flower, set seeds, and die. The green, occasionally purplish, flower stem may grow to a height of 2 m or more. The small, greenish flowers are set in spherical umbels, 10–15 cm or more across. When bruised, the whole plant has a strong aromatic scent, often described as musky.
Angelica is widely cultivated, mainly for its root, in several European countries, including Germany, Belgium, Holland, Poland, and France. Its main uses are in herbal medicine. It was once considered a panacea and used as a remedy for just about every imaginable ailment. Extracts of the roots are utilized in the production of various alcoholic beverages, such as vermouth, Benedictine, Chartreuse, and gin.
Fifty tons of angelica are harvested annually in the marshlands of Marais Poitevin, in the French region of Poitou-Charentes. When grown and prepared here, it may be labeled angélique de Niort. The most common use is to candy the stalks, as confiture d’angélique, for inclusion in cakes and confectionery. The stalks are cut into short pieces and cooked in a sugar syrup several times until saturated. Pure candied angelica is a somewhat dull green. Today it is often artificially colored to make it a gaudy, metallic green. Sulfur dioxide may be added for a longer shelf life. The English trifle is frequently decorated with pieces of candied angelica.
See also candied fruit and trifle.
animal crackers
refer to sweet-tasting crackers molded into the shapes of various circus animals. In the late 1800s animal-shaped cookies (or “biscuits,” in British terminology), called simply “animals,” were introduced from England to the United States. The earliest recipe for “animals” was published on 1 April 1883 by J. D. Hounihan in Secrets of the Bakers and Confectioners’ Trade. It called for “1 bbl [barrel] flour, 40 lbs sugar, 16 lbs lard, 12 oz soda, 8 ozs ammonia, 
gals milk.”
The demand for these cookies grew to the point that commercial American bakers began to produce them. In 1902 the National Biscuit Company officially introduced the most popular brand still known today, Barnum’s Animal Crackers, named after P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), the famous circus owner and showman. The packaging was part of the treat—the box looked like a colorful circus train with animals. Initially designed as a Christmas tree ornament, the string holding the box was soon put to use as a handle by which small children could carry the box around. Although a number of other manufacturers presently make animal crackers, Barnum’s remain the most famous.
Over the years, 37 different animals have been included in Barnum’s Animal Crackers, but the only ones to have survived the product’s entire lifetime are bears, elephants, lions, and tigers. Although child actress Shirley Temple sang “Animal crackers in my soup / Monkeys and rabbits loop the loop” in Curly Top (1935), rabbits never found their way into a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers. Today, each box contains 22 crackers with 19 different animal shapes: 2 bears (one sitting and one standing), a bison, a camel, a cougar, an elephant, a giraffe, a gorilla, a hippo, a hyena, a kangaroo, a koala, a lion, a monkey, a rhinoceros, a seal, a sheep, a tiger, and a zebra. For the one-hundredth anniversary of the brand, the koala was added on the basis of consumer surveys, beating out the penguin, walrus, and cobra.
Today’s Barnum’s Animal Crackers are baked in a 300-foot-long traveling band oven in a Fair Lawn, New Jersey, bakery belonging to Nabisco Brands. More than 40 million packages of animal crackers are sold each year, both in the United States and in 17 countries abroad. These fun-to-eat treats have remained popular with children and adults, partly because of the many references to animal crackers in popular culture. In addition to Shirley Temple’s song, used in many Nabisco commercials, Animal Crackers was the name of a 1930 Marx Brothers’ musical and film.
See also anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sweets.
animals and sweetness is a subject that has not received much systematic attention. Little is known about why and how human animals evolved their sweet tooth from nonhuman animals. Nonetheless, existing data reveal some surprising and very interesting discoveries for the relatively few animals that have been studied, and it turns out that the ability to discriminate sweets is phylogenetically old. For example, chemotaxic responsiveness (orientation or movement toward or away from certain chemicals along a concentration gradient) to sugars and sweetness has been discovered in motile bacteria such as E. coli.
Evolutionary biologist Jason Cryan notes that humans have evolutionarily and physiologically “associated a sweet taste with high-energy foods which would have helped our earliest ancestors survive better in their environment” (Bramen, 2010). On the other hand, our perception of bitter tastes was important in identifying and avoiding toxic plants. It is possible that one could make the same argument for nonhumans.
Research shows that much variation exists among other animals in terms of their ability to taste sweets. Cats, including lions, tigers, cheetahs, and jaguars, and some other carnivores do not taste sweets and do not show preferences for them. Neither do dolphins, sea lions, or Asian otters. It has been suggested that animals that mainly eat meat do not benefit from eating sweets and have lost their ability to taste sweet foods as a result of genetic mutations. According to Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, when the data for cats were first published, people claimed that their cats did, in fact, like sweets. However, Beauchamp goes on to explain that the cats’ preference for sweets was really a preference for fat and other components of the sweet items.
Beauchamp further notes that the loss of a taste for sweets occurred independently in different species. An animal’s diet seems to determine whether a mutation will be effective and retained over subsequent generations. Thus, we need to be careful about generalizations across species because domestic dogs, nonhuman primates, spectacled bears, and many other animals prefer natural sugars; and the taste preferences of a large number of species have never been rigorously studied. It is also widely accepted that although domestic dogs do like sweets, the sweets are not good for them.
Interestingly, bees play a significant role in the understanding of human sweet perception and metabolic disorders. Researchers at Arizona State University discovered connections between sugar sensitivity, diabetic physiology and carbohydrate metabolism, and that bees and humans may partially share these connections (“Bees Shed Light,” 2012). By inactivating two genes that control food-related behaviors in the bees’ “master regulator” module, researchers uncovered a possible molecular link between sweet taste perception and the state of internal energy. One of the researchers, Ying Wang, noted that the same bees resembled people with Type 1 diabetes in that both showed high levels of blood sugar and low levels of insulin. Clearly, more research is needed, but the relationship between taste perception in bees and human disease is intriguing. See sugar and health.
It is also known that the brain is not needed to perceive sweetness. Taste scientist Robert Magolskee notes that when researchers put sugar directly into the stomach or small intestine of mice, the mice “know that that’s something good and something positive, and they will seek more of that stimulus” (“Getting a Sense,” 2011).
Data also exist showing that German cockroaches are losing their sweet tooth because the traps used to catch them utilize sugared poisons. The mutant cockroaches have neurons, activated by glucose; some say, “Sweet!” while others say, “Yuck!” The “Yuck!” neurons lessen the signal transmitted from other neurons, so the message “this taste is awful” gets sent to the brain. It takes about 25 generations or 5 years for such a change to occur. This discovery is a compelling example of evolution at work and shows that taste preferences in nonhumans are evolutionarily labile. The rapid emergence of this highly adaptive behavior underscores the plasticity of the sensory system to adapt to rapid environmental change.
There still is much to learn about taste perception and preferences in animals. Existing data offer some unanticipated results among carnivores and other species. Nobel Prize–winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen has suggested that researchers consider four general questions when studying animal behavior: evolution, adaptation, causation, and ontogeny (development). Because eating sweets is enjoyable, psychologist Gordon Burghardt has proposed adding “subjective experience” to Tinbergen’s scheme. Applying Tinbergen’s and Burghardt’s ideas will surely contribute to the database for research on taste preferences and place these sorts of studies in a more naturalistic and comparative evolutionary framework.
See also sweets in human evolution.
anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sweets have, over the centuries, been prepared, bought, and exchanged as presents that add significance to convivial, pagan, and religious celebrations. A wealth of creatures, or parts of their bodies, convey symbolism from the most remote, even pre-totemic times. These sweets are highly aesthetic, as well as delicious and diverse in their ingredients, techniques, intentionality, and meanings. Often they are employed as messengers of mythological beliefs, pagan legends, or episodes of biblical origin, shared through oral tradition and now embedded in updated imagery and practices. Their methods of production and consumption were often recorded in medieval texts. In Spain, writers such as Lope de Vega and Cervantes described them, and the secrets of their production were standardized in treatises on the art of sweet making, such as those by Diego Granado, Martinez Montiño, and Juan de la Mata.
Zoomorphic and anthropomorphic sweets remind us who we are and where we come from. These edible metaphors, vestigial markers of identity often closely tied to festivities, combine tradition with innovation and encourage collective indulgence, as if to prove the truth of the adage “You become what you eat and survive from what you sell.” Whether homemade or bought from convents, stalls in fairs and markets, or from bakeries and cake shops, these ritual sweets offer an opportunity for families and friends to gather and celebrate.
Some anthropomorphic sweets betray the pagan traditions that underlie Christian celebrations, such as Easter sweets that evoke spring fertility rituals. Kulich, the Russian Easter bread replete with candied fruits and drizzled with white icing, is unmistakably phallic, although it is never acknowledged as such. See russia. In Amarante, Portugal, doces fálicos (phallic sweets) are exchanged by men and women during the Festes de Sao Gonçalo in the first week of June, in a sort of fertility rite marking the name day of the patron saint of spinsters. See portugal.
Other anthropomorphic sweets made for particular celebrations include san martino a cavallo cookies with their highly decorative depictions of Saint Martin on horseback, which are baked in Venice on Saint Martin’s Day. Hamantaschen, the triangular filled cookies baked for the Jewish holiday of Purim, are formed in the shape of the Persian vizier Haman’s three-cornered hat. By eating this symbolic hat, the evil Haman is destroyed. See hamantaschen.
Gingerbread men, springerle, Lebkuchen, and speculaas are Central European examples of anthropomorphic cookies, representing figures ranging from Saint Nicholas to an individual family member who inscribes her name in icing on the human shape. Alsatian Gugelhupf is made in various human and animal shapes for different occasions, including that of a swaddled Christ child at Christmas. In pre-Revolutionary Russia during the Christmas season, particularly in the north, decoratively iced animal-shaped cookies made of gingerbread or honey cake were an important part of the caroling ritual. Groups of gaily dressed mummers would proceed from house to house, singing for the cookies as their reward. The most common shapes of these kozuli were deer, eagles, goats, and horses, as well as the sun and human figures. The cookies were also hung on Christmas trees and distributed to children. In the spring, lark-shaped buns (zhavoronki) were baked as harbingers of the new growing season. See christmas; gingerbread; gugelhupf; russia; speculaas; and springerle.
Specific Examples
Anthropomorphic sweets rely on the specific requirements for each type of dough. Some malleable consistencies allow for realistic pieces like orejas de fraile (friar’s ears)—thin, fragile ear shapes. Others, like the brazo de gitano/reina/venus (gypsy’s/queen’s/Venus’s arm), have many layers: the skin, flesh, and blood. Some have protruding parts, such as tetas de novicia (novice’s tits), which are airy with brown meringue on top, or barrigas de fraile (friar’s bellies).
