See cocoa.
Cadbury is the trademark representing the large manufacturers who dominated chocolate production in the twentieth century in the United Kingdom and a range of countries formerly part of the British Empire. In 1824 a Birmingham-based Quaker, John Cadbury, opened a shop selling tea, coffee, and “Cocoa Nibs, prepared by himself, an article affording a most nutritious beverage for breakfast,” as he proclaimed in his first advertisement. Cadbury would have remained an obscure retailer had he not seen the potential for expansion afforded by the government slashing the then-crippling import duties on cacao beans, an opportunity he seized in 1831 when he switched to manufacturing and opened his first factory.
Although Cadbury’s timing had been ideal, his range of generic cocoas offered nothing new or different than those provided by Britain’s leading cocoa firm, J. S. Fry & Sons. By the early 1860s, when Cadbury handed over control to his two sons, Richard and George, trade had withered away, losses had mounted, and the end seemed inevitable.
The company was saved by an attribute of George’s that became one of the company’s leading characteristics: a willingness to borrow and exploit a good idea when he saw one. “It was no use studying failure. I wanted to know how men succeeded, and it was their methods I examined and, if I thought them good, applied” (Gardiner, 1923, p. 24), he explained later in his life. The success in question was a much-improved cocoa produced in Holland by Coenraad Johannes van Houten using a hydraulic press, one of which George Cadbury purchased to produce a new brand, Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence. See cocoa and van houten, coenraad johannes.
Cocoa Essence would become Britain’s leading brand of cocoa thanks largely to Cadbury’s most un-Quaker-like competitive streak: George Cadbury lobbied the British parliament to ensure that only his Cocoa Essence brand could be labeled “cocoa.” His rationale was that the competition’s cocoas contained fillers such as flour, sago, or tapioca, whereas the hydraulically pressed Cocoa Essence was “100% Pure, Therefore Best,” an advertising slogan the firm hammered away at for 40 years. While Cadbury’s legal bid failed, the message seeped through to the public’s consciousness.
By the 1900s, the company was being run by the next generation of family members: Edward, William, George Jr., and Barrow Cadbury, all of whom had inherited the borrow-with-pride philosophy. Following the invention of the milk chocolate bar, Cadbury decided which of the versions turned out by a host of Swiss firms was the best, and then copied those milky characteristics to launch its own version, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, in 1905. See candy bar.
Much impressed by a visit to Henry Ford’s production lines in Detroit, the company revolutionized the British chocolate market between the two World Wars by investing heavily in mass-production technology. It then ploughed the cost savings into a series of price reductions that, when applied against Dairy Milk and a range of new brands such as Fruit & Nut and Wholenut, gave Cadbury a dominant position in the British market. Between 1920 and 1938, Cadbury cut its prices by 70 percent, making chocolate an affordable everyday treat for all, a strategy that increased sales fivefold. During this same period, Cadbury absorbed its great rival, J. S. Fry & Sons, makers of Fry’s Turkish Delight and Fry’s Chocolate Cream (the world’s oldest brand of chocolate bar), and drove another competitor, Rowntree, to the brink of extinction.
This stunning success funded Cadbury’s next great initiative. To protect its export markets threatened by rising import tariffs, Cadbury built factories in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and India, the running of which they left largely to local management, who built commanding market positions while Cadbury’s major international competitors remained largely excluded.
Following World War II, Cadbury’s U.K. business went into relative decline as its competitors adopted strategies that avoided head-on competition with Cadbury, creating new market segments in which Cadbury held no inherent advantage. Coupled with an increasingly conservative management style, this shift would result in Cadbury losing its market leadership in Britain by the late 1970s.
In 1969 Cadbury, having become a takeover target, merged with the similarly threatened soft drinks firm Schweppes. The growth strategy for both categories was acquisition to fill glaring geographic gaps in the company’s global presence—the chocolate side had barely expanded beyond its interwar markets, while the soft drinks side was missing out on the vast American market.
The drinks gap was plugged by the acquisitions of Dr Pepper and the U.S. rights to 7Up, but no such blockbuster moves occurred in chocolate. Instead, the company accumulated a large number of local and regional companies, such as France’s Poulain and Poland’s Wedel. Lacking big chocolate takeover targets, the company moved into candy with the acquisitions of Trebor and Bassett’s and subsequently chewing gum with its 2002 purchase of Adams Brands, which temporarily made Cadbury the world’s largest confectionery company.
This moment was to be its high-water mark. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the company came under pressure from activist shareholders calling for the confectionery and beverages businesses to be separated. Cadbury succumbed to the pressure, progressively selling and spinning off its soft drinks businesses. This action left the remaining confectionery business more vulnerable to takeover, a fate that befell Cadbury in 2010, when Kraft Foods gained control of the company.
Kraft subsequently reorganized, forming a new company based on its confectionery and snack brands, Mondelēz International Inc., where Cadbury now resides alongside two of its fiercest competitors from a century ago, Suchard and Tobler.
café means more or less the same thing virtually anywhere in the world: a place to drink coffee or another hot beverage, or perhaps even a cold drink—sometimes alcoholic, sometimes not. Most cafés offer snacks, if not full menus. The original idea, however, was subtly different.
The distant origins of the café lie in the coffeehouse and the coffee craze that gripped Europe in the seventeenth century, a fact reflected in French and Italian, whose individual words for “coffee,” “coffeehouse,” and “café” are identical. The late Henri Enjalbert, an eminent French geographer and oenologist, was perhaps the first to speak of a “drinks revolution” in the seventeenth century, which led not only to the refinement of claret, cognac, and champagne as we now know them but also to the discovery of coffee, tea, and chocolate by Europeans. See chocolate, post-columbian and tea.
In Vienna, anecdotal history dates the city’s passion for coffee to 1683 and the Turkish siege. See vienna. As the story goes, the Ottomans abandoned their sacks of coffee in their retreat, and a Serb called Kolschitzky brewed up the beans and addicted the Viennese to coffee at the sign of the Blue Bottle. In fact, the first recorded coffeehouse had opened a generation earlier: in Oxford, England, in 1652. That same year another was opened by the Armenian Pasqua Rosée in the City of London. Another ethnic Armenian, Johannes Diodato, was a pioneer in Vienna, too, after emigrating from the Ottoman Empire.
At the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, coffee’s popularity increased, and the coffeehouse became a center of social life. It may be that, unlike the taverns of the time, a more sober atmosphere was bred by the absence of alcohol on the premises, although this changed when some coffeehouses began to double up as emporia and “punch-houses.” See punch. In Queen Anne’s time there were as many as 500 coffeehouses; from Ned Ward’s Wealthy Shopkeeper (1706) we know that “every respectable Londoner had his favourite house, where his friends or clients could seek him out at known hours.”
In London, coffeehouses were above all meeting places, as the Wealthy Shopkeeper reveals:
Remember John,
If any ask, to th’ Coffee House I’m gone.
Then at Lloyd’s Coffee House he never fails
To read the letters and attend the sales.
The maritime insurance market Lloyds started out as Lloyd’s Coffee House in Tower Street around 1680, moving to Abchurch Lane in 1682. Coffeehouses also fathered gentlemen’s clubs. The most exclusive and aristocratic club, Whites, was founded in 1693 as White’s Chocolate House. It is the sole survivor of a seventeenth-century coffeehouse. Three centuries ago the political coffeehouses—Cocoa Tree, St James’s (with its inner room for political discussions), Will’s, the clerical Truby’s or Child’s, the scholarly Grecian, and so on—were just as well known. The coffeehouse was not just a place to consume coffee, tea, or chocolate (all heavily sweetened) and talk; it was a place to play card games like piquet and basset.
In the United Kingdom, coffeehouses metamorphosed into clubs or were replaced by pubs. The last native British institution was the Domino Room in the old Café Royal, which closed in 1923. Until recently, Dublin could offer a genuine coffeehouse in the form of Bewleys, where you might run into le tout Dublin, but it has been deserted by its regulars and is now just a tourist trap. There are plenty of continental-style cafés in London, but the contemporary iteration of the native British café, or “caff,” has distorted the original meaning of the place: these informal eating houses serve a variant on breakfast throughout the day. There is seldom wine, and most people drink tea from mugs. The Parisian coffeehouse or café is nearly as old as its London counterpart. Le Procope at 13 rue de l’Ancienne Comédie was founded in 1670 by the 20-year-old Sicilian nobleman Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, who sold coffee imported by two Armenians called Pascal and Maliban. At the time, the preferred term for the Parisian purveyors was limonadier, since they sold both cold and hot sweetened beverages. Sweet snacks were also on offer. Until 1675 Le Procope was in the rue de Tournon, where it was a signal success. The café moved to its present location in 1686 to be opposite the original Comédie-Française and henceforth attracted a crowd of theatergoers. In the eighteenth century Procope was frequented by wits and became the veritable “oral newspaper of Paris.” Later, the Encyclopédistes—Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert—made it a home away from home. Procope was popular with Revolutionaries, too, but by then most had gravitated toward the Palais Royal, the Café de Foy, and the Café Anglais (the latter became the restaurant Beauvilliers). The famous lawyer and gastronome Brillat-Savarin met his friends at the Bonapartist Café Lemblin, while habitués fought pitched battles with royalists in the Café de Valois next door. Procope was closed from 1890 to 1940 and is now chiefly frequented by bus parties. Most Parisian cafés, however, had already departed from the original idea of a coffeehouse and begun to serve an extensive menu. The original idea can still be found, however: cafés such as the Flore or the Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés are still true cafés, even if their coterie is now diluted by tourists. Some lovely cafés have also survived in the French regions, notably the Empire-style Deux Garçons in Aix-en-Provence.
Italy, too, has its famous cafés, such as the Caffè Florian in Venice, dating from 1720, or the Caffè Greco in Rome, founded in 1760, which still looks the part and is a magnet to artists and writers even if they are generally outnumbered by tourists.
The list of notable cafés is endless: Madrid’s Gran Café de Gijón, Oporto’s Majestic, and the now sadly mothballed Café A Brasileira.
The coffee craze was slow to cross the Rhine, but the most famous coffee music of all time was composed to commemorate Zimmermann’s Coffee House in Leipzig 80 years after the first cafés surfaced in London. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his Coffee Cantata to words by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici) about a young girl’s coffee addiction:
Ei wie schmeckt der Coffee süße,
Lieblicher als tausend Küsse,
Milder als Muskatwein.
[Oh how nice this coffee is,
Better than a thousand kisses,
Sweeter than Muscat wine.]
Today, opposite Bach’s Thomaskirche in Leipzig, a café commemorates one of the composer’s few light-hearted works.
In the 1840s, Karl Marx’s friend Ernst Dronke made a study of Berlin cafés: he thought Kranzler, which then served only chocolate, the best. After the war Kranzler moved to the Kurfürstendamm and became quite the dullest café in Berlin, if not in Germany. The Romanische was the café of reference for a later generation, taking over as the city’s bohemian haunt from the Café des Westens with its artists’ table. The café, called “Romanesque” because it was part of the architectural scheme around the Memorial Church to Emperor William, was big enough to divide down the middle with “swimmers” and “nonswimmers” “pools” (rooms)—the former for the artists, the latter for the gawkers. Habitués had their own language: auf Pump (keeping a tab); Nassauerei (staying all day on the strength of one coffee); and Ausweis (banishment). The Romanische was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943. The enormous Café Luitpold in Munich was the place to be seen before it suffered the same fate as the Romanische. Hitler favored the intimate Café Heck, where he would sit surrounded by his thugs. The building is still there, even if it denies previous association with the Führer.
Sometimes the lure of particular cakes has assured the fame of a café, like Gerbeaud in Budapest or Kreutzkamm on the Altmarkt in Dresden, which still makes the best stollen. See stollen. The real guardian of the café concept is Vienna, however, for only in Vienna do the Kaffeehäuser (coffeehouses) remain true to the original idea of an “extended drawing room.” In Britain, the place for locals to gather is the pub; in Germany, the Kneipe; in France, the bistrot. In Vienna, people seek admission to the Stammtisch or regulars’ table at their chosen café or Stammcafé. Admission requires a good relationship with the owner, but also with the waiters, who wield considerable power. If the waiter (Ober) does not know you, you can wait a long time for your Mokka (black coffee) or Melange (half and half), which always comes on a shiny metal salver with a glass of water and sugar cubes. Most drink their coffee sweet. Once the waiter knows you, however, the coffee arrives before you have even ordered it.