Zoomorphic sweets, on the other hand, require a certain intentionality to produce recognizable figures, whether flat or three-dimensional, like marzipan figures and monas de Pascua (Easter figures) in the shape of swans, dragons, bears, crocodiles, or camels. The monas are made from chocolate in Cataluña. Three-dimensional cakes in the shape of lambs are popular at Easter time in a number of countries across Central Europe; they are baked in special two-part molds. Other types of dough are hand-shaped into two-dimensional figures, traditionally in the shape of snails, oysters, mussels, clams, anchovies, shrimps, crayfish, seahorses, insects, worms, doves, chickens, and swans. Cookie dough has long been popular for making two-dimensional figures, whether imprinted with molds, such as springerle, or formed with cookie cutters, such as gingerbread men. See cookie cutters and cookie molds and stamps. Boiled sugar sweets on sticks, mainly in the shape of roosters but also other animals, have been handmade in Turkey since the sixteenth century. They are often hollow and can be blown as whistles. These confections may have inspired the German roter Zuckerhase (red sugar hares), three-dimensional, bright red rabbit sugar figurines that represent the triumph of life and love at Easter. The many industrially produced sweets made from gelling agents, such as Gummi Bears, are more recent iterations of zoomorphic forms. See gummies and haribo.
In Spain, many sweets are nominally anthropomorphic, their names referring to states of mind. These can be categorized as follows:
Other Spanish sweets are more or less realistic reproductions of bodies or body parts, such as cabello de ángel (angel hair), trenzas (braids), orejas (ears), bocas (mouths), dentaduras (false teeth), bigotes (mustaches), labios (lips), lenguas (tongues), gargantas (throats), corazones (hearts), brazos de gitano (gypsy’s arms), dedos (fingers), tetas de novicia (novice’s tits), barrigas de fraile (friar’s bellies), tripas de monja (nun’s innards), chochos de vieja (old lady’s vulvas), penes (penises), and huesos de santo (saint’s bones).
The most beautiful and delicious of these is cabello de angel (angel hair) that also features as a filling in many other sweets. One seventeenth-century version, made from transparent candied citron, was known as diacitron. Another version is made by pouring liquid egg yolks through a colander with five tiny spouts into boiling syrup, so that the threads of yolk resemble blonde hair. Angel hair is used to adorn trays of luxury cured meats.
Transforming the Fantastic into the Real
Through culinary artistry and the names they give their confections, sweet makers establish a territory of fertile imagination, seduction, and invention. Each edible creature broadens reality, expands the realm of fiction, and embodies the past in the present. The artisans combine the old and the modern, paying tribute to both canonical tradition and heresy, to the local and the universal, to the system of language, to the realm of chance and creativity, and to necessity and survival.
Some historical examples in Spain include animas del purgatorio (souls in purgatory), a version of floating island for which meringues are set onto custard cream colored red with beet juice, and orejones (big ears), a favorite seventeenth-century delicacy that consisted of peaches modeled to resemble ears and then air-dried. The contemporary orejas or orelletes found throughout Spain are very thin, delicate fried sweets in the shape of ears.
Even today, when home cooks bake round loaves of ancient simplicity based on the Roman panis candius, they give a piece of dough to children for them to create their own edible amulets, thereby accentuating the magical and religious dimension of bread as a sacred element offered in social and religious celebrations. The children’s doves, lizards, and snails are drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sugar before being baked until brown and crunchy.
Mysteriously, two very old zoomorphic sweets from distant regions in Spain, the Majorcan ensaimada and the anguila de mazapán (marzipan eel) from Toledo, share the same snail shape of coiled dough. The Majorcan pastry is of Christian origin, because its hojaldre dough is made with pork fat; the Toledan anguila has Semitic roots. We must suspect that its name is a euphemism to avoid mentioning a taboo: the serpent. Magnificently stuffed with sweet potato, almond paste, and egg yolk with syrup, and ornamented in the style of Toledan filigree, the expensive anguila symbolizes power and wealth. It appears at Christmas surrounded by marzipan figurines and turrón (nougat candy), heralding a dense calendar of festive opportunities to cultivate the idiosyncratic Spanish passion for embellishing everyday life, to exchange gifts with peers, reward moral authorities, show appreciation to donors, and request intercession from the spheres of sanctity and deity. See nougat and spain.
The Emergence of Thematic Sweets in Spain
The immensely contrasting regions of Spain have been enriched by a convivial crush of various ethnicities. Native Tartessians and Iberians saw the arrival and challenge of Celts, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Visigoths, Moors, other Europeans, and Americans, all exchanging material culture such as ingredients, instruments, and techniques, as well as the wealth of their conceptual imagery. Primal sobriety, isolation and poverty, then classicism, followed in 711 by the sudden impact of the Arabic sense of refined luxury, established a culinary wisdom reflecting the synthesis of three cultures: Moorish, Jewish, and Christian. Marzipan and zoomorphic marzipan figures are Semitic in origin. See marzipan. From the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, symbols of political and economic power were imported from Italy and found their way into kitchen and dining room. The tables of nobles and kings were invaded by monumental scenes of heroic animals and humans at leisure or in combat, cast of sugar, pastry, or marzipan and decorated with arabesques and pan de oro (gold foil), and colored with fancy substances such as cochineal and sandalwood, as described in the literature of the period. See food colorings and sugar sculpture.
Everyday Spanish life is still marked by festive conviviality featuring music and food. Spaniards are prepared to invest time, energy, and money in celebrating rites of passage from birth to death, as well as the sequence of religious festivals aimed to incur the favor of God and the saints. The public is also given the opportunity to spend and celebrate at regular commercial events, such as local fairs and markets, during which ancestral traditions of producing and eating certain sweets are revived as an excuse for commerce and socializing. The bone-shaped sweets that appear in the streets and markets on All Saints Day are one example. Huesos de santo are made of marzipan with different fillings; huesos de San Expedito are fried; and other “bones” look broken because they are reliquias (relics). See day of the dead; fairs; and festivals.
Why, where, and how these sweets survive depend on the producers. Their champions are to be found in the home—the mothers and grandmothers and the children who learn from them—and at the closed convents where the monjas de clausura sell their divine specialties. See convent sweets. Professional bakers also deserve special mention for their perseverance, mindful as they are of their role as the keepers of sweet-making traditions, and tied up as they are in their own means of survival. The true enemies of the fantastic tradition of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sweets are the changes in the availability and quality of basic ingredients, and the contemporary panic over diet and nutrition.
See also animal crackers; easter; fried dough; and holiday sweets.
aphrodisiacs are substances, often edible, that are used to enhance the desire for and enjoyment of sex. In earlier times they were also used to increase fertility and longevity by attempting to strengthen and increase life-containing bodily fluids and overall life force. The word “aphrodisiac” is derived from the Greek aphrodisiakon, “pertaining to Aphrodite,” the ancient Greek goddess of love and sexuality.
We associate love and sex with sweetness; we have sweethearts, sweeties, honeys, and sugar pies. See slang. We go on honeymoons, during which love and lovemaking are supposed to be the most idealized. See honeymoon. We give boxes of candy to our sweethearts, especially on Valentine’s Day. See chocolates, boxed and valentine’s day. Many sweet foods have long been considered to have aphrodisiac properties.
Some of the most ancient aphrodisiacs recorded are from India. All but one of the Kama Sutra’s aphrodisiac recipes contain sugar, milk, or honey. The text makes extravagant claims for a sweet-potato cookie:
Crush sweet potatoes in cow’s milk, together with swayamgupta seeds [Mukunia pruriens], sugar, honey and clarified butter. Use it to make biscuits with wheat flour…. By constantly eating these biscuits, one’s sperm acquires such force that it is possible to sleep with thousands of women who, in the end, will ask for pity.
Vajikarana (vaji meaning “stallion”) was a branch of Ayurveda (India’s ancient medical system) devoted to promoting fertility, virility, and sexual pleasure. Its primary text, the Charaka Samhita, states that “whatever is sweet … is known as an aphrodisiac” and that “the edibles prepared with raw sugar, sesame, milk, honey, and sugar are aphrodisiac…. ” Panchamritam, “five immortalities,” a mixture of milk, yogurt, sugar, honey, and clarified butter, is still prescribed to increase fertility, restore vitality, and promote longevity. See india.
Licorice was used as an aphrodisiac in ancient India, Egypt, and China. The root indeed contains traces of the hormone estrogen. The Kama Sutra contains this formula: “Mix garlic root with white pepper and licorice. When drunk with sugared milk, it enhances virility.” See licorice.
The obsession with aphrodisiacs in China to this day originally reflected Confucianism’s emphasis on male heirs and the Taoist pursuit of longevity. Rather than targeting specific symptoms and organs, Chinese aphrodisiacs address yang-shen, “life-nurture,” or long-term vitality, which in turn supports potency and sexual desire. One ancient prescription was a mixture of ground walnuts, peanuts, almonds, and dates, to be taken twice daily for virility and immortality.
Chocolates have long been considered to have aphrodisiac properties, one reason they are so popular on Valentine’s Day.
Sharbat, an icy liquid from which sherbet originates, was considered a love potion from the Middle East to India. In Sir Richard Burton’s commentaries on his translations of The Arabian Nights and of India’s Ananda Ranga, he says that “no Persian will drink sherbet in the presence of his future Mother in-law” because of its aphrodisiac qualities, and that Hindu men imbibe it during sex to prolong the act. See sherbet.
The Islamic sex manual The Perfumed Garden, ca. 1410–1434, contains many aphrodisiac recipes for use by married men. The text advises, “If a man will passionately give himself up to the enjoyment of coition without undergoing great fatigue, he must live upon strengthening foods…. The quality of the sperm depends directly on the food you take.” One prescription was to eat 20 almonds and 100 pine nuts, chased by a glassful of thick honey for three successive days.
Majoon, a traditional aphrodisiac sweet still found today in countries ranging from Morocco to India, consists of honey, fruits, nuts, spices, and marijuana, to which cantharides (Spanish fly) was occasionally added in the past. In Morocco it was said that “this dessert will make all women want to cast off their clothes and run naked through the streets and cause all men to cry, ‘Allah be praised!’”
Breads and pastries shaped like genitalia were utilized in European sex magic. Romans employed heterae, sacred prostitutes, to bake phallic-shaped breads. (Forno, Latin for “oven,” is the derivation of “fornicate.”) Similarly shaped loaves are described in old Teutonic histories. See anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sweets.
Sex magic was also practiced by anointing a cake with body secretions and feeding it to a lover. One such practice was graphically described by an outraged Buchard, Bishop of Worms in his 1023 Decretum, a 20-volume canon law of the Holy Roman Empire: “Have you done what certain women are in the habit of doing? They prostrate themselves face downwards, rump upward and uncovered, and have a loaf of bread kneaded upon their nude nates; when it has been baked, they invite their husbands to come and eat it; this they do in order to inflame their men with a greater love for them.”
Seventeenth-century English diarist John Aubrey recorded that women would press pieces of dough against their vulvas, bake them, and offer them to the men they desired. Scientists today point out that the “magic” might have been powerful sex-attractant pheromones in body secretions that were transferred to the baked goods.
Gingerbread men were originally prepared by crones for lovesick women. They laced dough with ginger, believed to have aphrodisiac properties, then sculpted it to resemble the man for whom the lady lusted. When her beloved ate the cookie, his heart, and parts further south, would be enslaved to the damsel forever. See gingerbread.
Alcoholic beverages have long been used to enhance, if not encourage, sexual encounters. Cakes dipped in alcohol were eaten by eighteenth-century French newlyweds to lower their inhibitions on their wedding nights. Rum cakes and alcohol-laced fruitcakes are part of the culinary tradition, if not the belief.
Although Mesoamericans had aphrodisiacs aplenty, usually in the form of herbs and herbal mixtures, we do not know whether chocolate was one of them. The only information we have comes from records of Spanish conquistadores, whose interpretations of Aztec life were colored by their own beliefs. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a foot soldier who traveled with Cortés and chronicled his Mesoamerican conquest, started the titillating trend by reporting, “From time to time, gold cups were brought to him [Montezuma] containing a beverage made from cacao. He was said to drink it before going to his women, but,” del Castillo added piously, “we did not pay any attention to this detail.” Atextli, an aphrodisiac chocolate and herb beverage, was described in an Aztec Materia Medica compiled and written by the Spanish royal physician Francisco Hernández. Its erotic effects are believed to have come from an herb that modern botanists have yet to identify. Hernández classified chocolate as being able to “excite the venereal appetite”—and leaving us ignorant of what the Aztecs themselves thought about it. See chocolate, pre-columbian.
When chocolate reached Europe, scientists were swift to label it a botanical slut. In 1651 Spaniard Antonio Colmenero claimed in A Curious Treatise of the Nature of Chocolate that it “vehemently incites to Venus, and causeth conception in women.” British Royal Physician Henry Stubbes published The Indian Nectar, or a Discourse Concerning Chocolata in 1662. He wrote, “As chocolate provokes other evacuations through the several Emunctories of the body, so doth that of seed, and becomes provocative to lust upon no other account than that it begets good blood.” Another Englishman, the aptly named James Wadsworth (1768–1844), optimistically observed in A History of the Nature and Quality of Chocolate:
Twill make Old women Young and Fresh;
Create New Motions of the Flesh,
And cause them to long for you know what,
If they but taste of chocolate.
A medical theory in which Renaissance and baroque physicians put great stock was the doctrine of signatures. Its premise was that after Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden and humankind began to experience diseases, God mercifully gave each plant a visible sign, usually in the form of a resemblance to the part of the human body it could be used to treat. Some herbs and plants were labeled aphrodisiacs because they resembled genitalia. Vanilla, the long, slender pods of a Mexican orchid, reminded Spanish physicians of a sheath, which encompassed the idea of a vagina. They named the plant vaina or vainillo, from “vagina”—never mind that orchis, the Greek root of “orchid,” means “testicles”! Vanilla thus became known as an erotic stimulant in Europe. See vanilla.
Modern physiologists believe that eating delicious food triggers the brain to release a flood of endorphins, causing people to feel more relaxed, happy, and, at times, more sexy. The endorphin system can also be stimulated by opiates in foods, and there is evidence that high-fat and sweet foods can trigger the release of endorphins. Phenylethylamine, a neurostimulant that works similarly to cocaine and amphetamines to produce exhilaration and heightened sensitivity, is found in chocolate. Honey contains boron, a mineral that increases testosterone and helps metabolize estrogen. However, it is not yet known whether a reasonable portion of any food contains enough of these chemicals, and whether they can be metabolized in a way that reliably trips the sex switches in the brain.
The way foods send sensory signals to the brain through appearance, taste, and smell is also being examined by psychologists and physiologists. It may be that a whiff of a food odor containing a sex pheromone, or the sight of a dish that reminds an individual of a memorable erotic tryst, may stimulate that giant sex organ, the brain, more powerfully than eating a platter of the delicacy. However, at heart, such inquiries reinforce the ancient premise that certain foods positively affect sexuality.
See also medicinal uses of sugar and sweetness preference.
Appalachian stack cake is a traditional autumn harvest dessert unique to the Appalachian mountain region in the southern United States; it is made from sun-dried apples and sorghum syrup. This inexpensive cake was especially valued during hard times; cut thinly, a dried apple stack cake can yield upwards of 50 slices.
Although the cake’s precise origins are murky, the thinness and number of its layers, as well as its use of a fruit filling, clearly relate it to German tortes, and the large German immigrant population of Appalachia supports this theory. A typical dried apple stack cake consists of seven thin layers, each about half an inch thick. In between each layer is a filling of dried apples that have been reconstituted by boiling in water for several hours, then puréed. The preferred apple is the Winesap, prized for its tartness that counterbalances the sweetness of the cake. Spicing can be nonexistent or any combination of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg added to the cake batter, to the apples, or both. Apple butter and applesauce are commonly used if no dried apples are on hand.
The cake batter consists of items readily found on the farm or at the country store: flour, eggs, buttermilk, sorghum syrup, and shortening. See shortening and sorghum syrup. Cast-iron skillets, turned upside down, were often used to bake the cake layers. Because the layers are so thin, baking time is a mere six or seven minutes. After the cake has been baked and assembled, it must season for two or three days for the flavors to blend and the layers to become moist. Stories abound in Appalachia about children who could not wait that long and got into trouble for cutting into the cake too early. Often the cake’s only adornments are scalloped edges (if the dough has been cut with a tin pie pan or tart pan) and a pattern of scattered sugar on top. Carefully spaced fork prickings not only keep the layers from rising but also add to the cake’s simple design.
For many mountain people, dried apple stack cake now exists only in memory, having fallen victim to the pressures of quick cooking and the shortcuts of convenience cuisine. Rarely is dried apple stack cake offered on restaurant menus.
See also layer cake; south (u.s.); and torte.
aroma has long been used by chefs to determine “doneness,” to teach apprentices about the stages of cooking, and to beguile diners with rapturous smells. The aroma of baking bread triggers a visceral, and pleasurable, reaction in most people, and the sense of smell is crucial to the ability to taste. Our olfactory sense couples with our taste buds to communicate flavors to the brain. In an evolutionary sense, aroma developed as a litmus test for the environment. The ability to smell allows us to evaluate danger and distinguish predators from prey. In regard to the foods we eat, aroma is essential for seeking the nutritious while rejecting the toxic or spoiled. See olfaction; sweetness preference; and sweets in human evolution.
Historically, Western tradition has maintained a hierarchy of the senses in which sight and hearing are considered the most refined. Because mind is privileged over body, the “chemical senses” of smell and taste have been relegated to the lowest categories. Japanese culture, however, recognizes the importance of the sense of smell. Kōdō, the appreciation of incense, is considered one of the three classical Japanese arts of refinement (the others being kadō or ikebana [flower arrangement] and chado [tea ceremony]).
The mind-body division means that taste and smell are often disparaged because they do not easily lend themselves to intellectual abstraction. How can the fragrance of vanilla be described accurately without mentioning the vanilla bean itself? Yet the ephemeral and complex properties of aromas found in food can be a means of communicating or an avenue of learning. The response to any given aroma may be subjective, but the power of smell is undeniable, as evidenced by the $30 billion perfume industry. Some chefs have marketed perfumes inspired by edibles—a logical step for Jordi Roca of El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, who has used natural essential-oil perfumes in his restaurant. He created the fragrance “Núvol di Llimona” (Lemon Cloud) based on one of his innovative desserts. The American celebrity chef Roblé Ali is launching a women’s perfume rumored to smell like his dessert French Toast Crunch.
The biologists Linda Buck and David Axel received the Nobel Prize in 2004 for discovering that the olfactory genes comprise 3 percent of the mammalian genome connected to the amygdala, the seat of memory in the brain. Yet almost a hundred years earlier, in Remembrance of Things Past, the French novelist Marcel Proust wrote, “When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls … bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.”
Aroma triggered memories and emotions for Proust, and it is used by chefs today in the same fashion. Modern chefs, in particular, have diffused smoke, steam, and perfumes at the table to achieve these effects. Perhaps the best example of this kind of “edible perfume” is found once again in the desserts of Jordi Roca, who has riffed on such perfumes as Calvin Klein’s “Eternity” and Dior’s “Hypnotic Poison.” His “Trésor of Lancôme,” inspired by the perfume, consists of a warm peach cream, loquat syrup, vanilla, apricot sorbet, and honey caramel rose petals, served with a small swatch of the original fragrance so that the two may be compared.
The mysterious nature of aroma makes it a compelling subject of study for chefs and neuroscientists today. Indeed, the high-order cognitive implications of smell are just beginning to be understood by chefs and scientists alike, and chefs are increasingly focusing on specific olfactory events to enhance the diner’s experience. To emphasize the interplay of scent and memory, Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck sent scented letters of confirmation to a series of guests and then released the same scent at the entrance to the restaurant upon their arrival. Daniel Patterson, an accomplished San Francisco chef, and Mandy Aftel, the foremost natural perfumer, collaborated on the book Aroma, in which they pursue the culinary benefits of using essential oils.
The smells of home cooking elicit some of our strongest involuntary memories. Thanksgiving dinner and Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies are the subjects of serious study by the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, whose chemists, neuroscientists, and psychologists produce an astounding body of work on the connections among odors, memory, and emotion. Combined with taste these are the real ingredients of fine desserts.
See also sugar in experimental cuisine.
art depicting sweets has flourished for as long as sugar has had a steady presence on our tables. Sweets—sugar, chocolate, and the treats that can be made or baked with them—first appear as a recurring subject in Northern European still life painting, and their debut notably correlates with the rise of sugar production and trading. While sugar had long been cultivated in tropical climates and traded in small quantities as a luxury good, it was not until the early sixteenth century that large-scale sugar production was launched in the New World by European colonists. Built on African slave labor and plantation system production methods, sugar cultivation was a highly profitable colonial enterprise that, over time, transformed sugar and the goods it sweetened from aristocratic and patrician luxuries into staples enjoyed throughout society. Artists have been keen observers of this evolution, and the following brief overview shows how their work offers important ideas about the production, consumption, and social meaning of sweets.
Still Life Painting
Commensurate with the rise of Antwerp and, later, Amsterdam as thriving centers of sugar refinement, sugar and its progeny, sweets, began to appear with prominence and frequency in Northern still life painting around 1600. The Flemish painters Clara Peeters and Osias Beert, and their German contemporary Georg Flegel, were among the earliest to devote panels to scrupulously realistic still lifes that included such sweets as ragged comfits (nuts, seeds, or spices coated in sugar), sweetmeats, pastries, letter cookies, and even loaves of crisp, raw sugar. See comfit. Many of these early Northern still lifes contain Christian references such as wine, symbolizing the blood of Christ, or sweets arranged in the shape of a cross. See christianity. Such paintings show sugar replacing honey as a traditional symbol of spiritual sweetness, God’s abundance, and eternal life. These depictions of luxurious sweets were also intended to display wealth and status and, as such, reflected rising affluence (not unrelated to colonial ventures), and a newly emerging cultural focus on trade, consumption, and living prosperously.