You can have a beer or a glass of wine in a Viennese café, too, and most offer some sort of food—particularly cakes—even if serious food is generally found elsewhere. Once you have something to eat, the coffeehouse world is yours: a warm place to sit, free newspapers, somewhere to meet your friends—and all for the price of a coffee.
All Viennese cafés have seen better times, and many have gone into inexorable decline. Too polished an appearance is generally a sign that the coffeehouse is no longer frequented by locals and has become the province of Zuagraste—outsiders—as have the Central, Schwarzenberg, Landtmann, and Mozart, to name just a few. To get the feel of a Viennese coffeehouse today, you must try Hawelka, Bräunerhof, or Prückel. This is a sad fate for the Central in particular: not only is it visually perhaps the most extraordinary café in the world, but it also has a distinguished history as a literary haunt, like the Procope in Paris or the Café Royal in London. Writers, however, vote with their feet: men like Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg (who wrote a list of 10 pretexts for going to the café) deserted the Central for the Herrenhof, where they were joined by Robert Musil, Franz Werfel, and Joseph Roth. The Herrenhof closed in 1960, and what was left of bohemia moved on to the Hawelka.
Emigrants from the coffee-drinking capitals brought the café idea to wherever they settled, whether in New York, Havana, or Rio de Janeiro. One of the loveliest of the New World café’s is perhaps Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires, originally opened by a French settler in 1858. In the United States, New Orleans’s Café des Artistes (founded in 1862) is primarily known for its chicory-laced coffee and beignets (square doughnuts).
Prior to the coffee bar explosion of the 1980s, cafés in the United States tended to cater to specific ethnic groups (Cubans in Havana, Italians in New York) but also to beatniks, hippies, and other bohemians. Greenwich Village spots such as the San Remo Café (as a much a bar as a café) was a gathering spot for Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s.
Since the 1980s the European café has been reinvented by chains such as Starbucks, as well as by local cafés and coffee bars that often fetishize the coffee-making process. In modern American usage, “café” refers to a casual restaurant where sandwiches or more substantial meals can be ordered. The spirit of the original café is found in what are called coffee shops, which have proliferated across the United States. Drinking coffee has again become so chic that there are now training courses for the baristas, who make specialty coffees according to methods ranging from drip to siphon. Like their European predecessors, the best coffee shops serve as gathering places, although today’s patrons are more likely to remain focused on their wireless devices than to engage in conversation with others.
See also lemonade.
cake is a sweet food, most often baked, that usually contains flour, sugar, eggs, and frequently butter or another fat. It comes in various flavors, shapes, and sizes and is often chemically leavened with baking powder or baking soda. Derived from the Old Norse kaka, the word “cake” entered Middle English spelled as it is today, though it was probably first pronounced KAH-keh.
Cakes in the Ancient World
Ancient cakes—made from bread dough or similarly dense mixtures; sweetened with honey; enriched with eggs, fresh cheese, or oil; and flavored with nuts, dried fruits, herbs, and seeds—likely evolved from early breads. They are thought to have been made with rye, barley, and oat flours as well as wheat flour. Sumerian texts from some 4,000 years ago mention these sorts of baked goods, and Cato describes a similar kind of cake in De Agri Cultura (second century b.c.e) that was wrapped in leaves before baking and served at weddings and fertility rites. See ancient world.
Sixteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Cakes
Heavy, bread-like cakes made from dense mixtures and often still leavened with yeast continued to be made well into the eighteenth century in England. In France, lighter cakes were developing simultaneously, beginning in the sixteenth century with brioche, perceived at the time as more of a sweet product than a bread. Yeast-risen cakes such as the Gugelhupf, sweeter and richer than brioche, and the baba, originally similar to a Gugelhupf (now lighter) and soaked with rum syrup, remained popular. See baba au rhum and gugelhupf. During the eighteenth century in France and Italy, meringues, sponge cakes made with whole or separated eggs, and cake batters based on soft butter or with melted butter added to sponge mixtures became widespread. See meringue and sponge cake. By the mid-nineteenth century, both baking soda and baking powder ushered in an era of American creativity in the development of cake recipes, and chemically leavened butter cakes, devil’s food cake, and many others began to appear. See chemical leaveners. Angel food, a cake of American origin made from only whipped egg whites, sugar, and flour, is the symbol of the nineteenth century’s search for lightness and delicacy in cakes. See angel food cake.
This “slice” of cake is actually a 36 × 24-inch layer cake made for the chef’s own birthday party. The cake is covered and decorated with sugar paste, while the “plate” is made of pastillage. photo © ron ben-israel cakes
Cake Terminology
In American baking terminology, a cake is anything, large or small, filled or unfilled, made from a sweet batter, whether dense or light. In most other Western baking traditions, “cake” is not the general term that it is in American English. In the United Kingdom, a cake is what Americans might call a “plain cake” and usually refers to a dense baked good such as Madeira cake, similar to what Americans might call a pound cake, or to a fruit-laden Christmas cake (U.S. fruitcake). See fruitcake and pound cake. In the United Kingdom, a layer cake is referred to as a “sandwich sponge,” “sandwich,” or by the French term gâteau. See layer cake.
In France, le cake is a loaf-shaped pound cake often enriched with dried or candied fruits. Lately, the French have begun to apply the term to any loaf-shaped, flour-based baked goods; one result is le cake salé (salted cake), a dense savory cake. A layer cake can be a gâteau in France as well as in the United Kingdom, though the same term may also refer to desserts made from pastry doughs, such as the almond-filled gâteau des rois (kings cake or Twelfth Night cake) made from puff pastry, the gâteau Basque made from a sweet pastry dough, or the gâteau Saint Honoré made from unsweetened pastry dough or puff pastry and pâte à choux (cream puff pastry). See pastry, choux and pastry, puff. Delicate layer cakes with rich or soft fillings are also referred to as entremets (desserts).
In German-speaking countries, terminology mostly follows classic South German nomenclature. Plain cakes, those embellished with fresh fruit, or those made from yeast-leavened doughs are referred to as Kuchen. See kuchen. Layer cakes and some rich cakes made from pastry doughs are referred to as Torten, as in Punschtorte, layers of sponge cake moistened with rum punch and filled with apricot jam; Sachertorte, a rich chocolate cake; and Linzertorte, a dense, jam-filled cake that lies halfway between a cake and a pastry. See linzer torte; sachertorte; and torte. A Torte is sometimes mistakenly thought to be a cake or cake layer made without flour, probably because the Viennese baking tradition often uses ground nuts either alone or combined with flour or dry breadcrumbs for Tortenboden or cake layers.
Italian bakers solve the problem by referring to most cakes, as well as to pies and tarts, as torte. An Italian torta may be either a layer cake, as in torta bignè (a cream-filled layer cake covered with tiny unfilled cream puffs or bignè), or an unfilled, denser cake such as an almond pound cake (torta di mandorle). It can refer to a savory pie (torta rustica) or to a sweet one (torta di mele).
Cake Baking Equipment
Straight-sided cake pans meant for baking round cakes and cake layers came into common use during the nineteenth century. See pans. American and British professional and home bakers still use them today; American pans are usually 1½ to 2 inches deep, whereas British ones are deeper owing to the British preference for taller plain cakes. French closed cake pans, about 2 inches deep, have sloped sides and are referred to as moules à manqué (molds for ruined [cake]). The term is said to have originated with a baker who, on removing his butter-enriched sponge cake from the oven, found that the cake had not risen as much as he had hoped and cried, “Le gâteau est manqué!” (“The cake is ruined!”) Recipes for gâteau manqué appear in many French baking collections to this day.
The use of a bottomless hoop for baking cake layers destined to be sliced horizontally and made into layer cakes, as well as for some denser mixtures, persists throughout Europe. Widespread use of the cake hoop, renamed cercle à entremets (dessert circle or ring), occurred during the emergence in the 1960s of la pâtisserie moderne (modern pastry making) spearheaded by the Normandy-born Parisian dessert mogul Gaston Lenôtre. Stainless-steel rings became available in a variety of diameters and depths and were used for molding layer cakes with liquid mousse fillings, as well as for constructing layer cakes finished with denser mixtures such as buttercream or ganache. Use of the rings enabled less skilled finishers to produce cakes that emerged perfectly symmetrical from the oven.
See also breads, sweet; cupcakes; dessert; entremets; france; germany; italy; small cakes; twelfth night cake; wedding; and wedding cake.
cake and confectionery stands for the presentation of these items on the sideboard, dining table, or in a retail environment usually take the form of a circular dish elevated above the surface of the table or display case by a flaring central foot. The form is essentially that of a tazza, a versatile stem vessel with a shallow bowl that functioned from ancient times as a drinking cup, food dish, and display piece. Examples in delicate glass and precious metal, holding biscuits and sweets, may be found in Dutch still-life paintings and Italian frescoes. Another form of confectionery stand is the pyramidal étagère, composed of circular glass, metal, or porcelain dishes of diminishing diameter fixed by a central rod emanating in a handle. Commonly employed for English high tea, étagères were, and still are, made by every porcelain manufacturer in Europe, even if the market for them is not obvious.
Most popular cookbooks illustrate cakes on stands, though the authors do not comment on how to display or serve a cake. Lifestyle gurus, on the other hand, love cake stands. “Our prop house shelves are overflowing with cake stands of every imaginable size, design, color, and material,” writes Kevin Sharkey of Martha Stewart Living. “We love cake stands for not just cakes but to display flowers, votive candles, even Easter eggs. Nothing makes a delicious pie or cake better than a great cake stand.” The cake stand collection of Food Network television star Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, is apparently legendary and has pride of place on the open shelving in her kitchen.
Like cake knives, the modern-day cake stand is probably a Victorian invention. “A party without cake is just a meeting,” once asserted Julia Child. The cake plate or confectionery stand is a superb accessory for celebrating and protecting many forms of sweetness.
See also epergnes and serving pieces.
cake decorating, the art of making cakes attractive with sugar icing, gilding, and other materials, came into its own in the late 1800s, due largely to new technology and societal changes. Decorative confections originated from Renaissance trionfi di tavola, sugar sculptures made to adorn feasts of the wealthy. These sculptures survived alongside ornate cakes on affluent dinner tables into the early 1800s and are used for commercial purposes to this day. See sugar sculpture. However, over the course of the nineteenth century, the growth of a large middle class in Europe and America, along with more reliable ovens and affordable ingredients, led to standardized cake recipes. Some special cakes, such as those made in England for weddings and Twelfth Night, were decorated with sugar paste figures from the late eighteenth century onward. See twelfth night cake; wedding; and wedding cake. It was not long before the cakes’ appearance became as important as their taste, as evidenced by the chromolithographs of decorated cakes in the 1892 edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. See beeton, isabella.
This rosette, or floral decoration, was made around 1975 by Hans Strzyso, the chief baker at Madsens Supermarket in New Ulm, Minnesota. Strzyso specialized in lavishly decorated cakes and German baked goods. photo by flip schulke / u.s. national archives
Piping and Icing
For a century, however, cake decoration would remain a mostly professional matter, made possible by the 1840s French invention of piping. First extruded from paper cones, then later from metal tubes (also called tips), piped icing made elaborate cake decorating possible for all levels of bakers. With practice—and the help of colored icing and pastry school courses or printed instruction—bakers could now apply elaborate trims directly to the cake itself or attach them when they were dry. Unlike other sugar ornamentation, most piping did not have to be removed before eating.
With the use of metal “nails,” piped flowers blossomed on cakes. Piped letters and numbers produced names and messages on both holiday and personal celebration cakes. Piped “weaves” made two-dimensional or stand-alone baskets possible. Intricate piping created the look of fine lace, especially when it was done on net for added strength.
Originally a German specialty, network became the rage in Edwardian England when émigré confectioners Herr Willy, Ernest Schulbe, and R. Gommez produced publications detailing the method. At one English trade show, a wedding cake covered in piped network was even lit with “small electric lamps” (“a troublesome piece of work,” admitted its creator, Ernest Schulbe). By the 1920s Joseph Lambeth, an English émigré to America, had popularized his interwar variation, overpiping, with its multiple layers of thin stringwork. However, single-layer tortes, piped in vivid colors, had replaced much of the white lace multi-tier look, except for weddings. In the 1930s, when some wedding gowns were colored, all-color wedding cakes became a fad, too. After World War II, Nirvana (the pen name of Ernest Arthur Cardnell) brought the run-out technique of piping to 1950s Britain. This technique literally flooded geometric shapes with icing. Piping was also used to create animal forms (including circus animals) and figures (including dancers and acrobats).