Some Northern still lifes have further layers of meaning. Georg Flegel’s ca. 1630 Large Food Display, for example, portrays a buffet resplendent with fruit, nuts, pastries, and, at the center, sweetmeats and ragged comfits in a silver compote. A contemporary viewer would have understood this painting as a statement of wealth and cultivation, while also recognizing symbols of Christian faith, such as the parrot (which can be interpreted as the word of God), walnuts (representing the wood of the cross on which Christ was crucified), and an open pomegranate (a symbol of Christ’s resurrection), all of which temper the picture’s earthly, sweet abundance with higher spiritual principles. In an added twist, though, these same elements—especially the open walnut and pomegranate—had sexual connotations, too, and a contemporary viewer would have recognized this sly nod to lust. See sexual innuendo. A 1640 painting by the Antwerp painter Jan Davidsz. de Heem, A Table of Desserts, layers the cautionary message of a vanitas into a still life of a sumptuous buffet. Here, the teetering, spoiling leftovers of a grand feast, a half-eaten pie at the center, allude to the trappings of excessive indulgence and the certainty of decay and death.
The sweets depicted in Still Life with Candle, Sweets, and Wine (1607) by the Dutch artist Clara Peeters carry multiple messages, both religious and secular. The cookies and comfits represent ephemeral pleasure, as they so easily crumble and decay. The edible letterform “P” could reference Saint Peter but more likely suggests the artist’s pride in her painterly achievement.
In Spain, Juan van der Hamen y León painted still lifes with confectionery that reflected the extravagant hospitality practiced among the aristocracy and the affluent. His Still Life with Sweets and Pottery (1627), for example, shows a carefully staged and chromatically harmonious arrangement of delicate cookies, sugared fruit, and boxes of marzipan. Antonio de Pereda exhibited Spain’s colonial gains—chocolate, raw sugar, and baked goods—in the exquisitely rendered Still Life with an Ebony Chest of 1652. A century later, the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin studied the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters, but, like van der Hamen y León, was drawn to form more than symbolism. His 1763 La Brioche shows a splendidly risen pastry flanked by a sugar bowl and macarons that reveal his mastery of form, color, and texture. See breads, sweet. When La Brioche went on view at the Louvre in 1869, it inspired the French painter Édouard Manet to paint an homage of the same title. Like Chardin’s masterpiece, Manet’s study is a display of formalistic and painterly brilliance.
In American still life painting prior to the Civil War, sweets were not a frequent subject, but the work of Raphaelle Peale is a notable exception. Peale returned numerous times to a still life composition that included a petite iced raisin cake. His small, spare paintings, such as Still Life with Cake (1818), show both Dutch and French affinities, but Peale’s work is most like Chardin’s with its quiet restraint and hovering sense that the sweets presented are not about to be enjoyed but are instead a study of form. In the later nineteenth century Joseph Decker and John Peto expanded the repertoire of still life subject matter with compositions of diverse, colorful hard candy that reflect the widening availability of such confections. See hard candy. Though sweets do not factor prominently in earlier twentieth-century art, after 1960 a new and lively profusion of sweets appears in art.
Contemporary Variations on the Still Life
In the early 1960s the California artist Wayne Thiebaud began painting cakes, pies, and slices of American food culture to create an iconic and widely loved body of work. Well aware of predecessors like Chardin, Cézanne, and Manet, Thiebaud reinvigorated the still life with spare arrangements of desserts that were lushly described, with thick impasto mimicking frosting. Thiebaud was drawn to the simple geometries of commercial baked goods and the patterns created when these attractive sweets were offered up for sale in rows or grids at a bakery counter. Like Chardin, he was also following an interest in the everyday—here, distinctly American confections from his childhood, painted from memory—while also imparting a nobility, tinged with longing, to his commonplace subject. Thiebaud’s influential work, exemplified by his 1963 Cakes, speaks to the abundance and formal beauty of expanding American consumer culture and the desire it stoked.
Forty years later the American artist Sharon Core found herself spellbound by Thiebaud’s paintings and sought to reconstruct them. Her Thiebauds series of 2003–2004 is composed of glossy photographs that she took of meticulously constructed stagings of Thiebaud paintings (Core baked all the sweets herself). Working from reproductions in books and catalogs, Core’s appropriations playfully engage Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the role that technological reproduction plays in shaping aesthetic experience. Core’s beautifully rendered photographs succeed because viewers recognize the cakes: Thiebaud’s delectable images are affectionately embedded in our collective visual memory through contact with originals and reproductions alike.
Like Thiebaud, Pop artists were drawn to everyday objects of mass production, including appealing but standardized sweets like pies, cakes, and candy. But unlike Thiebaud’s restrained nostalgia, Pop art appropriated popular-culture imagery with irony, humor, and whimsy. Foremost among Pop artists in depicting sweets was Claes Oldenburg, who challenged the convention that sculpture must be serious, rigid, and permanent. Oldenburg’s oversized, soft sculptures from the early 1960s, such as Floor Cake and Soft Fur Good Humors (ice cream bars rendered in colorful animal prints), can be read as playful, outsized three-dimensional still lifes. Oldenburg’s sculpture also foregrounded commercially produced sweets from everyday American life, in an era when this was still novel, to draw our attention to how much of what we ingest and enjoy is industrially produced. Four decades later Jeff Koons, continuing an interest of Pop artists, makes flawless, oversized replicas of common objects of consumption. His Sacred Heart (Red/Gold) (1994–2007) emphasizes the shiny, enticing cellophane wrapping of a chocolate heart while calling attention to the workings of a mature consumer economy: slick packaging that stimulates desire but may not deliver satisfaction. See candy packaging.
The Photorealist movement that emerged in the late 1960s was, like Pop, fascinated with the commonplace. Working from photographs of everyday objects to render precise, large-scale reproductions, Photorealists asked viewers how their perception of reality is influenced by photographic technology. Desserts and candy were, and continue to be, a frequent Photorealist subject for their brilliant, often unnatural colors, their rich capacity to reflect light, and the complex way they engage the eye. A viewer studying Audrey Flack’s superbly painted 1974 Strawberry Tart Supreme, for example, knows how the whipped cream will gently give way to a spoon, or how the brightly flavored strawberry filling might zing the tongue. See tart. Likewise, Ralph Goings’s 1995 Donut could prompt a wave of pleasurable memories of glazed doughnuts enjoyed with coffee. See doughnuts. These outsized copycat sweets activate multiple senses and involuntary memories, not unlike Marcel Proust’s madeleines. See madeleine. More recently, the Italian artist Roberto Bernardi paints stunningly faithful candy still lifes, such as Caramelle di Cristallo (2010), which suggest that the commonplace sweets we savor primarily through one sense—taste—are worthy of another, our studied gaze. The British artist Sarah Graham paints extra-vivid, hyper-real desserts and candies, set against brightly colored backgrounds, that read less as actual sweets than as nostalgic memories of sweets.
The American painter Emily Eveleth shares Wayne Thiebaud’s abiding interest in monumentalizing a beloved, ordinary American sweet—for her, the jelly doughnut. But unlike Thiebaud’s more visually cheerful work, Eveleth’s large, luminous canvases, like Pact of 1996, shimmer with tension. In Eveleth’s hands, a common glazed doughnut is lusciously painted and pregnant with sweet, cherry-red filling, but is simultaneously an oozing, possibly sinister corporeal mass. This duality triggers contradictory feelings of anticipation and comfort, disgust and anxiety, all of which are common to contemporary discourse around sweets. The California photographer Jo Ann Callis also explored a menacing aspect to sweets in her 1993 series Forbidden Pleasures. Her still life subjects—éclairs and strawberry tarts, for example—are staged on shiny, sensuous textiles to emphasize desire, temptation, and the guilt associated with the consumption of sweets. Here, the Christian concern about confectionery abundance seen in Northern seventeenth-century painting has morphed into a self-centered guilt about the personal consequences of succumbing to the seduction of now ubiquitous sweets. More recently, the Canadian photographer Laura Letinsky, in her 2004 Hardly More Than Ever series, makes quiet still lifes of staged leftovers and messy, postrevelry tables to challenge images of domestic perfection published in popular magazines. Like Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s still life, Letinsky’s partially eaten desserts and soiled dishes suggest a narrative of conviviality and consumption, but Letinsky introduces notes of alienation and melancholy.
Social, Economic, and Political Critiques
Thanks to advertising, the sugar and chocolate proffered today, and so strongly associated with pleasure and even luxury, have been detached from their past and present systems of production. See advertising, american. The work of Cuban-born María Magdalena Campos-Pons brings critical attention to this gap by highlighting the role of slavery in the Cuban sugar industry. Her 2010 installation Sugar/Bittersweet takes the form of a sugarcane field with rows of erect African spears balanced on African and Chinese stools and encircled by disks of raw sugar like those exported on the triangular trade. Alluding to the enslaved African and indentured Chinese laborers upon whose backs the Cuban sugar industry was built, Campos-Pons opens up a backstory to Antonio de Pereda’s lavish display of Spanish wealth. More recently, the American artist Kara Walker pointed to the historical entwinement of race, power, and exploitation in sugar production with her 2014 site-specific installation in a former Domino Sugar warehouse in Brooklyn. See race. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby centers on a 90-foot-long African American female sphinx coated in white sugar. Inspired by the “subtlety,” a small, clever, edible sculpture often made of sugar paste that appeared on wealthy medieval banquet tables, Walker created a commanding sphinx with the knotted kerchief of a mammy, exaggerated breasts, and fully exposed genitalia. See sugar sculpture. Both a tribute to sugar workers of African origin and a wider indictment of the historical production systems in which they worked, Walker’s work impels viewers to recognize that enslaved and disempowered female sugar workers also endured both sexual stereotyping and exploitation.
The Brazilian artist Vik Muniz focused on the offspring of contemporary sugar plantation workers on the island of Saint Kitts in his 1990s series The Sugar Children. See plantations, sugar. He saw that years of backbreaking work left the parents embittered and broken, and understood that their sweet and carefree children faced the same dire future. Muniz took Polaroid photographs of the children; back in his New York studio, he meticulously copied these photographic portraits by sprinkling granulated white sugar on black paper. He then photographed the sugar “drawing” before destroying it, echoing the impermanence of the children’s sweet nature. Muniz’s use of sugar in his artistic production references the legacy of colonialism, slavery, and present-day exploitation. See politics of sugar.
Chocolate production has received similar scrutiny from artists. The American conceptual artist April Banks spent three months in West Africa, the historical locus of the Atlantic slave trade and a region that today supplies the majority of the world’s cacao. Her study of cacao cultivation in West Africa, and the global economy in chocolate, informed her 2006 installation Free Chocolate. Combining photography, video, and text, Banks’s work reveals how much our pleasure in chocolate is “guilty,” predicated on the oppression of cacao farmers and the inequitable profit margins of the chocolate industry. The Kenyan-born photographer James Mollison also brings attention to invisible workers in the chain of chocolate production. With his large-scale color portraits of cacao farmers in the Ivory Coast, viewers engage with the direct gazes of the hardworking, disenfranchised people who pick the cacao beans that beget their luxurious sweet. The German conceptual artist Hans Haacke, known for mapping social systems of patronage and enrichment, deconstructed the empire of the wealthy German chocolate manufacturer and art collector Peter Ludwig. Haacke’s 1982 exhibition and artist book Der Pralinenmeister (The Chocolate Master) exposed underpaid immigrant labor, female workers living in locked compounds, government tax breaks, and back-room business and art deals. Haacke’s work calls attention to the complicity of politicians, taxpayers, and chocolate consumers that enabled Ludwig to profit excessively and at a huge human cost.
Consumerism and scripted consumption have been rich areas of inquiry for artists. In 1959 Andy Warhol published Wild Raspberries, an artist’s book that charmingly satirized the French cookbooks so popular in the 1950s. Readers are treated to haute cuisine dishes, including elaborate desserts, that are illustrated by Warhol and accompanied by fancy instructions and humorous shortcuts, like calling the Royal Pastry Shop to request delivery of half-inch chocolate balls. The British photographer Martin Parr vividly chronicled everyday working- and middle-class British cuisine in his 1995 series British Food. Among sandwiches, sausages, and fried foods, he showcases sweets such as cakes and cupcakes crowned with artificially colored frosting, waxy sprinkles, and British flags. These brilliantly colored, flash-saturated images indict blind consumption and excess.
More recently, the American painter Julia Jacquette combines sweets with text to bring attention to the way advertisers and magazine editors manufacture consumer desire by provoking a primal longing for human connection. Will Cotton, another American painter, explores this well of human desire that fuels our pleasure-seeking consumer society. His saccharine-sweet confectionery landscapes, many featuring cotton-candy clouds and nude women awaiting the viewer’s pleasured gaze, are a momentarily seductive fantasy world, but this vision of utopia is a place where desire is sated to gluttonous, nauseating extremes. Perhaps a modern-day vanitas, Cotton’s paintings caution the viewer about fulfilled wishes.
Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #175 (1987) is a particularly graphic image of out-of-control consumption. A staged close-up photograph of a chaotic, sandy scene with suntan lotion and sunglasses (showing Sherman’s posed reflection), partially consumed cupcakes and Pop-Tarts, and strewn vomit, Sherman pulls back the curtain on binging and its repulsive consequences. Sweets amplify the grotesque aspect of her scene since they normally engage the senses and stimulate desire, not disgust. See psychoanalysis. With this work Sherman was also critiquing trend-oriented 1980s art collectors: “…let’s see if they put this above their couch,” she explained to Kenneth Baker in a 2012 interview published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Focusing on the private world of disordered eating, the American realist painter Lee Price, in works like Jelly Doughnuts, creates aerial-view images of women binging on doughnuts, cakes, ice cream, and junk food. These intimate paintings call attention to cultural attitudes toward women and their cravings, especially for the guilty pleasure of sweets. See gender.
Use of Sweets as a Medium
Chocolate, a widely loved sweet with rich sensory engagement, is a potent medium for artists. Though not the first, the Swiss German artist Dieter Roth was a pioneer in exploring chocolate as a medium starting in the 1960s. Roth was intrigued with the organic properties of chocolate and its inevitable dissolution. In works like Chocolate Lion (Self-Portrait as a Lion) (1971) and, later, Schokoladeturm (Chocolate Tower) (1994/2013), Roth’s vertical assemblage of neatly arranged trays of self-portraits, sphinxes, and lion heads, all cast in chocolate, the artist foregrounded physical decay as an essential, natural element of life—a modern take on the vanitas. In an era when museums were mandated to preserve everything that entered the collection, Roth’s chocolate-based works were also subversive—they naturally attracted bugs and mold—and challenged museum-based notions of permanence. A decade later, the German artist Sonja Alhäuser invited museum viewers to become active participants in the process of destruction. For Exhibition Basics (2001), she fabricated sculptures and pedestals out of dark and white chocolate and marzipan, and instructed visitors to eat them, eventually erasing the work completely. Alhäuser called into question conventions of museum visitor behavior—do not touch, much less destroy, the art—and used sweets to conflate art with everyday acts of pleasurable food consumption. Alhäuser’s work formed an antipodal point to Ed Ruscha’s 1971 Chocolate Room, where visitors entered an enclosed space covered with sheets of paper coated with silky, fragrant chocolate. Viewers were enveloped by the rich, aromatic chocolate but could not consummate their desire to consume it.
In the 1980s the American performance artist Karen Finley famously smeared herself in chocolate in a visceral act that outraged critics of the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded her work. By slathering her nude body in melted chocolate, she decried women being treated like excrement and consumable commodities. A few years later, in 1992, the Bahamas-born performance artist Janine Antoni debuted Gnaw, based on two 600-pound minimalist cubes—one chocolate, the other lard. Over a period of six weeks Antoni gnawed at the cubes and spit out bites that she ultimately fashioned into colorful lipsticks and molded into appealing chocolate candies. Antoni chose chocolate for the way it stirs desire; its partner, lard, represented the consequences of succumbing. She drew attention to the contiguity of desire and disgust; one can be overcome with desire for chocolate but also disgusted by the lard, which, in turn, is a common ingredient in lipstick, which, she said, women use to make themselves more desirable.
Sugar has also been employed by artists as a medium, though not as frequently as the more alluring chocolate. Dieter Roth built Zuckerturm (Sugar Tower), a companion to his chocolate tower that was populated with colorful sugar casts. In 2000 the American artist Shimon Attie created the installation White Nights, Sugar Dreams, which included video projections that surrounded the viewer with a haunting, mountainous landscape of white sugar. A diabetic, Attie chose sugar for its dual nature—both “nutrition and poison.” The surreal landscape that he created and filmed is a metaphor for the diabetic’s experience of low blood sugar and the careful calibration of insulin in response to the body’s sugar levels. See sugar and health.
Some artists, such as the Taiwanese YaYa Chou, have, like Chardin, created art in response to the simple, formal beauty of sweets. Her 2005 Chandelier, for example, is made up of hundreds of colorful Gummi Bears strung together to imitate a sparkling Venetian glass chandelier, transforming a beloved common candy into an object of splendor. Decades earlier the American artist Sandy Skoglund identified patterns found in certain commercial cookies and playfully extended them by placing the cookies in similarly patterned contexts and photographing them.
The Cuban American artist Felix Gonzales-Torres created “candy spills,” large singular piles of wrapped hard candy carefully placed on the floor of a gallery. One of these spills, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) of 1991, was a poignant installation that was at once political and deeply personal. Ross was created from 175 pounds of colorfully wrapped candy that referenced the healthy weight of Gonzales-Torres’s former partner Ross, who had died of AIDS-related illness. Viewers were invited to take away candies, gradually depleting the mound until it was replenished by the museum, thereby sustaining the cycle of life and death. Consuming the candies, which represented the body of Ross, was both an act of communion and an act of complicity that made viewers agents in the symbolic demise of Ross. In this way Gonzales-Torres alluded to the destruction of the gay community, one by one, during the AIDS epidemic, while many people and governments stood by idly.
For the past four centuries artists have borne witness to the remarkable rise of sweets. They have traced the arc of their expanding presence in society with attention to their form and allure, as well as to their underbelly. Just as our relationship with sweets is ongoing and evolving, artists will continue to be drawn to them and offer visually engaging, critical insights about our passion for sugary things, our history, and ourselves.
artificial sweeteners are industrially produced substitutes for sugar, intended for those who want or need to curtail their intake of sucrose. One could argue that the taste of sweet “discovered” artificial sweeteners. Saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, was identified in the 1870s when a scientist at Johns Hopkins University licked his finger and found it shockingly sweet. Sodium cyclamate, the second sweetener to be discovered, emerged as marketable in the 1930s when a graduate student at the University of Illinois placed his lit cigarette on a lab bench (where a bit of the substance had landed), only to find the next puff unexpectedly sweet. Aspartame, better known as NutraSweet, came to market only after a pharmaceutical chemist licked his finger mid-experiment and tasted sweetness. And sucralose, or Splenda, first appeared in the 1970s when a research chemist, while working with sucrose (table sugar), told a colleague to “test” one of the resulting compounds. Hearing “taste” rather than “test,” the scientist did so and found it intensely sweet.
Such stories of discovery suggest that lab safety left much to be desired well into the twentieth century. They also reveal that these products were sweet accidents, tastes inadvertently discovered by scientists who were researching something else. That artificial sweeteners have become such key ingredients in our lives tells us much about the modern American desire for sweets without caloric consequence.
How Sweet Are Sweeteners?
All artificial sweeteners on the market today are much sweeter per part than is sucrose. Aspartame is roughly 200 times sweeter, saccharin about 300 times sweeter, and sucralose—the sweetest of all—nearly 600 times sweeter. Sodium cyclamate was the least sweet, at 30 to 50 times the intensity of sugar, and many of its advocates believe that with its less sweet taste, stability when heated, and nonbitter aftertaste, it remains a superior option for sweetening. However, it was removed from the U.S. market in 1969 by the Food and Drug Administration after fears surfaced that it was carcinogenic. Of the artificial sweeteners remaining, only sucralose (branded as Splenda) can be heated, making it the choice for bakers who avoid sugar (although complaints about dryness in the results abound). The key distinction between sucrose and artificial sweeteners, in addition to the intensity of sweetness, is the fact that while sucrose provides food energy and is always absorbed by the body, artificial sweeteners provide no food energy (calories) and can pass through the body without being absorbed.
Changing Perceptions of Artificial Sweeteners
Ideas about artificial sweeteners and health have changed dramatically over the last century. Much of this change can be attributed to how the United States has thought about sugar. In the early twentieth century, when mothers were advised to feed their children sugar because of its high calorie (energy) content and low cost, artificial sweeteners were soundly rejected. “It ought to be a penal offense,” declared one New York Times reader when he discovered that manufacturers had been secretly replacing the more expensive “cane syrups” with cheaper saccharin in carbonated beverages. Only Teddy Roosevelt’s personal use of saccharin kept it on the market during the Progressive Era, and even then it was deemed a medicine suitable only for diabetics or those on calorie-restricted diets.
The 1950s saw the rehabilitation of artificial sweeteners’ reputation. Not coincidentally, this movement coincided with national concerns about obesity and sugar. Advertised in newspapers across the country, Tillie Lewis’s “Diet With Sweets” was one of the first campaigns to link artificial sweeteners explicitly with weight loss, a tactic that contributed greatly to its success. The 21-day plan provided menus heavy in the company’s Tasti-Diet products and claimed that, without any change in lifestyle, weight loss could be achieved merely by replacing sugar with artificial sweetener. In the early 1970s Jean Nidetch promoted a similar message when introducing her line of artificially sweetened foods and sodas, core components of Weight Watchers’ efforts to draw new participants into its weight-loss community. Advertisements promoted chocolate sodas or desserts, all sweetened with saccharin, as appropriate indulgences for times when eaters simply could not resist cravings for sweets.
At the same time that food manufacturers and diet companies promoted saccharin, antisugar sentiments were on the rise in American popular culture. John Yudkin’s Sweet and Dangerous (1972), along with similarly themed articles in the popular press, invited Americans to see their excess sugar consumption as the cause of ailments from ulcers and heart disease to diabetes, as well as tooth decay, hyperactivity, and obesity. See dental caries and sugar and health. Doubts about sugar, then, helped fuel experimentation with saccharin. In 1977, when the Food and Drug Administration sought to ban saccharin after correlations between high use and cancer risk were found in rats, the majority of consumers protested.