With cake recipes appearing in newspapers and magazines and the introduction of supermarket cake mixes, suburban housewives, especially in the United States, became major practitioners of cake decorating. See cake mix. American firms like Wilton advertised that “every homemaker can learn to decorate cakes—even the most inartistic or unskilled.” Although 1950s plastic ornaments might have been a godsend to some women, so many others practiced true cake decorating that even an independent baking-school owner like Richard Snyder devoted four books to floral piping between 1957 and 1963; the fourteenth printing of his original 1953 manual for amateurs appeared in 1976. See publications, trade.
Meanwhile, Wilton’s books illustrated the company’s own 8-foot-tall cake for the San Francisco Association of Retail Bakers Convention and official seven-tier cake for the Chicago International Trade Fair. For the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a sugar company, baking company, baking school, and restaurant chain joined forces to produce and promote the “World’s Largest Birthday Cake,” which weighed 25,000 pounds and stood 23 feet high. The cake was sold as boxed slices to fair attendees.
True creativity stagnated until the 1990s cake-decorating revival that pitted trained professional pastry chefs against amateurs, often art directors or crafts enthusiasts. See competitions. Professionals increasingly concentrated on geometric fantasies—usually inedible and meant as showpieces. Cake decorators increasingly looked to Australia, South America, and Asia for invention. Australian housewives developed the fashion for fondant covering, whereas wildly intricate yet innovative piping was practiced by Indonesians, Filipinos, and Central Americans, whose wedding cakes often occupied an entire table, just when the craze for tiers of cupcakes took Anglo-American cake decorating by storm. See cupcakes and fondant.
Showpieces
Although piping became the dominant cake-decorating method, molded and modeled ornaments, made by professionals from gum paste or marzipan, were highly desirable on sugar showpieces that required longer shelf lives. See marzipan and tragacanth. In the nineteenth century foods of all kinds, not just desserts, were subject to sculpting and molding. Sometimes the ingredients were artificial so that the finished item—while looking good enough to eat—could withstand the wear of display. Instead of being made exclusively for private parties, these showpieces began to appear in professional competitions, at trade shows and public exhibitions, and in shop windows. Despite the change of venue and audience, some continued to have classical shapes—temples, plinths, even a Venus de Milo carved in beet sugar—but their purpose was to promote bakers’ skills. Faux vases, baskets, and pillows became mainstays of shop-window showpieces, but wedding cakes remained the most effective vehicle for cake decoration. A 1923 article in Bakers’ Helper magazine, “Show Pieces That Attract Custom,” featured an enormous five-tier wedding cake that had “been used more than once in the Kunze (bakery) windows.” As time went on, professionals attracted wider attention to their showpieces. W. C. Baker, for example, created a heavily publicized cake for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, weighing 1,000 pounds and with tiny models of San Francisco landmarks. Today’s decorating professionals often find television shows the best way to feature their art.
See also dolly varden cake; icing; and pastillage.
cake mix is an icon of American home cooking, a product so deeply rooted in the nation’s culinary culture that when U.S. homemakers say they baked a cake from scratch, most often they mean they used a mix. See cake.
The first cake mix on the market was Duff’s Ginger Bread Mix, which appeared in 1929 and contained dried, powdered molasses as well as flour, sugar, leavenings, and spices. It was developed by P. Duff and Sons, Inc., a molasses company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that hoped to boost the sales of molasses. See gingerbread and molasses. The initial response to Duff’s was so positive that the company quickly introduced white, spice, and devil’s food cake mixes. During the 1930s other small companies began producing cake mixes, until wartime shortages of sugar and fat halted production.
Research and development continued, nevertheless, especially at the nation’s major flour companies, and after the war, industry giants such as General Mills and Pillsbury moved directly into the cake-mix business. Sales of flour for home baking had been dropping for years, as fewer and fewer women made their own bread. Here was an excellent way to reinvent flour and charge more for it. General Mills introduced a fine-textured gingerbread it called “Gingercake” (italics in the original) in 1947. A year later Pillsbury introduced a white cake mix and a chocolate fudge cake mix, and by the 1950s some 200 manufacturers were turning out cake mixes. Sales more than tripled from 1949 to 1955. The industry was exuberant and so was the food press. As early as 1949, the popular weekly magazine Collier’s declared that “most housewives” had switched to mixes.
Sales of cake mixes tripled in the post–World War II United States, redefining home baking and spawning an industry of brand-driven cookbooks as Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, and Pillsbury became household names.
“Most housewives,” however, had done no such thing. True, the early cake-mix business had ballooned rapidly, but according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study, by 1955 only 4 out of 10 families were using “flour mixes,” a category that included long-established pancake and biscuit mixes, as well as cake mix. Ten years later a food-industry study concluded that “per capita consumption of cake mixes has been virtually stable since 1956.”
Industry experts were puzzled by the slowdown, but an apt assessment of the product appeared in Hilltop Housewife Cookbook, compiled by the New England food journalist Hazel B. Corliss. She had no objection to short-cut cookery on principle, but when it came to cake mixes, she balked. “My late husband, ‘Pop,’ couldn’t abide cake mixes,” she wrote. “I used one once and he insisted that it was only fit for the hens to eat! Prepared mixes usually do not have the good ‘home’ flavor, and they don’t have that most precious ingredient, a wife and mother’s love for her family” (p. 5).
Evidently, the symbolic power of a homemade cake—long seen as the epitome of feminine love and skill—posed a threat to the expansion of the cake-mix market. According to many journalistic accounts of how this problem was solved, manufacturers simply decided to reformulate the packaged mix. They eliminated the dried eggs and required the homemaker to add her own fresh eggs, thus persuading her she was indeed engaged in traditional baking.
This solution, often attributed to studies for General Mills conducted by the consumer-psychology expert Ernest Dichter, is apocryphal. Manufacturers had been pondering the question of whether to use fresh or dried eggs since the early years of cake-mix research. They knew that adding fresh eggs gave the cake better flavor and texture; they also knew that including dried eggs in the mix made it faster and easier to do the work. Surveys showed that consumers were divided as to which approach they preferred. By 1948 General Mills had chosen fresh eggs, Pillsbury had chosen dried eggs, and both companies were market leaders—until the sales of both companies sagged after 1955.
The larger issue suggested by the egg anecdote, however, was significant. Dichter’s research clearly indicated that homemakers were reluctant to forfeit a sense of personal involvement in cake baking. Hence, an emphasis on “creativity” became prominent in advertising: women were encouraged to add oil, pudding mix, spices, and other ingredients to make their cakes more personal. (This also helped to counter the taste of artificial flavorings that often identified a cake-mix cake.) Even more powerful was the new role assigned to decorating. According to innumerable magazine stories, a “creative cook” could transform a cake-mix cake into an elaborate fantasy by deploying frosting, food coloring, candies, and the like. See cake decorating.
These changes in technology and marketing brought about new standards for home baking. Traditionally prepared cakes came to seem inferior to cake-mix cakes, which were invariably light, sweet, and flawless. Today, most American home cooks prefer cake mixes not only for their speed but also for their factory-bred taste and texture, reliably achieved by following the directions on the box.
Canada, in its early history, was a country where sweets tended to be regional, dependent on local ingredients and the origins of new arrivals. By the end of the nineteenth century, the huge nation was largely settled, and the increasing availability of cookbooks influenced the range of sweets that make up what we now call dessert—cakes, small cakes and cookies, pastries, pies, tarts, and puddings. Most recently, new twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies and the arrival of new Canadians from around the world have further expanded its ever-bountiful sweet table.
When European settlers arrived in the early seventeenth century, they found an already established taste for sweets. In the St. Lawrence River basin and eastern Canada, for example, where maple trees flourish, the Sugar Moon was a time of tribal gatherings and celebrations involving maple products. Members of the First Nations collected sap, then boiled it down using a succession of heated stones. With metal pots the process was sped up. Maple became a distinguishing Canadian flavor. See maple sugaring; maple syrup; and native american.
Maple syrup production grew in the provinces of Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, but especially in Quebec, which now accounts for almost three-quarters of the world’s supply. Maple syrup and sugar remain important ingredients in such traditional recipes as grand pères au sirop d’érable (dumplings in maple syrup), tourlouche (maple syrup upside-down cake), and tarte au sirop d’érable (pie with custardy maple syrup, egg, and cream filling). One of the best loved is tarte au sucre (sugar pie), with a cream, butter, and maple sugar filling. An instant maple treat is tartine à l’érable—a slice of homemade bread, with a sprinkle of grated maple sugar and a drizzle of cream. Pouding au chômeur (poor man’s pudding), a famous twentieth-century, two-layer indulgence consisting of cake on top, custardy brown sugar, and often maple syrup underneath, has emerged as the definitive Quebec dessert. In other parts of eastern Canada, backwoods pie (again a maple custard filling), maple cottage pudding, maple fudge, and maple ice cream are old-time favorites.
Another swath of sweetness encompassed much of Atlantic Canada, notably Newfoundland and Labrador. Here, molasses from the Caribbean—traded for salt cod—became the sweetener of choice. See molasses. Molasses buns, made with salt pork, molasses, cloves, allspice, ginger, and raisins, used to be a noon-hour meal for men fishing or cutting firewood in winter. Toutons, pieces of bread dough, were fried and sauced with hot molasses and butter. See fried dough. Molasses was combined with dried fruit and spices in fruitcakes for Christmas and weddings and was also integral to gingerbread cakes. See fruitcake and gingerbread. A Newfoundland specialty, lassy tarts have a molasses, egg, and breadcrumb filling. The most famous Newfoundland sweet is figgy duff with molasses coady. This is a boiled pudding (duff) with raisins or currants (figgy) with a hot molasses and salt pork or butter sauce (coady). Molasses still enjoys prominence in the pantries of eastern Canada, in gingerbread cakes and spiced cookies. Examples are soft drop cookies such as cry babies, or others rolled thick and cut, such as Fat Archies. In Canada’s west, honey is often the choice of sweetener.
Everywhere in Canada, wild berries have figured prominently in sweets. Berries differ from east to west, south to north. Many of Canada’s heritage sweets are based on whichever berry is local and free for the picking. In Newfoundland and Labrador, there are cloudberries, known locally as bake apples, and tart partridgeberries, also known as lingonberries. From the Atlantic to northern Ontario, wild low-bush blueberries are harvested. The land has also provided wild elderberries, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, and blackberries for desserts and preserves. In the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Saskatoon berries, high-bush cranberries, and various wild cherries are the starting point for sweets. British Columbia is lush with such wild berries as blackberries. Not as well known is the Canadian buffalo berry, also known as soap berry or soopolallieis, which is crushed, sweetened, and whipped to make a frothy treat known as “Indian ice cream.” See akutuq. In the north, foraging for wild berries such as cranberries, Saskatoons, and bake apples is a way of life. Berries found their way into a variety of English- and American-influenced puddings, buckles, grunts, cobblers, and the roly-poly, with the fruit combined in some way with biscuit dough. See fruit desserts, baked.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cookbooks helped define and popularize sweets. The first English-language cookbook The Cook Not Mad was published in 1831 in Kingston, Ontario. A book of the same title, published a year earlier in Watertown, New York, introduced North American ingredients, including pumpkins, squash, cranberries, and cornmeal, to a largely English repertoire. La cuisinière canadienne (1840) first defined Canadian, or more precisely, French Canadian cooking. Sweet recipes of French and English origin called for ingredients such as pumpkin and cranberries, and included a generous selection of puddings, among them plum pudding and bread pudding. See pudding. “Canada is the land of cakes,” wrote Catharine Parr Trail in 1854 in her book The Female Emigrant’s Guide, an encouraging and practical guide for newcomers. For example, in addition to offering a recipe for apple pie, Traill provides instructions on selecting suitable apple trees, planting, grafting, harvesting, storing, even drying a bumper crop. As for cakes, she wrote, “I have limited myself to such cakes as are in common use in the farm houses” and continues, “A tea-table is generally furnished with several varieties of cakes and preserves.” As evidence, Trail provides a variety of mostly chemically leavened cakes that would have been familiar to cooks across settled North America. See cake and chemical leaveners. Traill put her stamp on the kinds of cakes newly arrived Canadians embraced.
The best-selling English-language cookbook of the nineteenth century was the 1877 Home Cook Book, Canada’s first community cookbook. By 1885, 100,000 copies of it had been sold to a population of 4.5 million. According to culinary historian Liz Driver, the Home Cook Book followed a pattern of community cookbooks recently established in the United States. The Home Cook Book provided a model for women in English-speaking Canada to use their own recipes, and to support good causes such as hospitals, charities, churches, and organizations like the Women’s Institute, a tradition that continues to this day. Its emphasis on sweets set a precedent for subsequent community cookbooks. As in the United States, cookbooks and booklets were created by manufacturers of new products such as baking powder, corn syrup, and cocoa, as well as of established ingredients, such as flour. These publications encouraged the sweet side of cooking. A prominent example is The Five Roses Cookbook, the 1915 edition of which had enormous influence, with sales of 950,000 copies, enough for one in every second Canadian home. The recipes were devoted almost entirely to sweet baked goods and breads, again favoring cakes over puddings, pies, and cookies, but including a small chapter on doughnuts, described as “dainty goodies.” The recipes indicate that Canadian pantries stocked bananas, dates, canned pineapple, shredded “cocoanut,” chocolate, and gelatin in addition to familiar molasses, maple syrup, apples, cranberries (mock cherries), mincemeat, dried apples, rolled oats, raisins, currants, and candied fruit. See candied fruit.
Among the book’s treasures is a recipe for Butter Tarts, admittedly not the first for what some consider the only created-in-Canada dish. That honor, according to culinary historian and researcher Mary Williamson, goes to the recipe in the 1900 cookbook published by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, Ontario, which contains a recipe called “Filling for a Tart.” Over the next few years the recipe, now named Butter Tarts, reappeared in other cookbooks, such as the Canadian Farm Cookbook in 1911, where six versions exist as collected from Ontario home bakers.
Since Canada’s population was mainly rural at the beginning of the twentieth century, it produced much of its own food, notably baking ingredients—butter, cream, milk, lard, eggs, and fruit. Canadian wheat was considered the finest in the world, as the gold medals it won at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 demonstrated. By the mid-nineteenth century, cook stoves began to replace hearths and bake ovens. In the twentieth century, in turn, electric and gas ranges made cook stoves obsolete and baking easier. With these new resources Canadians could afford to have dessert every day. And they did, even pie for breakfast. When company was coming, hostesses rose to the challenge by offering generous dessert spreads: a choice of pies, a pudding, a cake, cookies, and preserved fruit. One’s reputation was made when company called; at fall fair baking competitions; in the desserts provided for threshers; and in the pies the ladies brought to community suppers. See fairs.
A significant change in sweets took place with the development of domestic science in the late nineteenth century. Celebrated in this movement was Fannie Farmer. Her influential The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) was widely distributed in Canada. See farmer, fannie. Notable in Canada for disseminating a similarly rational approach to cooking and baking was Nellie Lyle Pattinson’s Canadian Cookbook (1923), originally a university textbook but later a very consumer cookbook that went through many editions. Pattinson’s use of the word “Canadian” helped define Canadian desserts.
It would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world with a more varied populace than Canada’s, or a richer collection of sweets that reflect former homelands. In southwestern Ontario, the Mennonite and Amish communities are celebrated for Dutch apple pie. See pennsylvania dutch. The Mennonites who settled in the west came from Russia. At their afternoon break, faspa, the table often holds a rhubarb, plum, or apple platz—a tender cakey crust with fruit and sweet crumbs on the top. Icelandic settlers in Manitoba retain homeland memories with vinarterta, layers of cake and cardamom-spiced prune filling. See vinarterta. Jewish bakers have added rugelach and hamantaschen filled with lekvar (thick prune or apricot jam) to the sweet table; the Portuguese contributed custard tarts; the Italians gelati and biscotti; South Asians mango kulfi (ice cream) and cashew barfi (fudge). See barfi; biscotti; hamantaschen; and rugelach. Eastern Europeans provided richly decorated Easter breads, honey cakes, buttery crescents, strudels, and tortes; Greeks baklava and sugar-dusted kourabiethes; and Latin Americans tres leches cake and dulce de leche. See baklava; dulce de leche; and tres leches cake. These top picks represent a much wider repertoire, filtered to appeal to already established Canadian ingredients, tastes, and techniques. Baklava appears, but no Greek custard pie, galaktoboureko; Chinese fortune or almond cookies win out over traditionally sweet red bean soup. Just as the sweets of earlier immigrant communities evolved to include pumpkin, Saskatoon berries, cornmeal, cranberries, carrots in Christmas pudding, and maple, so did the sweets of recent arrivals, who add blueberries to their coffee cakes and sauce their panna cotta with rhubarb compote.
Although home baking was widely practiced, Canadians long satisfied their sweet tooth at local bakeries where cinnamon rolls, fruity Chelsea buns, sugar-coated jam doughnuts, and raisin bread augmented everyday fruit and nut loaves, pumpkin pies, raisin oatmeal cookies, and layer cakes. On a larger scale, the Quebec bakery Vachon grew into a national chain, along the way giving the world the snack cakes May West (vanilla sponge-cake layers) and Jos Louis (chocolate layers), both filled with cream and coated with hard chocolate. Prominent also in the sweet snack line is the Whippet, originally Montreal-produced, a vanilla cookie base topped with a round pillow of marshmallow and coated with hard chocolate. Equally part of Canada’s sweet snack repertoire is the doughnut as sold by the very popular Tim Hortons chain, Canada’s largest food-service operator. There, you can buy a Canadian maple-honey cruller and double chocolate doughnut to go with your double double coffee (coffee with two sugars and two creams). See doughnuts.
Today, there are dessert cookbooks to respond to any interest, whether in French or Middle Eastern sweets, shortbread or cake pops, or simply the latest food fashion from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, or the United States. Celebrity pastry chefs and bakeries share their secrets on television shows and blogs. An emerging interest in low-fat and sugar-, gluten-, dairy-, egg- or nut-free products is driving new developments in sweets. Homemade is now simpler—fewer pies and more puddings, squares, and muffins are created. See muffins.
The Canadian love of the dessert course, and especially of baking, lives on. Certain desserts are classics: date squares, self-saucing lemon or rhubarb puddings, blueberry muffins, flapper pie (a meringue-topped custard pie with a graham cracker crust), apple pie, Queen Elizabeth cakes (date slab cake with a broiled coconut topping), oatmeal cookies, Nanaimo bars, banana bread, sugar pie (tarte au sucre), and gingerbread houses. See nanaimo bar. To paraphrase Catharine Parr Traill, Canada is truly the land of sweets.
See also breads, sweet; drop cookies; flour; fruit; pacific northwest (u.s.); portugal; rolled cookies; and united states.
candied flowers are produced by several different methods, depending on whether the whole flower or only its petals are used. For candied petals, what is technically a real “candying” process—the osmotic penetration of sugar, similar to that used for candied fruits—is most common. See candied fruit. For the whole flower, which is too difficult to candy, a crystallization technique, called praliner in French, is used. A third method, sometimes used at home, is to paint flowers or petals with egg white and dust them with sugar.
The use of flowers in confectionery dates back to the medieval Arab world. The flowers were mostly used as ingredients in syrups and sherbets (from the Arabic sharab), as well as in many kinds of perfumed waters, mainly rosewater and orange flower water. See flower waters and sherbet. The origin of candied fruit techniques is definitely Middle Eastern, with candied flowers given the distinctive name of murrabayat, preserves made of pulverized flowers mixed with sugar. In the Western world, the use of flowers in confectionery is first mentioned in the eleventh century, as rose and violet waters for use in fruit preserves and jams. See fruit preserves.
Flowers, in the form of “fake” sugar flowers perfumed with flower essences, featured prominently in the extravagant sugar compositions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See sugar sculpture. Around the same time, though, a renewed interest arose in the use of “real” flowers in confectionery. In Delightes for Ladies, the English writer and inventor Sir Hugh Plat wrote:
Dip a rose that is neither in the bud, nor over-blowne, in a sirup, consisting of sugar, double refined, and Rose-water boiled to his full height, then open the leaves one by one with a fine smooth bodkin either of bone or wood; and presently if it be a hot sunny day, and whilest the sunne is in some good height, lay them on papers in the sunne, or else dry them with some gentle heat in a close roome.
Plat also offered a more extravagant recipe that describes how to candy rose petals on the bush by pouring syrup over them and letting the petals dry in the sun.
Among the flowers most frequently mentioned as fit for candying are violet, rose, orange flower, marigold, lilac, acacia, mimosa, chrysanthemum, carnation, daffodil, lemon and jasmine, borage, and rosemary. However, only roses, violets, and to a lesser extent orange flowers had historically broad use, becoming part of a candied flower industry that still produces them commercially. Because flowers must be harvested during the night or at dawn to preserve their freshness, and sugared within a few hours, the candied flower artisans (and, later, a few industries) were located very close to flower-growing areas, mostly in Spain, southern France, and the northwestern Italian region of Liguria.
Pietro Romanengo fu Stefano, the famous Italian confectionery company based in Genoa and founded in 1780, still makes candied fruits and flowers in the traditional way, using a proprietary handwritten manual from 1906 that describes the candying of rose and violet petals as follows:
Pick the largest and thickest petals. Bring a sugar syrup to 86°F (30°C). Dip the petals in it and take them out when the syrup starts boiling. Press the petals. Put them back in a 86°F (30°C) syrup and let them rest for 24 hours. Change the syrup and let the petals rest up to one week. Spread the petals to dry and grain them twice with colored sugar.
All nineteenth- and twentieth-century recipes for candied flowers include some tinting of the flowers with natural or artificial colors because flowers when boiled tend to lose their colors (and some of their aroma), which need to be manually restored. See food colorings.
The only flower still commercially candied or crystallized whole is the violet. This flower, usually Viola odorata (known also as Viola di Parma), is preserved by coating it in egg white and crystallized sugar. Alternatively, hot syrup is poured over the fresh flower, or the flower is immersed in the syrup and stirred until the sugar recrystallizes. Violets were formerly an important part of the economy of the southern French city of Toulouse. Originally brought from Italy, the violet-growing business became so widespread in the Toulouse region that in 1907 there were some 400 farms producing 600,000 bouquets a year. The candied violet industry commenced in the nineteenth century to absorb the excess production of flowers. Today, whole candied violets, known as violettes de Toulouse, are made commercially by only one company in Toulouse: Candiflor.
Candied or crystallized flowers are used mainly to decorate desserts. Confiserie Florian, a traditional confectionery company based in a small village above Nice, produces candied flowers but is also expanding the use of candied fruits by creating new recipes. Pietro Romanengo fu Stefano puts whole candied violets in boxes of marrons glacés. Orange flowers in many countries are associated with weddings. Candied orange flowers were once used in Italy as wedding favors, associated with confetti or sugared almonds, but they have been replaced by sugar pastilles flavored with orange flower water. See confetti.
See also cake decorating; chestnuts; pastillage; and wedding.
candied fruit is whole fruit or pieces of fruit preserved with sugar through a series of operations in which the natural liquid of the fruit is replaced by sugar. To some extent, candied fruit has affinities with fruit pastes, marmalades, and jams, but differs from these products in that candying requires a sequence of operations over a week or more. Candied fruit is alternatively known as crystallized fruit or glacé (or glacéed) fruit, depending on the product, the country, and the type of finish, but the process is basically the same: steeping cooked fruit in increasingly concentrated sugar solutions so that, by osmosis, the sugar permeates the fruit and reaches a concentration that will ensure the stability of the final product. Candied fruit is “dry”; it might be sticky, but it does not need to be submerged in sugar syrup for storage, although the earliest forms of candied fruit probably were.
The Romans recognized that fruits could be preserved in sweet syrups; Book 1 of Apicius (a compilation of early Roman recipes) includes recipes for whole quinces stored in honey and defrutum (thick, concentrated grape juice), and for preserving fresh figs, apples, plums, pears, and cherries by covering them in honey, making sure that none of the fruits touched. Although these preparations might have been precursors, candied fruit as we know it today dates from the medieval era, evolving more or less in tandem with progress in sugar technology and with the availability and affordability of sugar.
Arab culture introduced the art of sugar refining to Mediterranean Europe, and probably also culinary techniques using sugar. A thirteenth-century Arab recipe manuscript includes a recipe for candied citron peel using equal quantities of sugar and honey and flavoring it with ginger, long pepper, Chinese cinnamon, and mastic. It is not clear whether the peel was stored in syrup or dried.