NutraSweet Nation and the Mainstreaming of Artificial Sweeteners
By 1980 artificially sweetened sodas and desserts could be found throughout supermarket aisles. See soda. These products, however, remained choices for dieters or people watching their weight. The situation changed with the introduction of aspartame, under the brand name NutraSweet. Using a technique known as supplier-initiated ingredient branding, Searle Pharmaceutical sent 5 million American households a small package of brightly colored gumballs attached to a flyer. While consumers tasted the newly approved sweetener NutraSweet, they read pages of testimonials from customers who found it “the best thing since the invention of food.” This combination of sending a sample associated with fun and pleasure rather than with diets and deprivation, and instructing consumers to go look for (and demand) this new ingredient, revolutionized the place of artificial sweeteners in the U.S. marketplace. No longer a substitute, aspartame became the most modern, healthful option for indulging in sweets. And, according to advertising material, it was not artificial. “If you’ve had bananas and milk, you’ve eaten what’s in NutraSweet,” explained one early advertisement. A methyl ester of aspartic acid and phenylalanine, aspartame did have things in common with bananas and milk. But it was not derived from milk or bananas, nor was it produced in a way that would have been considered “natural” to most consumers. By successfully presenting NutraSweet as both modern and natural, and by turning consumers into advocates, NutraSweet’s promoters converted the nation to artificial sweetener consumers. Only five years after its introduction, the red-and-white swirl denoting a product’s use of 100 percent NutraSweet had become ubiquitous, and product sales reached over $700 million worldwide. In the 1980s alone, NutraSweet replaced roughly a billion pounds of sugar in American diets. By 1990 three-quarters of the U.S. population had tried NutraSweet. Many of these new consumers were children. With NutraSweet’s superior taste to saccharin and new fears of childhood obesity on the rise, an artificial sweetener was for the first time perceived as the most healthful sweetening option for the family.
Splenda and Doubts about Artificial Sweeteners’ Healthfulness
Introduced in 1999, Splenda, the brand name for sucralose, is the latest artificial sweetener on the market, and it is now the most frequently consumed. Splenda’s ability to withstand heat enabled it to serve as a replacement for sugar not only in prepared foods and beverages but also in home baking. Its sugarlike taste and flexibility, combined with an early campaign message that it was “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar,” encouraged consumers to make the switch from NutraSweet. One study in the mid-2000s found that while Splenda sales rose 90 percent in a single year, sales for saccharin and NutraSweet dropped 12 percent and 90 percent, respectively. Consumers may also have been motivated by a low-level yet persistent unease about NutraSweet’s health effects. For the small percentage of consumers who suffer from phenalynine syndrome, aspartame consumption can be life threatening. Moreover, in websites and books, and through word of mouth, formerNutraSweet users had since the 1990s complained that their headaches, seizures, and memory loss came as a result of consuming large quantities of aspartame. Splenda likely benefited from these rumblings, but unease about all artificial sweeteners remains. Recent marketing studies find over half of Americans who use artificial sweeteners are concerned about these products’ safety. Add to this recent studies suggesting that artificial sweetener use, over time, may lead more often to weight gain then weight loss, and space for a new alternative appears.
The Future of “Artificial” Sweetness
Today, an increasing number of Americans desire local, whole, and organic foods. Artificial sweeteners are, by definition, none of these things. Assuming this trend continues, a strong market will exist for alternatives to artificial sweetener that can provide sweet taste with reduced caloric intake. One of these will certainly be Stevia, an increasingly popular natural sweetener formed by crushing the leaves of the stevia plant. See stevia. And new research avenues into taste may enable us to become our own artificial sweeteners. In one study, researchers are exploring whether our own taste receptors can be altered so as to make our experience of sweetness more intense. Such a twist, while currently more science fiction than fact, would enable our bodies to draw more sweet pleasure from naturally occurring sugar, and to consume less.
See also sugar.
Athenaeus, formally Athenaeus of Naucratis, a Greek city in Egypt, produced his massive Deipnosophists (Learned Banqueters) in 15 books sometime around 200 c.e. Nominally an account of the food and wine consumed and the topics discussed at a series of elaborate dinner parties in Rome, this work is, in fact, an antiquarian history of luxury, and it is among the most important sources for ancient banqueting and culinary practices, as well as for otherwise lost Greek literary material of every sort. The overall structure of the Deipnosophists imitates that of an individual dinner (deipnon) and the drinking party (symposion) that followed it. Baked bread (artos) and unbaked barley cakes (maza), which were consumed as part of the main meal, are accordingly discussed early on, whereas cakes and specialty sweets are treated toward the end of the work.
Culinary history was already a topic of academic discussion by the mid-third century b.c.e., and Athenaeus reports that at least four now lost treatises on cake making (by Aegimus, Hegesippus, Metrobius, and Phaestus) were included in Callimachus’s catalog of the holdings of the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. Athenaeus himself appears to have had at least secondhand access to other similar works, including Chrysippus of Tyana’s Breadmaking, Heracleides of Syracuse’s Art of Cooking, and Iatrocles’s On Cakes, from all of which he preserves scattered, brief quotations. Athenaeus additionally draws on various lexicographers, local historians, and the like, who cited rare terms (including names of cakes) and preserved literary passages—many from otherwise vanished lyric poems and comedies—in which they occurred.
Some of the cakes described in Book 14 or in passing in Book 3 are ritual offerings, often with their own local names and shapes, such as the mulloi formed out of sesame seeds and honey to resemble female genitalia that were carried in processions in honor of Demeter and Kore in Sicily. Most of the others are tragêmata (snacks), which were served on the so-called second tables as something approaching a dessert course after the main meal had ended and the drinking had begun, along with boiled eggs, almonds, hare meat, and roasted birds. Some of these cakes are fried in olive oil, such as the Syracusan staititas (“Moist spelt-flour dough is poured out into a frying pan, and honey, sesame-seeds, and cheese are added on top of it,” according to Iatrocles), but others appear simply to be kneaded together and served cold. The most common extra ingredients in the descriptions offered by Athenaeus are honey (also poured over fried items), cheese, sesame seeds, milk, grape must, and wine. See grape must. In the early and most emphatically Greek cakes, neither herbs and seasonings (such as anise, cardamom, and garlic) nor fruit (including raisins) plays a role. Some of the handful of Roman-era recipes offered by Chrysippus of Tyana are more elaborate, such as that for a Cretan gastris (glutton cake):
Thasian nuts, Pontic nuts, and almonds, along with some poppy seed; toast them, keeping a close eye on them as you do, and mash them fine in a clean mortar; mix the fruit in and work it smooth along with some reduced honey; add a considerable amount of pepper; and work it smooth. It turns out black because of the poppy seed. Flatten it out into a square. Next, grate white sesame seed; work it into a paste with reduced honey; press it into two sheets, putting one on the bottom, and the other on top of it, so that the black mixture can go in the middle; and assemble it nicely.
See also ancient world; gastris; priapus; and symbolic meanings.
Aunt Jemima is the brand name and fictional spokeswoman for a line of processed food products, most notably ready-mix pancake flour. She was depicted as a loyal slave with a magical touch in the kitchen; her creation was actually inspired by a stage tune, “Old Aunt Jemima,” based on an American slave song. Upon hearing a performance of that tune in a St. Joseph, Missouri, minstrel hall in 1889, Christopher Rutt, in collaboration with Charles Underwood, adopted the title character of the song as the name of their new pancake batter. See pancakes.
Aunt Jemima pancake flour, one of the earliest American products to be marketed through advertisements featuring its namesake, played on popular but racially problematic nostalgia for the antebellum South. © busy beaver button museum
The image of Aunt Jemima, a large, dark-skinned woman wearing a bandanna, was later popularized in a live performance by a former slave who played Aunt Jemima in a display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Nancy Green was the first of a series of African American women who depicted Aunt Jemima in print, radio, and television advertisements through the 1960s. The fictional slave’s life and times were embellished in a series of advertisements created by adman James Webb Young and illustrator N. C. Wyeth that ran in American women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal during the 1920s and 1930s. They depicted Aunt Jemima solving domestic problems on the antebellum plantation by whipping up a batch of the best pancakes anybody had ever eaten and then heading to the North after a Chicago-based milling company “bought” her imaginary pancake recipe and mass-produced it. The tagline for these ads was “I’se in town, honey,” a statement that was backed by a succession of actresses who fanned across the United States to give demonstrations on pancake preparation and dispense folksy if inarticulate wisdom. A caramel-colored syrup bearing Aunt Jemima’s name was first marketed in the 1960s. See corn syrup.
By the 1960s the trademark’s owner, Quaker Oats Co., had come under increasing pressure to de-emphasize Aunt Jemima’s slave background, and she subsequently played a reduced role in advertising campaigns. In 1989 her owners made extensive changes to her image, removing her bandanna and giving her pearls and gray hair, declaring that she was not a slave but a “working grandmother.” This is the image marketed today.
Australia and New Zealand, two countries in the southern hemisphere known collectively as the Antipodes, were colonized separately by the British—a heritage that produced a predilection for confectionery in both places. Sociologist Allison James has asserted that “sweets … are an entirely British phenomenon. There is no equivalent abroad and the British sweet industry, in its production of a very extensive range of confectionery, seems to be unique” (1986, p. 296). James was, however, unaware that Australia and New Zealand boast equally rich, although different, cultural and industrial confectionery histories. Children in both places have a voracious appetite for what they call “lollies,” rather than sweets or candy. For them, confectionery is a topsy-turvy wonderland of gustatory adventure that offers also a means of exercising consumer authority and subverting adult norms. Little wonder that when they reminisce about childhood “Down Under,” adults recall buying and consuming sweets in terms of power and enchantment.
The Magic of Lollies
When confectionery historian Laura Mason observed in Sugar-Plums and Sherbet that “sugar is fantasy land” (1998, p. 19), she could have had in mind Antipodean lolly counters, where a seemingly infinite range of shapes enables parents to turn children’s birthday cakes into oceans, jungles, moonscapes, and almost anything else. Perhaps a marker of difference for Australian confectionery is the prevalence of animals; if it flies, crawls, slithers, or runs, it may be found in miniature form at the lolly counter. The candy manufacturer A. W. Allen’s starch jellies, especially, have come in every shape imaginable: rats, cats, snakes, sharks, frogs, witchetty grubs, and so on. To this dazzling array add Allen’s Freckles and Steam Rollers; Hoadley’s Violet Crumbles and PollyWaffles; Mastercraft’s Golden Roughs, Redskins, and Bobbies; Plaistowe’s Choo Choo Bars; Riviera’s Fags; Scanlen’s Blackjack; Griffiths’s Kool Mints; and Lagoon’s Sherbet Bombs. A similar spectacle awaits children at New Zealand lolly counters, which offer Pineapple Lumps, Cola Rollers, Whittaker’s Peanut Slab, Chocolate Fish, Jet Planes for re-enacting scenes from Top Gun, and Fruit Puffs for making the ubiquitous Lolly Cake.