Sweet and therefore prestigious, candied fruit was one component of the final course of a medieval banquet. At a reception given by Pope Clement VI in mid-fourteenth-century Avignon, the dessert featured a multicolored array of candied fruits. At this time, when sugar was still relatively scarce and expensive, honey or concentrated grape must could be substituted for sugar; Clement VI and his successor received an annual gift from the town of Apt of “fruits confits avec du raisiné” (reduced must). In his 1552 book of preserves, Nostradamus similarly recognized the interchangeability of sugar, honey, and concentrated must, though he believed that sugar yielded the best results. See grape must and nostradamus.
Fifteenth Century
Possibly the earliest recipe collection devoted entirely to confectionery, the fifteenth-century Catalan manuscript Libre de Totes Maneres de Confits, gives recipes for candied fruits and sweetmeats made with honey and alternative versions of the same using sugar. Significantly, the recipes call for successive boilings of the syrup, whether honey or sugar, before pouring it over the fruit, repeating this process until done: “fins que conegau que sien fets” (literally, “until you know that they are done”). Unfortunately, the recipes do not specify whether the fruits—a great variety, including citrons, oranges, lemons, peaches, apples, quinces, melon, and cherries—are to be stored in the concentrated syrup that, in the final step, is reduced to the “thread” stage, or whether they are allowed to dry. See stages of sugar syrup. In one recipe for candied citron peel (with sugar), however, the final step calls for dipping the peel in a reduced rosewater-flavored syrup and then transferring it to sheets of paper; this process might have produced a thin, brittle sugar shell around the strips of peel.
Candied pineapple, dates, and cherries create a colorful still life. The process of candying, or glacéeing, fruit is an old one. It involves steeping cooked fruit in increasingly strong sugar solutions until the sugar permeates the fruit and thereby preserves it. © nutroasters
In fifteenth-century England, according to C. Anne Wilson, “banquetting stuffe”—the sweetmeats, creams, jellies, and other sweet dishes presented for the final service of a feast—included candied fruit and peel, called “wet sucket” when they were stored in syrup and “sucket candy” when dry. See sucket fork and suckets. Early recipes are not always specific as to whether the product is “wet” or “dry,” but it seems likely that until about the seventeenth century, the former was more common. In the sixteenth century Nostradamus indicates that preserves of citrus peel were stored in jars in syrup, whereas candied slices of edible gourd were coated in spiced sugar and stored with sugar in alternate layers. The recipes for candied citrus peel in both Scappi’s Opera (1570) and Bradley’s The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director (1736) are for “wet” variants, though La Varenne, in his Le confiturier françois (1660), expressly states that his candied whole oranges and lemons, orange slices, and orange peel are to be dried on a layer of straw. Massialot, at the end of the seventeenth century, gives instructions “à confire toute sorte de fruits, tant au sec qu’au liquide,” at the same time noting that some fruits, such as berries and grapes, are best preserved in syrup. Nevertheless, even fruit stored in dense syrup could be subsequently extracted from the syrup and dried on slate in a drying oven.
Citrus fruits seem to have been the popular choice for candying, although other fruits could also be used. At the end of the seventeenth century Massialot proposed a month-by-month calendar, starting with green apricots in May and cherries in July, chestnuts in November and December, then oranges and other citrus fruit, often imported, in January and February. Angelica could be harvested for candying in spring, summer, and autumn. See angelica. The range of candidates was broader in the warmer climates of Italy, Provence, Spain, and Portugal. Le cuisinier méridional, published in Avignon in 1839, gives very detailed instructions for candying green apricots, apricot quarters, peaches, plums, figs, pears, quarters of quince, cherries, walnuts, chestnuts, and oranges. The process is very delicate, the author notes, as the fruit has to be at the correct stage of maturity (slightly less than perfectly ripe) and the sugar must be cooked to the right degree. If the syrup is too concentrated, the sugar cannot penetrate the fruit. Furthermore, Indian sugar is preferred to sugar from the West Indies.
Until the nineteenth century, the candying of fruit was mainly a domestic process, often the task of the mistress of the household or, in noble dwellings, the “officier de bouche,” but its production gradually shifted to the domain of the professional, with manuals for professional confectioners becoming more common in the nineteenth century. In France this could well have been a consequence of the Revolution. One of the earliest works outlining the process is Le confiseur moderne, first published in Paris in 1803, the same year that Grimod de la Reynière published the first of his Almanachs des gourmands. Grimod describes in detail the delights of the confiseurs of the rue des Lombards in Paris, with their “confitures sèches et liquides, fruits au candi,” though he makes no explicit reference to “fruits confits.”
Contemporary Production
Candied fruit production today is most often associated with Mediterranean countries, including Portugal, and countries colonized by them. Certain regions have a reputation for the excellent quality of their candied fruits, including Sicily and the town of Apt in southern France. While stone fruit, citrus fruit, figs, and melons are most commonly represented in European manufactures, tropical fruit such as pineapple, papaya, mango, and guava are candied in Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines. Many Asian countries also use the candying process to preserve fruit; China, where the history of candied fruit dates back to the Sung period (960–1279), produces candied ginger, kumquats, pineapple, and even candied kiwi in slices. In the Moluccas, once known as the Spice Islands, the fruit of the nutmeg—the flesh surrounding the mace-covered nutmeg—is candied and dried.
The commercial process, as practiced at Apt, begins with sorting the fruit to eliminate bruised, imperfect specimens. Next, stones or seeds are removed, and any fruits damaged in this process are discarded. The fruit might then go into a sulfur solution to facilitate the absorption of sugar; this solution can also serve for temporary storage. Any traces of sulfur are removed in the subsequent blanching, followed by several rinses in fresh water. The candying proper starts with immersion in a light sugar syrup that is slowly brought to a boil, followed by cooling in the syrup. This process of immersion, bringing to the boil, and cooling is repeated as many as 15 times, with the concentration of sugar (or sugar plus glucose) in the syrup gradually increased each time until the fruit reaches a sugar content of about 65–70 percent. Because the sugar interacts with hemicelluloses and pectins in the cell walls, candied fruit retains its shape. The fruit is dried on racks, after which it might be glazed to enhance appearance and preserve flavor and texture.
Unsurprisingly, given the labor-intensiveness of the process, candied fruit is a luxury product generally reserved for gift giving and special occasions, typically Christmas in the Western world, New Year in Chinese cultures. In Sicily, the traditional Easter cassata is decorated with candied fruits—cherries, oranges, and, in particular, zuccata, candied squash. This product dates back at least as far as the fourteenth century and was originally made with zucca or edible gourd, an elongated, white-fleshed fruit with pale green skin, the “carabassat” of the Libre de totes maneres de confits. A Sicilian specialty, zuccata today uses squash or yellow pumpkins.
The cost of candied fruit generally restricts their culinary use to garnish or decoration, and few recipes call for candied fruit as a principal ingredient. One of these, variously known as American fruit cake, Brazil nut fruit cake, festive fruit and nut cake, or gourmet fruitcake, is essentially a multicolored mix of candied fruit and nuts held together by a small amount of batter. See fruitcake. Diced candied fruit features in the classic French dessert riz à l’impératrice, while candied citrus peel goes into a variety of cakes and desserts and can also be coated in chocolate.
See also candied flowers; fruit; and mostarda.
candy, strictly speaking, refers to sweets that are made from sugar or acquire their solid texture mainly from sugar, as opposed to pastries, jellies, puddings, and the like. However, the lines are a little vague. Many people would consider gumdrops to be candies, and to Americans, chocolates are candy. In the United States, a box of candy usually means a box of chocolates.
Indian Beginnings
The history of candy begins in India, where sugar was first refined from cane sap. By 100 c.e. śarkarā (“pebbles”) was the Sanskrit word for hard sugar crystals drained from syrup. At this stage, khaṇḍa or khaṇḍaka (“broken piece”) meant a cruder product, soft brown crystalline sugar. These words would travel to Europe by way of Persian (shakar, qand) and Arabic (sukkar, qand). See sugar.
It took centuries for “candy” to come to mean a product made from sugar. The earliest candy was, in effect, śarkarā allowed to develop particularly large crystals. In Arabic it was called sukkar al-nabāt (“plant sugar”) because the crystals “grow” in dense syrup as it cools. This type of large crystal is referred to as rock candy. Although no longer a very important category today, it still appears at the end of a wooden stick for stirring cocktails. And it is still beloved by children, until they discover candies that are not literally rock-hard crystals.
Back in India, the refining process started with a crude syrup made by boiling cane sap so that coarse plant material would rise to the surface, where it could be skimmed off. See sugar refining. This was called phāṇita (in Sanskrit, “skimmed”). In sixth-century Iran, pānīd had surprisingly become the name of the first candy made by dissolving refined sugar and then boiling down the syrup. When the syrup became so thick it was chewy, the syrup would be repeatedly stretched on a peg pounded into a wall to make what is called pulled taffy. See taffy. Boiling the syrup might have started out as a quasi-alchemical attempt to create a super-refined sugar; on the other hand, the taffy-pulling technique might have been known already, because a similar medieval candy was made by boiling down honey. Both kinds of taffy were often kneaded with nuts.
The Arab Period
For the next few centuries, candy innovation moved to the Arab world. The most important discovery of this period was hard candy (called “boiled sweets” in England). See hard candy. This process requires syrup to be boiled to the hard-crack stage, when it is only about 1 percent water. See stages of sugar syrup. If this syrup is cooled quickly, it has no crystalline structure and is technically just a super-cooled liquid, like glass. In fact, molten hard-crack syrup can be worked using the same tools and techniques that a glassblower utilizes.
Like glass, hard candy has a pleasant, smooth texture and is easily broken, so it can be crunched comfortably between the teeth. However, as boiling syrup approaches the hard-crack stage, it may suddenly “seize up” or crystallize. This probably explains a peculiar medieval Arabic name for hard candy, aqrāṣ līmūn, “lemon cakes.” The surviving recipes do not actually call for any lemon juice; they simply instruct the cook to boil syrup until it is about to crystallize, and then to drip it into chilled molds or onto a greased tray.
That might have been enough of a recipe for a professional confectioner, but the term aqrāṣ līmūn suggests cooks had already discovered that adding an acid ingredient such as lemon juice—not necessarily enough to taste but enough to split some of the sucrose molecules into fructose and glucose—interferes with crystallization. (Adding an “invert sugar” such as honey or corn syrup also works for the same reason. One thirteenth-century recipe from Moorish Spain says to add honey so that the syrup “retains its moistness and doesn’t break up.”) The fact that hard candies were called aqrạ̄s līmūn makes one suspect that adding some lemon juice for luck was a nearly universal practice. It is by no means an accident that so many hard candies in modern times have a sweet-sour fruit flavor, like lemon drops and Life Savers. See life savers. And like today’s Life Savers, aqrāṣ līmūn were often colored red, yellow, or green. Brightly colored candy is a medieval heritage.
It is known that these confections had reached Europe by the twelfth century because recipes exist for penidias, hard candy, and even a pulled honey sweet in Mappae Clavicula, a collection of metallurgical and glass-making formulas.
Medieval Arab confectioners also made a sort of pralin or perhaps nougatine (lauzīnaj yābis) by melting sugar crystals in a pan and tossing ground almonds into it; in addition, they created a kind of nougat (al-danaf, nāṭif) by beating egg whites with boiling syrup. See nougat. Finally, they practiced candying, though not with fruits because of the Middle Eastern distaste for fruits’ acidity in sweets. A thirteenth-century Syrian book offers a recipe for candying gourd by treating the pieces with lye and then boiling them in syrup until “if you take a piece into the light of the sun, it looks like amber in translucency and color.” See candied fruit and vegetables and herbs.
Candy Goes West
During the Renaissance, candy innovation moved to Europe. By the fifteenth century, candy-coating was a known practice. Tossing a small item such as a nut in a pan of syrup still makes a host of candies—comfits, Jordan almonds, jelly beans, and m&m’s. See comfit and panning.
European confectioners began to experiment with the use of dairy products in candy. In the late eighteenth century, butterscotch was created by adding butter to sugar syrup, which prevented “seizing up” by making the sugar crystals slide past each other rather than linking up. See butterscotch. This use of fat became so common in the nineteenth century that English confectioners referred to the medieval technique of adding lemon juice as “greasing” the syrup. Around this time dairy products such as milk and cream were added to syrup to make soft, rich candies such as caramels and New Orleans praline. See caramels and praline.