Life’s a Ball with Jaffas
When a lolly defines an era and becomes a national icon, it has as much to do with cultural ritual as gustatory pleasure. From the myriad backyard confectioners operating in Australia in the early twentieth century, Stedman’s became one of the industry giants during the 1920s and 1930s, alongside Allen’s, MacRobertson’s, Hoadley’s, Small’s, Plaistowe, Mastercraft, Dollar Sweets, and Darrell Lea. James Stedman (1840–1913) was the son of a convict. Apprenticed in 1854, this currency lad (a term denoting boys of the first generation to be born in the colony) founded Sweetacres, the makers of Minties (wrappers with Moments Like These cartoons), Fantales (wrappers with film-star biographies), Cobbers, Marella Jubes, Throaties, and the lollies Australians recall most often, Jaffas.
Developed in Sydney in 1931, Jaffas are chocolate balls panned with bright red, orange-flavored sugar. See panning. Hard and heavy, like marbles, they make ideal missiles. In postwar suburban movie theaters, organists were often pelted with Jaffas at the beginning of children’s matinees. Another barrage was unleashed if the film started late or if the reel broke. Best of all, a Jaffa rolling down the bare, sloped wooden floor of a darkened cinema during a tense moment provoked mirth and mayhem. The carnivalesque ritual of Jaffa-rolling epitomizes Australia’s anti-authoritarian identity and exposes larrikinism, for which Australians are renowned, as the province of girls and boys alike. New Zealanders have taken the sport of Jaffa-rolling to another level. Since 2002 an annual charity event involves millions of Jaffas racing down Baldwin Street in Dunedin, the steepest street in the world.
Making a “Chocolate King”
Equally legendary is the tale of pauper Macpherson Robertson (1860–1945), who converted an old nail can into a furnace, procured a secondhand pannikin for boiling sugar and began making lollies in the family bathroom. Outfitted for 9 pence as a teenager, he would boast an annual turnover of 2 million pounds and a staff of 2,500 by 1925. His company MacRobertson’s Chocolates became self-contained, encompassing a 1,000-acre cacao plantation in New Guinea along with subsidiary industries—maize, milk, timber, cask-making, and engineering—spread over a 35-acre Melbourne property dubbed “the Great White City.” By 1935 “the young man with the nail can” had become Australia’s “Chocolate King,” the highest taxpayer in the country. MacRobertson’s was renowned for exquisite packaging and for products like Cherry Ripe, Old Gold Chocolate, Snack, Freddo Frog, Columbine Caramels, and Clinkers.
An audacious entrepreneur, Robertson contributed 10,000 pounds to Antarctic expeditions in 1929–1930, prompting explorer Sir Douglas Mawson to name part of the territory MacRobertson Land. To celebrate Melbourne’s centenary, Robertson put up 15,000 pounds in prize money for a London-to-Melbourne air race, an enterprise that stimulated the development of aviation. Robertson was knighted in 1932.
Cakes, Desserts, and Biscuits
While “lollies” means confectionery, “sweets” refers to the sweet course served at the end of meals. Traditionally, this meant tinned fruit and ice cream or jelly and custard, and while plum pudding dominates Christmas, trifle and Pavlova are enduring wedding favorites. Pavlova, ANZAC biscuits, fairy bread (birthday fare), and Peach Melba are culinary icons, even if Australians and New Zealanders disagree over who owns what. See pavlova. Named for Queensland Governor Lord Lamington (in office from 1896 to 1901), lamingtons are cubes of day-old sponge cake coated in thin chocolate icing and dipped in coconut. They were created around the time of Federation (1901), when coconut was not widely used in European cooking. Biscuits (“bikkies,” not cookies) such as Iced Vovos, Tim Tams, and Milk Arrowroot, made by Arnott’s Biscuits (established in 1888), are traditional companions of the mid-morning “cuppa.”
Sweets foods are also found among the “bush tucker” eaten for centuries by Australia’s indigenous people, including acacia gum, lerps (honeydew), and honey ants.
See also children’s candy.
Austria-Hungary, the former Hapsburg Empire and the political units that have succeeded it, has one of the richest sweet food traditions anywhere. Much of this has to do with its location at the heart of Europe. Every cuisine emerges from a juncture of geography, history, and culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the countries that once made up the Central European Hapsburg Empire, officially renamed Austria-Hungary in 1867 and finally disbanded in 1918. Today, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and parts of Italy, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine all share the imperial heritage.
The Empire
The old empire extended from the Alps to the south and west to the broad range of the Carpathian Mountains to the east. From the baker’s perspective, the region’s southern reaches are good for grapes, cherries, apricots, and wheat, while the north is better for apples, pears, plums, and sugar beets. Berries of every description grow in the forests, and walnuts, hazelnuts, and chestnuts are ubiquitous. Pigs provide lard, and cows butter and cream.
Following the Counter-Reformation, the region was militantly Catholic. The church’s liturgical calendar specified what one could eat and when it could be eaten. With all the fast days, meat was forbidden almost one day in three. In the strictest interpretation of the rules, eggs and dairy were also forbidden, though in practice this level of abstemiousness was not always observed. On meatless days Central European cooks often turned to flour-based foods: noodles, dumplings, pancakes, and leavened baked goods. Many of these were sweetened initially with fruit, fresh or preserved, and later with beet sugar as it became affordable. Out of this practice came the vast repertoire of Mehlspeisen, a term that now translates as “pastry” but once encompassed any flour-based dish, whether sweet or savory. See mehlspeise.
A pastry chef decorates a cake near other edible sculptural creations. Vienna, Austria, 1951. ngs image collection / the art archive at art resource, n.y.
Both the geographic proximity and the liturgical connection to Italy meant that culinary trends and ingredients flowed continually, mostly from south to north. Bohemian silver paid for the spices and sugar shipped across the Alps by the Venetians. By the baroque era, Italian cookie bakers and ice cream makers were also peddling their wares in the northern capitals. Echoes of the southern influence are found in a scattering of food loan words, most notably in torte/dorte (from the Italian torta) for which Austria is famous. See torte.
Proximity to the Ottoman Empire in the east also left its mark. In Hungarian, the word for apricot is kajszi or kajszibarack, both deriving from the Turkish kayısı. From a culinary standpoint the Ottoman influence is less obvious. Facts are few, even if legends abound. Perhaps the most famous concerns Vienna’s Kipferl, the crescent-shaped sweet roll associated with Vienna’s coffeehouses. During the 1683 Turkish siege of Vienna, the early-rising bakers supposedly heard noises beneath the ground, which turned out to be the attackers tunneling under the walls. Alerted, the city was saved, and the bakers created a crescent-shaped pastry in imitation of the crescent on the Turkish flag. Other stories specify a baker named Peter Wendler as the inventor. In Budapest they tell a similar tale, theirs dating back to the 1686 siege of that city. However, as medieval sources attest, these crescent- or horn-shaped pastries (the terms are occasionally used interchangeably) date back hundreds of years earlier. See crescent.
Another commonly held assumption, that the hand-stretched dough used to make strudel was imported from the Turks, is probably also incorrect. A Venetian source mentions something called a Torta ungaresca (Hungarian pie) made with layers of stretched dough as early as the fourteenth century, long before the Ottomans had made any inroads into Hungary. See strudel. Where the Turks undoubtedly had influence was in introducing the coffee habit, both in the territories they ruled directly but also within the empire itself. Certainly, when the Ottoman ambassador Kara Mahmud Pasha visited Vienna in 1665, his opulent train of 300 attendants, including the coffeemakers Mehmed and Ibrahim, made an impression.
Hapsburg politics and the whims of culinary fashion introduced Central European sweet makers to flavors and techniques from far beyond the empire’s borders. The Hapsburgs may trace their origin to an obscure Alpine cul-de-sac, but by the 1500s their astute marriages had raised them to the top rank of European aristocracy. Nuptial alliances with Spain and France were especially common. As a result, Viennese courtiers early on picked up the Spanish habit of drinking chocolate. Matthias de Voss, the earliest recorded court sugar refiner (“Zuckerbäcker bei Hof,” 1563), was from the Netherlands, another Hapsburg possession at the time.
As the court at Versailles and all things French became à la mode in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, courtiers in Central Europe demanded that their own dessert tables be decorated with recherché biscuits, crèmes, and petits choux. When Maria Theresa (1717–1780) married Francis Steven, the Duke of Lorraine, the imperial household largely converted to French-style dining. For the upwardly mobile, serving tea, or at least a mostly sweet meal called by that name, became a symbol of sophistication. See sweet meals.
After the French Revolution, numerous French chefs found employment in the aristocratic households of the empire. Franz Sacher, for example, trained under a certain maître Chambellier, so it is not surprising that his eponymous torte is based on a decidedly French biscuit. See sachertorte. Even the great French pastry chef Antonin Carême worked in Vienna for a time, in the employ of the English ambassador. See carême, marie-antoine. This Gallic influence is evident in numerous dessert recipes, such as the Biscuiten, Bonbons, and Rouladen in Katharina Prato’s best-selling Die süddeutsche Küche (first published in 1858 and still in print). The legendary Budapest culinary impresario József Dobos was so steeped in French cooking that he published a French-Hungarian cookbook (Magyar-franczia szakácskönyv) in 1881. Central European pastry chefs both adapted and elaborated on French techniques. Beloved cakes such as the Panamatorte came to be frosted with Pariser crème (a whipped ganache), while countless others came to depend on buttercream, a frosting first used to embellish the decidedly French le gâteau moka. See icing.
Within the empire itself, techniques and recipes were freely traded from one region to the next. Czechs have their version of linecké těsto (named after the Austrian town of Linz), a buttery dough enriched with hazelnuts or almonds used to make cookies and tarts; Hungarians make szilvásgombóc, plum-filled dumplings dusted with toasted breadcrumbs, which their neighbors would recognize as švestkové knedlíky (Czech) or slivkové knedle (Slovak). Strudel has been part of the Austrian repertoire so long that it is difficult to recall its Hungarian origins.
City
The sweet specialties for which the countries of the former empire are renowned often resulted from the rivalries among both pastry cooks and their patrons in nineteenth-century Vienna and the provincial capitals. Elite confectionery was a highly urban phenomenon that depended on costly ingredients such as eggs, sugar, fresh butter, cream, and, in later years, chocolate, as well as a highly skilled, rigorously regulated, yet fiercely competitive workforce of pastry cooks and confectioners. In Vienna, the court was long the arbiter of taste, yet unlike Versailles, it never had the staff to be self-sufficient and therefore depended on town confectioners for its catering needs. See court confectioners. As the bourgeois population of the cities swelled during the Biedermeier period (1815–1848), the sweetshops’ customers were increasingly middle-class women who used pastry as a tool for social advancement. Occasionally, this phenomenon was made explicit, as in Der Zuckerbäcker für Frauen mittlerer Stände (1824), in which F. G. Zenker, one-time chef to the princely Schwarzenbergs, explains in great detail how to throw pastry-rich tea parties just like the aristocrats do.