Modern technology has created an endless variety of candies, but such is the human sweet tooth that most of the techniques were already known 800 years ago.
See also corn syrup; fructose; glucose; and honey.
candy bar, an iconic confectionery form consisting of chocolate and other ingredients, is the sweet by-product of two intertwined and indomitable forces: the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. For most of its history, chocolate was prohibitively expensive, mostly consumed in a liquid form and almost exclusively by the aristocracy. But several European innovations of the mid-nineteenth century changed all that. In 1847 the English confectioner Joseph Fry came up with the idea of creating a moldable paste of cocoa powder, sugar, and cacao butter. His discovery was followed by Henri Nestlé’s creation of the first bar of milk chocolate and Rodolphe Lindt’s invention of conching, a process that makes chocolate creamier. See cocoa; lindt, rodolphe; and nestlé. In 1893 American confectioner Milton Hershey saw a conching machine on display and immediately purchased it. Following in the footsteps of Cadbury and other European pioneers, Hershey—considered by Americans the godfather of the candy bar—began to mass-produce and distribute milk chocolate bars in 1905. See cadbury; hershey, milton s.; and hershey’s.
The American market for candy bars was accelerated a decade later by the United States military, which asked Hershey’s and other companies to produce a single-serving portion of chocolate for the ration kits given to soldiers. The doughboys returned home with an appetite for chocolate bars, soon to be called “candy bars,” which quickly spread to the general population. See military.
Ray Broekel, widely considered the world’s leading authority on candy bars, estimates that regional confectioners manufactured tens of thousands of different brands in the “golden age” of candy bars between the World Wars. Most were made of the same suite of ingredients—chocolate, caramel, fudge, and nuts—though locally grown fruits such as cherries, figs, or even pineapple, were sometimes included. The health craze of the 1920s spawned a bar known as the Vegetable Sandwich, consisting of dehydrated vegetables enrobed in chocolate and including the ill-advised tagline “Will Not Constipate.” A decade later, during the Great Depression, candy bars such as the Chicken Dinner and the Club Sandwich—which featured mostly chocolate, nuts, and caramel—sold for a nickel and were advertised as a protean form of fast food, promising the consumer quick energy on the cheap. This emphasis on caloric heft led to the introduction of whipped nougat and marshmallow, which made bars appear larger and therefore more filling. See marshmallows and nougat. All these additions also made the bars cheaper, since the quantity of expensive chocolate was minimized.
Because of the similar ingredients included in most candy bars, manufacturers sought to distinguish their brands through marketing. Some were linked to cultural icons such as Charles Lindbergh, Clara Bow, or Babe Ruth. Other bars celebrated popular expressions (Boo Lah, Dipsy Doodle), exotic locales (Cocoanut Grove, Nob Hill, Fifth Avenue), dance crazes (Tangos, Charleston Chew), local delicacies (Baby Lobster), hit songs (Red Sails), carnival attractions (Sky Ride), even quiz shows (Dr. IQ). During Prohibition, the Marvel Company of Chicago made an Eighteenth Amendment Bar, which boasted “the pre-war flavor” and pictured a bottle of rum on the label. World War II ushered in a battalion of militaristic bars: Flying Fortress, Jeep, Chevron, Buck Private, Big Yank, and Commando.
As documented by Joël Brenner in The Emperors of Chocolate, Milton Hershey and his chief rival, Forrest Mars, quickly came to dominate the U.S. market by automating their factories, establishing a national distribution system, buying out competitors, and stockpiling raw ingredients. See mars. As a result, by the 1980s more than 90 percent of the bars that appeared on domestic candy racks were made by one of three multinational corporations: Hershey’s, Mars, or the European giant Nestlé. (On the world market, Mondelez, which owns Cadbury, is second only to Mars.) Because so much of their equity resides in the production techniques used to manufacture different bars, the confectionery companies are highly secretive. They have been known to blindfold noncompany workers brought in to repair particular machines, and they rarely allow nonemployees inside their plants.
The number of candy bars produced by smaller American companies has continued to dwindle as the retail landscape has consolidated. Large retail chains such as Walmart charge often prohibitive “slotting fees” to place candy bars in desirable locations in its stores, such as near the cash registers, where many shoppers make impulse buys.
In order to increase the variety of candy bars offered, the so-called Big Three have embraced the concept of brand extensions, introducing new versions of leading bars such as Snicker’s, Milky Way, and Kit Kat. In this way, they are able to capitalize on recent confectionery trends, such as the popularity of dark chocolate. The Big Three have also experimented with different sizes. The standard candy bar weighs roughly 2 ounces. Mars has introduced bars nearly twice that size, as well as “fun size” and “bite size” bars that are well under an ounce.
The cost of candy bars has risen roughly in correspondence with inflation (although the Hershey’s Bar stayed at a nickel for nearly half a century, until 1969). Nevertheless, candy bars remain relatively cheap compared to gourmet chocolates, which are usually sold in boxed sets or by the piece. See chocolate, luxury and chocolates, boxed.
Many of the most popular varieties of candy bar, however, do not actually take the form of a bar. Two brands that consistently rank in the top five are Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and M&M’s, small pods of candy-coated chocolate. See m&m’s and reese’s pieces.
See also advertising, American and chocolate, post-columbian.
candy canes are hard candies, or “boiled sweets,” that evoke the sights, sounds, and smells of Christmastide with their brilliant red and white stripes and sweet, peppermint, hard candy crunch.
The manufacturing process begins with the boiling of granulated sugar and water to the “hard crack” stage, around 300°F (142°C). See stages of sugar syrup. The resulting liquid takes on a strawlike color and molten consistency before being poured onto a table for cooling. When the sugar cools sufficiently to handle, it is pulled repeatedly on a taffy hook to incorporate air into the mass. While the candy is being stretched and pulled, it turns brighter and whiter, reflecting and refracting light. Flavoring, usually peppermint oil in liquid form, is now added. The batch is then rolled on the table and divided, with the candy maker sectioning off by knife or scissors a small portion of it to form the red striping. Red or another color is now kneaded into this portion of the batch, which is then left to rest while still warm. This colored portion will not be worked on the hook as long, in order to obtain a glassy translucence against the white opaque body. See food colorings.
A boy eagerly peers at a candy cane in a store window in Bangor, New York, in this early-twentieth-century promotional card. Candy canes were made by hand until the Bunte Bros. of Chicago began mass-producing them in the late 1920s.
The main batch is then further hooked by hand or pulled on a machine until the kneaded sugar attains a pearly white color. Then it is formed into an oblong loaf. At this point, the colored section is drawn out and rolled by hand to form a red rope, which is carefully twisted around the white loaf. Soon the familiar striping begins to emerge. Usually, this work is done either in front of “batch warmers” to keep the sugar pliable or, ideally, on a “batch roller,” large steel cylinders that rotate the batch mechanically while simultaneously keeping it warm. The mass is then extruded by hand to the desired thickness and cut into uniform lengths using candy shears. As one candy maker is working to maintain the consistency of the stripe during extrusion, a fellow candy maker is “crooking” the sticks while they are still warm to achieve the familiar cane shape. The hard candy quickly cools and will be packaged in paper or cellophane.
Although the process of making candy canes has not changed much over the centuries, the symbolism and traditions originally associated with them have. Popular competing myths surround the origin of the candy cane. Regardless of which tale (if any) is true, it is safe to say that candy canes are closely associated with the story of the Nativity and the ensuing Christian holidays.
The most enduring story takes us to Cologne, Germany, around 1670. The choirmaster of the imposing Dom cathedral there attempted to quell the noisy chatter of children during holiday services, when a live Nativity scene or Putz was taking place. Hard candy sticks were a common confection in seventeenth-century Germany, available in apothecaries and sweetshops. See hard candy. The choirmaster at Cologne engaged a local confectioner to make a special hard candy stick, with a hook on the end to resemble a cane or, more specifically, a shepherd’s crook. This confection was intended to remind the young churchgoers to observe the Nativity with quiet reverence as “shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” Owing to the Christian nature of the confection, it has also been suggested that the inverted candy cane was intended to form a “J” for Jesus. Symbolism aside, the sugar clearly helped satiate the children during the long and often uncomfortable liturgies.
Some religious commentators believe that the candy canes of old were white to reflect the purity of Christ. Actually, the first candy canes would have been a cream color at best, depending on the refined state of the sugar available to the confectioner. A story from seventeenth-century England posits that the white “body” of the candy cane refers to Christ’s flesh, while the thick red stripe references his blood; the three tiny red stripes symbolize the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In any case, by the second half of the nineteenth century, candy canes had taken on the red and white striped pattern as highly refined white sugar and commercial red food dyes became readily available.
Prior to World War I, candy canes were handmade and produced in modest quantities by local confectioners throughout the Western world. The colors of the stripes varied by confectionery to denote flavor, with green for spearmint, black for anise, and brown for clove or sassafras. In 1921 the Bunte Bros. of Chicago applied for a patent for a machine to manufacture candy canes. By the late 1920s, Bunte was mass-producing the confection wholesale, distributing candy canes to candy shops and druggists all over the United States. Currently, 1.7 billion candy canes are sold each year. They are now made in every imaginable flavor and color combination, although the traditional peppermint red and white canes predominate. Their convenient shape and festive colors adorn Christmas trees, garlands, and stocking tops in both religious and secular traditions. By hook or by crook, candy canes are here to stay.
See also christmas.
See halloween.
candy dishes, like ashtrays and cookie jars, are specialty containers that serve modern consumer habits. Usually of low, shallow form, possibly circular or square, candy dishes tend to be lidless (and unsanitary), while candy jars have lids. Some candy dishes could be confused for ashtrays and vice versa; in a nonsmoking household, an ashtray might be deployed as a candy dish. By extension, almost any vessel could function as a candy dish. Wrapped or unwrapped, candy apparently shows best in glass, according to the great number of dishes in evidence in this medium.
Candy dishes have their roots in Renaissance sugar-paste containers for biscuits and sweets that were arrayed around the princely table during the dessert course. Eighteenth-century inventories of royal court pantries indicate that hundreds of small glass containers were on hand for displaying and serving dragées, nonpareils, and drops. One German inventory from 1733 indicates small glass Confect-Bechergen (candy cups) and larger Confect-Schällgen (candy bowls). Figural examples in Meissen or DuPaquier porcelain superseded their ephemeral prototypes and were termed “sweetmeat dishes.” Emily Post, in Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home (1922), used the terms “candy dish” and “compotier” interchangeably.
Novelty or seasonal containers for sweets have a place in American culture. For instance, President John F. Kennedy presented guests on Air Force One with souvenir candy dishes. Open dishes with wrapped or unwrapped candies are a leitmotif in the American workplace, inviting snacking and chance conversation away from the watercooler. Holiday-themed M&M’s and ribbon candy are especially popular. President Ronald Reagan kept jars of Jelly Belly jellybeans on his desk at the White House and on Air Force One.
See also candy; comfit; hard candy; and serving pieces.
See valentine’s day.
Candy Land, a board game, is for many Americans synonymous with childhood. The allure of being transported to a magical world where sweets grow by the roadside is exciting to any child; combine that with brightly colored squares and lovable characters, and it is no wonder that the game, introduced in 1949, remains popular today.
Eleanor Abbott, a retired schoolteacher, developed Candy Land while recovering from polio in the 1940s. She sold the idea to the Milton Bradley Company, which used the marketing slogan “a sweet little game for sweet little folks.” The game’s promise of plenty—all the sweets you can eat, without a tummyache—immediately caught on with children emerging from the deprivations of World War II.
There have been nine editions of Candy Land. In 1984, when Milton Bradley merged with the toy company Hasbro, specific characters and a narrative—“The Legend of the Lost Castle”—were introduced onto what had been a plotless board. Players now had an incentive to finish the game, not just meander, as they searched for King Kandy’s lost castle. This new quest was populated by characters like Plumpy the local sugarplum purveyor, Mr. Mint the candy-cane man, a giant gumdrop called Jolly, Gramma Nutt, Princess Lolly, Queen Frostine, Gloppy the chocolate monster, and the fearsome Lord Licorice. Pulling a character’s card could either help or hinder each player’s progress, determining how far he or she would travel on that turn. The first player to reach King Kandy’s castle is the winner. Players pull cards with either colors (corresponding to the colored squares) or characters. If a player pulls a card with two yellow squares, for example, she would jump ahead two yellow squares on the board; if she were to pull Queen Frostine, however, she would jump ahead to the queen’s square. It is entirely a game of luck rather than skill: players can also pull Gloppy’s card, which effectively sends them back to the beginning of the board.