Whereas these sorts of get-togethers were formerly held late in the night by the titled set, the more puritanical bourgeoisie shifted the social event to the middle of the afternoon, eventually leading to the Austrian institution of Jause, which now mostly features coffee and a sugary or savory snack. The social demands of the Jause led to the invention and elaboration of an enormous repertoire of sweet tidbits. By 1900 the trend of taking tea in the English fashion gave further incentive to confectioners and home bakers alike. The 1906 edition of Katharina Prato’s Die Süddeutsche Küche included more than 120 recipes for Theegebäck (as these cookies and petits fours came to be known), as well as some 70 for hors d’oeuvres–type snacks appropriate for the afternoon meal. In the twentieth century many Theegebäck were adapted for Christmas. Perhaps the most ubiquitous of these holiday treats are Vanillekipferl, crescent-shaped almond cookies, and Linzer Augen, jam-filled sandwich cookies made with Linzer dough.
Up until the late nineteenth century the highly bureaucratic nature of the Hapsburg realm forbade cafés to sell confectionery, and confectioners to sell coffee. When this regulation was finally relaxed in the 1890s, the hybrid Café-Konditorei (café-confectioner’s) emerged, giving women a respectable public gathering spot. See café. Some of Vienna’s most famous confectioners belong to this category, including Demel (founded 1786), Heiner (1840), and Gerstner (1847).
Although confectioners in the regional capitals were more alike than different, certain cities became associated with specific desserts: Vienna for its Sachertorte, Bratislava for its rožky (poppy seed–filled crescents, Pressburger Kipferln in German), Budapest for Rigó Jancsi and Dobos torte, and Salzburg for its Nockerl (a sort of soufflé or Auflauf as it is known in Austria). See dobos torte and rigó jancsi. In Fred Raymond’s 1938 operetta Saison in Salzburg (Salzburger Nockerln), the last of these edible urban icons is praised as Süß wie die Liebe und zart wie ein Kuss (“sweet as love and tender as a kiss”).
Country
If the aristocracy and bourgeoisie of the Hapsburg cities sipped tea, coffee, and chocolate, consulted cookbooks that told them how to cook in the latest Italian or French fashion, and could avail themselves of pastry shops selling ice cream, bonbons, and every other fantasy that expensive cane sugar could elicit, the country folk lived in a very different world of sweetness. Up until the industrialization of sugar beet production in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even a generation or two beyond that, sweetness came from two primary sources: honey and fruit. See fruit and honey.
As elsewhere in Europe, apiculture was established as early as the Middle Ages—though honey was still being gathered in the wild well into the 1800s. In an effort to encourage this locally produced sweetener, Empress Maria Theresa even established a school for beekeeping. In 1775, by imperial decree, beekeeping instructors were sent to the provinces and honey was excluded from taxes. Whatever honey was not sold (or given in tithe under feudalism) found its way into Lebkuchen (gingerbread), sweetened the porridges and gruels that formed one of the main staples of the peasantry, or was fermented into mead. See gingerbread and mead. Honey-sweetened gingerbread itself became a sweetener (as well as a binding agent), grated over dumplings, pancakes, and porridge or added to poppy seed and other sweet pastry fillings.
The imperial palace also recognized the importance of fruit to its subjects. Maria Theresa’s son Joseph II (1741–1790) went so far as to award farmers a silver medal when they planted more than 100 fruit trees, and he required that several fruit trees be planted prior to obtaining a wedding license. According to the imperial land register, in 1800 there were close to 8 million fruit trees in Bohemia alone, or almost three trees for each person. Naturally, much of this fruit was eaten fresh, and some was distilled into brandy, but a great deal was also preserved either by drying or cooking it down into fruit butters: lekvár (Slovak, Hungarian), povidle (Czech), Powidl (South German). While today these fruit preserves are almost always made with damson plums, earlier sources speak of apples, pears, cornelian cherries (from a tree in the dogwood family), bilberries (European blueberries), strawberries, rose hips, and others. See fruit preserves. These fruit butters were spread on pancakes or used as fillings for various yeast-based pastries such as koláče (round tarts made with an enriched yeast dough) or buchty. See buchty. In Hungary and Slovakia, cornmeal was formerly made into görhe or görhő, a sort of baked johnnycake, sweetened with prune butter or sometimes just carrots. In fact, carrots were often used like a fruit, utilized to make a syrup or dried and pulverized into a sweet powder. Desiccated apples and pears were given a similar treatment and sprinkled on sweet foods in much the same way the wealthy used confectioner’s sugar. Just about every fruit that could be dried, was. See dried fruit.
Fruit both dry and fresh has long been transformed into dumplings. An early recipe for plum dumplings appears in a sixteenth-century manuscript, and today versions filled with apricots and other fruit are widespread. See dumplings. Fresh and dried fruit has been used to make soups, compotes, and a sort of fruit porridge cooked with milk and thickened with flour. None of these dishes would have been considered dessert. Rather, they would have been a meal unto themselves, possibly accompanied with bread in the case of the more liquid preparations. See soup.
The region’s noodles are also often served sweet. Mohnnudeln, thick noodles made with potato dough, are served with butter, ground poppy seeds, and sprinkled with sugar. The similar Czech škubánky look more like gnocchi. In Bröselnudeln the poppy seeds are replaced with breadcrumbs. Hungarian rakott tészta layers more conventional egg noodles with cottage cheese and is baked like a pudding.
At least three types of pancakes have been commonly eaten as a main course. Perhaps the oldest are yeast-raised lívance, pancakes cooked in a special pan with flat, round indentations. Austria has various forms of Schmarrn, a thick pancake chopped up after cooking. The best known is the upscale Kaiserschmarrn, made by folding beaten egg whites and raisins into the batter prior to cooking and shredding. Palatschinken (or the Slavic or Hungarian equivalent) is the local name for crepes, which are typically smeared with jam or fruit butter. See pancakes.
Holidays
Among the oldest of the festive sweet foods for holidays, weddings, and christenings are the many variations of Lebkuchen (gingerbread). Not only are they traditional for Christmas, they are a familiar sight at the numerous saint’s day fairs. Carnival brings jelly doughnuts (Faschingskrapfen), whether in Transylvania or the Tyrol. See doughnuts. Enriched yeast breads crop up across the festive calendar in multiple forms: as the braided Czech vánočka for Christmas, or the similar Austrian Osterzopf for Easter. To make Reindling, a Carinthian Easter specialty, the baker rolls an enriched yeast dough, strudel-like, around a filling of raisins and walnuts and bakes it in a Bundt cake tin, while Czechs form a similar dough into round loaves and stud it with almonds to make mazanec for the holiday. Weddings have long been celebrated with a Gugelhupf in the German-speaking regions, a role mostly played by koláče north of the Danube. See gugelhupf. George Lang describes a Transylvania wedding confection called a menyasszonykalácsfa (bridal cake tree) or eletfa (life tree), made by dipping a stripped branch in batter before frying it and setting it in a cake base. This “tree” was then decorated with ribbons, small cakes, and edible figures.
Industrialization
As in England and Germany, the nineteenth century brought industrialization and urbanization to the Hapsburg realms. It also brought the sugar beet, which first transformed the diets of city dwellers and eventually the foodways of everyone See sugar beet. Starting in the 1830s, the vast majority of the empire’s sugar beets were produced in Bohemia, which by 1863 was producing 12 percent of the world’s beet sugar, much of it destined for export. Enough was left over, though, to add increasing amounts of sugar to flour-based foods that had once been barely sweet or sweetened only with fruit.
Industrially refined sugar also paved the way for sweet foods produced on an industrial scale. Formerly artisanally made wafers long popular at spas like Karlovy vary (Karlsbad) were commoditized by Karl Bayer in 1867 into a nationally marketed product. In 1898 Joseph Manner’s Vienna company made its name by sandwiching a similar wafer with hazelnut cream. Mozartkugeln were developed in Salzburg by Paul Fürst in 1890; however, since he never patented these pistachio marzipan-filled chocolates, several companies (including Fürst) now produce billions of the foil-wrapped candies each year. In Hungary, Bonbonetti was founded in 1868 and by 1883 was mass-producing chocolates in its steam-powered Pest factory. The company was acquired in 2012 by the Ukranian Roshen Confectionary Corporation. In Bohemia, the Orion brand was registered in 1914 by František Maršner’s two-decades-old “oriental sweets” and chocolate company. The brand survived both World War II and years of communism; it is now owned by Nestlé. Worldwide, the best-known brand to emerge from old Hapsburg realms is PEZ candy, developed originally in Vienna in 1927 by Eduard Haas III. See pez.
After the Empire
The collapse of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918 initially had little impact on the sweet repertoire of the newly independent nations of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Yugoslavia. However, economics and politics soon created fissures in the common culinary heritage. Rapid urbanization, increased availability of processed food, and the gradual erasure of religious dietary observance sidelined the habit of sweet, flour-based meals. The shortages of eggs and butter during the Depression and World War II and then the imposition of communism in Hungary (1947) and Czechoslovakia (1948) lowered the standards of both home and professional bakers. In communist Czechoslovakia all private enterprise was banned (in Hungary the regime was less draconian), including bakeries, pastry shops, cafés, and restaurants. Under the command economy many of the goods sold at these food-service operations were now produced in central factory-like commissaries to state-mandated norms that left little room for quality. Artisanal production ceased for two generations.
Thanks to the revival of individual enterprise following communism’s demise in 1989, the craft of pastry has slowly been returning to standards that had never been abandoned in next-door Austria. Whether in Linz or Bratislava, today’s pastry chefs look for inspiration both to the region’s deep confectionery tradition and to trendy French and American models. The old empire’s prodigious sweet tooth endures.
See also breads, sweet; budapest; carnival; chocolate, post-columbian; croissant; fairs; france; linzer torte; nestlé; small cakes; and vienna.
azuki beans (Vigna angularis, also romanized as adzuki) have been cultivated in Japan since the prehistoric period. High in protein, B1, and iron, they are indispensable to Japanese confectionery and even find their way into Western-style baked goods in Japan. Although the color of red azuki is considered auspicious, the English translation “red beans” is a misnomer because there are also white azuki.
Cooked with glutinous rice, the beans provide color and flavor to the celebratory dish Red Rice (sekihan); they can also be cooked in a rice porridge, or mashed up to make a sweet soup called shiruko, to which dango or rice cakes (mochi) may be added—when whole azuki are used, the soup is called zenzai. Azuki, however, truly shine in confectionery. Mashed azuki sweetened with sugar make an, often translated as “bean jam,” the most frequently used filling for sweets like manjū or mochi; an is also used as a topping in traditional confections such as dango. See dango; manjū; and mochi. In recipes for traditional sweets, the consistency of the beans can take two forms: tsubuan retains some of the original shape of azuki in the bean paste, whereas koshian is a smooth paste with the remaining lumps strained away. The confection called yōkan, which entered the diet of Zen monks in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), was originally a vegetarian substitute for mutton. It is made from steamed an, sugar, flour, kudzu starch, and flavorings. The version of the recipe that developed by the nineteenth century substituted agar agar (kanten) for the flour and kudzu starch to create more gelatinous versions, a texture much prized by the Japanese: softer mizuyōkan and firmer neriyōkan. Because yōkan is troublesome to make at home, it is sold at traditional confectioners in long cakes that can be sliced into servings.