In 2010, in response to changing tastes, Hasbro released “Candy Land: The World of Sweets.” This latest version eliminates Plumpy, Mr. Mint, and Jolly. Gramma Nutt, who was famous for her peanut brittle, becomes Gramma Gooey, famous for her fudge. And the game no longer seems so innocent: both Lolly and Frostine have been sexualized to reflect new cultural perceptions of female beauty.
First introduced in 1949, the American board game Candy Land has gone through nine editions, with a changing cast of characters that reflect shifting tastes and evolving notions of female beauty and health. © hasbro
candy packaging is a twentieth-century innovation. Candy manufactured and sold through the nineteenth century was typically packed in wooden barrels (later cardboard boxes) and shipped to the retailer. Retailers might serve the candy to their customers out of the manufacturer’s container, or they might transfer the goods to more attractive glass jars or counter displays. There was little sense of product differentiation or brand identity.
The rise of consumer advertising and brand awareness in the early twentieth century drove manufactures to begin to use packaging to identify and differentiate their product. A growing consumer awareness of hygiene and fear of “germs” in the 1910s also put pressure on candy makers to begin wrapping their goods. Wrappers were a sign that candy was clean and germ-free (although the conditions in factories where the candy was produced would sometimes suggest otherwise).
The trend toward selling candy in factory packages was also accelerated by developments in packaging technology. In the second decade of the 1900s, machines that could efficiently and cheaply wrap small candies such as kisses and drops as well as larger bars became widely available. Advances in wrapping materials also created new possibilities for candy packaging.
Paper and cardboard were the first materials used to wrap candies. The results were not always satisfactory: the porous material did not preserve freshness or flavor, and glues could react with the candy to mar the taste. Paper, however, could be printed, which allowed candy manufacturers to identify their product.
Hershey’s was one of the first manufactures to use packaging to develop a brand identity. As early as 1905, the wrappers for Hershey’s Bars had a consistent look and always featured the Hershey name prominently. A few other manufacturers successfully branded their goods prior to World War I, but the use of the label to secure a consistent brand did not become common practice until the 1920s. See hershey’s.
Cost was a factor in whether a candy would be sold wrapped. Around 1900, five- and ten-cent candy boxes and paper-wrapped bars began to appear, but it was not economical to wrap cheap “penny candies.” Tootsie Roll, introduced in 1908, is believed to be the first individually packaged candy, priced at one cent. The candy cylinders were wrapped in printed paper and packed in boxes that could be used as counter displays. The wrapper featured both the Tootsie logo and patent claims, and was intended to fend off imitators as much as to promote the product. See tootsie roll.
Tin foil was better than paper at preserving and protecting the candy, but it could not be printed. This created copycat problems. Many chocolate manufactures put out goods resembling the popular foil-wrapped chocolate morsel Wilbur Buds (1894). H. O. Wilbur spent heavily in the early 1910s on advertising, admonishing consumers to demand authentic Wilbur Buds. Life Savers Pep-O-Mint gained success in 1913, with a printed paper label wrapped around the tin foil tube to create a package that simultaneously protected and advertised the goods. See life savers.
Visual appeal was an important aspect of candy selling. Both paper and foil wrappers had the disadvantage of concealing the contents. Candy makers quickly adopted transparent wrapping materials when they became available in the late 1910s. The first, glassine, was a semi-transparent paper that could be printed and wrapped around bars or made into pouches or envelopes.
Better than glassine was cellophane, a fully transparent wrapping material that revolutionized candy packaging. Cellophane was manufactured in France in the 1910s, but it was not until DuPont began producing it in the United States in 1923 that cellophane became widely adopted for wrapping individual candies, making transparent bags for bulk candies, creating windows in cardboard boxes, and sealing fancy boxed candies to guarantee hygienic freshness.
By the 1940s, many Americans were buying groceries in self-service supermarkets. After World War II, candy packaging changed to reflect this new shopping style. “Penny candies” that had previously been sold in bulk were now packaged in 1- or 2-pound bags. Candy bars were also packaged into 6- or 12-bar units See candy bar. This “family” packaging encouraged shoppers to view candy as similar to other groceries that one might stock regularly. It also gave the shopping parent—typically, the mother—greater control over the candy consumed by her children.
Twenty-first-century innovations in candy packaging emphasize convenience and portioning. Resealable pouches and cupholder-shaped tubs encourage consumers to take candy with them wherever they go. Candy bars today come in a wide range of sizes to accommodate a variety of eating occasions, from the small, snack-sized bars to the extra-large multipiece bar packages that are supposed to encourage saving some for a later occasion or sharing (formerly called “king size”). In response to mounting concerns about the links between diet and health, candy manufacturers are also changing their packaging to give increasing prominence to nutritional and calorie information.
See also children’s candy and chocolates, boxed.
cane syrup is made by peeling and mashing sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), then reducing its juices to produce a toasty, caramelized syrup with slightly bitter notes. Though it is common worldwide wherever the perennial grass grows in tropical and subtropical climates, cane syrup was once particularly loved in the American South—a place where weather demanded an early harvest. Unripe cane would not yield a large quantity of refined sugar—the important commodity—but it was suitable for cane syrup production. On small southern farms cane syrup became a common sweetener, requiring little equipment to make. Cajun Louisianans used the syrup in gâteau de sirop (spice cake) and pain perdu (French toast), or as “syrup soppin,” drizzled on a plate at the end of a meal and eaten with bread.
During World War I the U.S. government urged citizens to voluntarily reduce their sugar intake to conserve refined sugar for the war effort. This 1918 poster shows a scale weighing a bowl of sugar against a pitcher of syrup, implying that cane syrup or molasses were the more patriotic options. library of congress
In the early 1900s cane syrup production proliferated in several southern towns, including Cairo, Georgia, which dubbed itself “Syrup City.” The real hub, however, was balmy New Orleans, which sold all manner of the sugarcane that grew nearby, in the processed forms of crystallized sugar, dark molasses, and cane syrup—once more commonly called “New Orleans syrup.” See new orleans. The production of cane syrup was partially spurred by members of the Interstate Sugar Cane Growers Association, as well as by the sugar rationing implemented during World Wars I and II. See sugar rationing. Nevertheless, it remained largely a small, home-based practice and was eventually eclipsed by falling sugar prices and the prevalence of other syrups, especially Karo corn syrup. See corn syrup. Today, few traditional cane syrup mills remain; the industry is centered in Abbeville, Louisiana—150 miles from New Orleans, and home of Steen’s 100 percent Pure Cane Syrup since 1910.
See also golden syrup; maple syrup; molasses; and south (u.s.).
cannelé, a little cake made of a crêpe-like batter and baked in a small cylindrical fluted copper mold, is said to have a 300-year history, although cannelé recipes have only recently begun to appear in cookbooks. A cannelé comes out of the oven rich and moist on the inside, while the outside is deep brown from the thick coating of caramelized sugar. The cakes are named after the shape of the molds in which they are made, cannelé meaning “fluted.” Such molds are depicted in an early-twentieth-century restaurant supply catalog from J. Jacquotot in Paris, in which the word “cannelé” describes the appearance of several molds and does not indicate a particular cake by that name. Paula Wolfert, who includes a recipe for cannelés in her cookbook The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen (2003), writes that when she worked in Bordeaux in the 1970s, cannelés were unknown: “No local guide or notable cookbook published since the start of the twentieth century even mentioned them.” Wolfert says that several Bordeaux bakers revived this former local specialty in the 1980s. Cannelés became so popular that they were made all over France, provoking a group of Bordeaux patissiers to lobby for a protected status for their special recipe and method of making the cakes. Today, the cannelé is the “official cake” of the city of Bordeaux. City officials changed the spelling to canelé de Bordeaux, whereas the old spelling is used for the “generic” or unofficial version of cannelé bordelais (cannelés in the style of Bordeaux).
See also france and small cakes.
cannoli, one of the best-known Sicilian pastries, originated in Palermo to celebrate Carnival but is now a year-round favorite. The name derives from canna, a noduled cane reed (Arundodonax) cut into sections and then used as a mold to fry the pastry shell. The batter is prepared with flour, eggs, sugar, aromatic wine, and suet, and then fried in hot oil until golden brown. The filling consists of sweetened sheep’s ricotta cheese, which is thoroughly sieved to make it creamy. Sometimes the cheese is flavored with chocolate or pistachio, or with small cubes of candied citrus peel, zuccata (candied pumpkin), or chocolate chips. Ideally, the creamy filling should be added just before eating to maintain its contrast with the crisp outer layer.
In Sicily cannoli come in various sizes, ranging from minute cannulicchi (5 cm) to the enormous ones (20 cm) made at Pianadegli Albanesi. Cannoli have always been a highly appreciated gift, and an old tradition was to offer la testadelturcu (“Turk’s head”), a large pastry base in the shape of a Turk’s turban filled with several rows of cannoli.
Contemporary variations include cannoli that are baked instead of fried, and industrially produced shells are now sold vacuum-packed. Some small Italian pasticcerie still use the canes for frying, although they have been replaced for the most part by metal cylinders. Outside Italy, various fillings are substituted for the original recipe; they include custard, mascarpone, whipped cream, and other ingredients.
See also carnival and italy.
caramels or caramel candies are small sweets created by cooking glucose, sugar, and milk or cream together with butter and flavoring to yield a confection that is opaque, medium brown in color, and with a texture that ranges from soft to medium-hard and chewy. Once cooked, the mixture is usually cut into small squares that are wrapped individually to prevent the pieces from sticking together. A softer version is made for filling chocolates and chocolate bars. This type of caramel is also used in cakes or cookies, such as the layered combination of soft caramel and chocolate topping set upon a shortbread base, known as caramel squares, or sometimes as millionaire’s shortbread. Very soft caramel mixtures with a velvety texture are popular in North America and elsewhere, swirled through ice creams, as cake fillings, sweet sauces, flavors for puddings and syrups, and as a coating for caramel corn or sweetened popcorn.
Confusingly, the word “caramel” (singular) has a technical meaning in English, referring to one of the stages of boiled sugar created by cooking sugar syrup to temperatures of 320°F (160°C) or above when it browns and acquires a burnt flavor. See stages of sugar syrup. To complicate matters, this is a relatively modern usage of the word. In previous centuries caramel indicated the stage now known as hard crack, when the sugar cools to a hard but uncolored mass. This helps to explain why in some languages, for instance, Spanish and Russian, caramelo or karamel indicates clear hard sugar sweets or hard candy, not the milky, chewy type of confection purchased in the sweetshops of the Anglophone world.
The notion of caramelized sugar is not helpful in understanding the chewy caramel candies popular in the English-speaking world. The distinctive flavor of this sweet is provided by caramelization of the milk in the presence of sugar. The mixture is cooked at 257° to 266°F (125° to 130°C), at which temperature a small amount of moisture (about 7 percent) remains, which enables the texture to be malleable. Recipes are carefully balanced to optimize this characteristic; as Charles Appel explained in Twentieth Century Candy Teacher (1912), “When people are eating a caramel they want something they can chew.” In industry, condensed milk is preferred to cut down on cooking time, and glucose syrup is used in addition to brown sugar. Flavors added to the candies include vanilla, fruit essences, maple syrup, and chocolate. Fat is also important; industrial producers have experimented with substitutes for the traditional butter, and vegetable fats are frequently used in place of dairy ones.
In their ingredients and flavor, caramels are related to butterscotch and toffee and, like these sweets, have a slightly mysterious history, emerging as formalized recipes only at the end of the nineteenth century. Although it is impossible to identify the exact moment when caramels diverged from these other confections, the British clearly saw them as an American innovation, calling them “American caramels” and regarding them as a much-sought-after novelty; E. Skuse commented on this in The Confectioner’s Handbook (ca. 1892). A French caramel sweet, negus de Nevers, also originated around this time, but Dutch hopjies, with a caramel coffee flavor, claim a much older pedigree, dating back to the late eighteenth century.
See spices.
Carême, Marie-Antoine (1783/4–1833), christened Marie-Antoine but nearly always known as Antonin, styled himself the “Palladio of patisserie” and has some claim to be the father of modern French confectionery. He was pastry chef to Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister, and his fame spread first via the diplomatic corps as a result of his skill as a sculptor and scenic artist working with sugar as his medium. In truth his primary gift may have been as a self-publicist as much as confectioner, which is why he is also known as the first “celebrity” chef. Carême exploited his connections to forge a successful publishing career, arguably the first chef to find mass market appeal during the gastronomic publishing boom of the early nineteenth century, itself connected to the era’s obsession with decorative confectionery.
Carême illustrated his own cookbooks and had a signal interest in the visual impact of food served in the courtly service à la française style. This required elaborate sculptural center pieces (pièces montées) frequently made partially or entirely of spun sugar. See sugar sculpture. Carême’s books described and illustrated semi-edible ships in sail, turning globes, and architectural follies. They rarely featured clear recipes, but he is nevertheless credited with coining the phrase “you can try this yourself at home.” Carême’s greatest gifts to confectionery history therefore were as both a food-chronicler and a cook. He spun gold out of sugar via publishing, helping to create the cult of the chef as well as positing sugar as the key ingredient in glamorous cuisine. He claimed to be the originator, variously, of choux pastry, soufflés, the toque or iconic chef’s hat, the vol-au-vent, and the definitions of the boiling points of sugar. Little of this was properly his invention. See pastry, choux; soufflé; and stages of sugar syrup.
Born in the slums of Paris’s Left Bank in 1783, Carême may have had as many as 23 siblings. He went on to cook for Napoleon, the Russian tsar Alexander I, and the British prince regent, but his self-aggrandizing legend as “the Napoleon of the kitchen” began during the French Revolution. Carême was abandoned as a nine-year-old at the height of The Terror (1792) and began cooking at a gargotier (chophouse) near the site of the guillotine. He was apprenticed at Bailly’s patisserie on the rue Vivienne before being talent-spotted by Talleyrand, probably around 1797. Certainly by the end of the eighteenth century, Carême’s skill as a patissier and sugar sculptor had caught the attention of Paris. His first written work, Le pâtissier royal parisien (1815), makes it certain that he studied in the print room of the Bibliothèque Nationale and there began a lifetime’s fascination with architecture and the decorative arts, which in turn closely informed his work. His style of sugar craft, featuring hermitages and ruined temples, may be regarded as the confectionery analog to English garden follies of the neoclassical and Gothic period. Carême’s fame therefore rests on his obsession with the architectural and plastic properties of the increasingly refined sugars of his era. His definitions of the boiling points of sugar stand to this day, and his description of the means of testing temperature (with bare hands and iced water nearby) is still a rite of passage for patissiers.
Marie-Antoine Carême was arguably the first celebrity chef, known especially for his elaborate sculptural centerpieces (pièces montées), which were frequently constructed of spun sugar. He is also remembered for several masterly cookbooks. This engraving is from an 1854 edition of Le pâtissier royal parisien, first published in 1815.
The tumultuous politics of Carême’s era—the rise and fall of Napoleon, the invasion of the Russian army, and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Louis XVIII—offered occasions for grand court and regimental dining featuring elaborate desserts and pièces montées. These banquets gave both reason and budget for Carême’s increasingly lavish deployment of spun sugar, and he was one of the star chefs involved in the gargantuan Champs Elysées feast for 10,000 veterans in 1815, as well as in the Allies’ victory banquets in Champagne. It is for this work, beyond confectionery, that he is often remembered.
Following these military banquets Carême’s cooking, and his career, moved increasingly toward publishing. Le pâtissier royal parisien (1815) was followed by Le pâtissier pittoresque (1816), Le maître d’hôtel français (1822), Le cuisinier parisien, (1828), and his masterwork, L’art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle, in five volumes (1833). Although Carême took commissions from time to time—with the British prince regent (catering one Brighton banquet featuring 137 dishes and 8 separate sugar pièces montées), for the British ambassador and his wife in Vienna and the marquis and marchioness of Londonderry, and in Russia for the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna—his desire to cook “below stairs” palled along with his need to do so. The patronage of Betty Rothschild in the late 1820s brought Carême into close contact with Chopin, Paganini, and Victor Hugo, and he became particularly friendly with Heinrich Heine and Rossini, who dedicated compositions to him just as Carême dedicated dishes to Rossini. Such attention marks a certain ascendancy for the profession of confectioner, treated as an equal among the great artists of the era, but Carême’s professional triumphs were bought at the expense of his health, and he died in 1833, aged less than fifty.
See also france and paris.
Carnival is a secular holiday celebrated in many places where Catholicism is or was the dominant religion. Despite its inherently secular nature, Carnival is intimately tied to the Christian calendar. Specifically, it is a time of revelry and feasting that immediately precedes the liturgically somber period of Lent, which was traditionally marked by strict fasting for the approximately six weeks preceding Easter. The name “Carnival” itself reflects this relationship to fasting, as it derives from the medieval Latin carnem levare, “the setting aside of meat.”
The length of the Carnival celebration has been variably interpreted: in some cases, it has focused largely on the Tuesday immediately preceding Ash Wednesday, known traditionally in English as Shrove Tuesday but now also as Fat Tuesday, a calque of the French Mardi Gras. Even more extended interpretations of Carnival season exist, however, as in modern New Orleans, where Mardi Gras celebrations take place over the course of the two weeks preceding Lent, and the broader Carnival season begins with or immediately after the Epiphany (6 January, the end of the Christmas season).
Although it is widely believed that some of the core traditions associated with Carnival celebrations have pre-Christian origins (e.g., in the Roman Saturnalia), the modern manifestations clearly go back to medieval or early modern practices. Carnival traditions have survived most strongly in the western Mediterranean lands of Italy, southern France, and Iberia. With European colonial expansion, Carnival celebrations also became firmly entrenched in various parts of the Americas, most famously in areas formerly belonging to France (New Orleans, Mobile, Guadaloupe) and Portugal (Rio and generally in Brazil).
Two basic aspects of the holiday have directly influenced the foods associated with it. The first is Carnival’s juxtaposition to the period of Lenten fasting. Originally, the fast involved abstinence from all animal products, including lard, butter, cheese, and eggs, and there was a general expectation that food consumption during Lent would be restrained, so that lavish use of any expensive and especially tasty preparations, including those not involving animal products, would also be avoided on fast days. The impending sobriety of Lent brought about a natural intensification of the opposition of fat and lean and a particular inclination to consume fatty and fried dishes during the Carnival period, but also more generally to indulge in festive preparations that involved costly ingredients, such as highly refined wheat flour, sweeteners, and spices.
The other aspect of Carnival that strongly influenced its culinary traditions was the importance of the communal celebratory gatherings it featured, with widespread traditions of parades, competitions, musical performances, and plays carried out on the streets of cities, towns, and villages throughout Europe in which all elements of society, including the poor, participated. Simple but festive foods that are quintessential “street foods” have therefore always been a central part of Carnival celebrations, including, among sweet offerings, all kinds of deep-fried dough preparations. See fried dough. The geographical and cultural splits between northern Protestant and southern Catholic lands are reflected to a degree in surviving culinary practices: whereas the tradition of fried sweets, especially doughnuts, was apparently once extremely widespread throughout Europe, it is now less strongly represented in northern, Protestant Europe but continues to flourish in the Catholic south.
Some traditional carnival sweets include the following:
See also festivals and holiday sweets.
cassata is a lavish cake from Sicily, a complex concoction of layered liqueur-soaked sponge cake interspersed with sweetened ricotta cheese, fruit preserves, and jellies surrounded by marzipan and decorated with baroque garnishes and flourishes of marzipan fruits, rosettes, flowers, and curlicues. Cassata probably originated as a simple egg, sugar, and ricotta cheese cake. See cheese, fresh and cheesecake. Cassata also refers to a contemporary ice cream inspired by the cake.
Although the etymological derivation of “cassata,” and therefore clues as to its origins, is not yet a settled matter, the notion that cassata comes from the Latin caseus, the word for cheese, because it can be made with cheese, was called “far-fetched” by the famous early-twentieth-century etymologists da Aleppo and Calvaruso. The Latin derivation is not as far-fetched as they make out, though, because even in the fourteenth century, Angelo Senisio, a Sicilian abbot who wrote a dictionary of Sicilian vernacular in 1348, defines cassata as a torta (cake) derived from the Sicilian casu, that is, cacio (cheese), a food of bread and cheese (vivanda di pane e cacio). The history in verse La vita di lo Beato Corrado composed by the nobleman Andriotta Rapi of Noto, probably in the fifteenth century, also records the word “cassata,” which C. Avolio in Introduzione allo studio del dialetto siciliano (1888) defines as “a cake with a base of cheese (caseata).”
However, the Latin etymologies for the Sicilian cassata might be tenuous because the various words used to describe a cheese cake might refer either to a cake with cheese unrelated gastronomically to the Sicilian cassata, or to something completely other than cheese. For example, in both Michele Pasqualino’s eighteenth-century Sicilian-Italian dictionary and Vincenzo Mortillaro’s nineteenth-century Sicilian-Italian dictionary, the definition of “cassata” also means, besides a kind of cheesecake, a sweet-box where sweets are kept, derived from casseta, a kind of small box.
However, cassata is, more than anything, born of a fascination with sugar, not cheese, and sugar was not cultivated in Sicily during the Roman era. It was only when the Arabs brought sugar to Sicily and an energetic sugar industry took root in the tenth century that sweet inventions using this product appeared. The more likely derivation is from the word for the baking tray or earthenware bowl in which the primitive cassata was cooked, the Arabic qasʿat. Thus, the genesis of the Sicilian cassata may very well be traced to the Arab era, or shortly afterwards to the Arab-influenced kitchens of Norman-Sicilian monasteries, as a very simple concoction of eggs and flour. Cassata was early on a springtime cake traditionally made as an Easter specialty by the monastery nuns or for Purim by Sicilian Jews. Cassata was so delicious and seductive that as late as 1574, the diocese of Mazara del Vallo had to prohibit its making at the monastery during the holy week because the nuns preferred to bake and eat it than pray. Documents show that large purchases of ricotta were made in Sicily before the end of Lent.
Cassata seems related to not only Lent but also Passover. A document referring to Sicilian Jews, an old community in Sicily who spoke Arabic in the eleventh century, contains an explicit reference to festum Judeorum nuncupatum di li Cassati (for the Jewish festival, it is called cassati), which must be Passover. It is contrasted to Easter, which is what the reference to festum Azimorum in the documents must mean (azimorum translates to “unleavened”). The earliest and clearest reference to cassata as a specifically Sicilian cake made with ricotta cheese, as it is today, dates to a delivery contract of 1409 to a Jew named Sadon Misoc. However, the first mention of a possible ancestor of cassata appears in the Paris manuscript of the Riyād an-nufūs, a tenth-century description attributed to Abū Bakr al-Mālikī, about whom we otherwise know nothing. He reports that Abū al-Fadl, an orthodox jurist from the Aghlabid capital in Tunisia, refused to eat a sweet cake called a kaʿ k because it was made with sugar from Sicily, then ruled by unorthodox Shiites. In the twelfth-century diet book of Abū Marwān ibn Zuhr, Kitāb al-aghdhiya (Book of Diet), a kaʿ k is described as a kind of twisted ring-shaped bread or cake fried in oil and finished with pistachios, pine nuts or almonds, rosewater, and honey. This certainly sounds like a precursor of cassata.
Another manuscript from the Middle Ages, dated to 1428, is the Al-kalām ʿala al-aghdhiya of al-Arbūlī, a scholar working during the Nasrid reign in Granada. Al-Arbūlī mentions the word kaʿk, a kind of cake that is originally Egyptian, and not Persian, which may be the ancestor of the Sicilian cassata. In Andalusia, it referred to as a kind of round or twisted bread loaf or cake with a hole in the middle. Michele Amari, the preeminent historian of the Arabs in Sicily, was the first to note, in his monumental study Storia dei musulmani di sicilia (History of the Muslims in Sicily, 1868), that vestigial Arabisms permeated the Sicilian language most especially in the areas of sweet making, agriculture, and hydrology. It seems quite possible that cassata was part of this Arab-influenced repertoire of Sicilian cooks.
See also fruit preserves; marzipan; middle east; persia; sponge cake; sugar; and torte.
cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz), also called mandioca, manioc, aipim, and yuca, is an Amerindian staple food native to Brazil. By the time the Europeans arrived in the New World, it had already spread throughout South America and the Caribbean basin. Through programs of plant exchange cassava was introduced into the tropics, reaching Africa and Asia in the seventeenth century. Early Brazilian documents refer to the root as “bread,” and the flour processed from it soon came to be used as a wheat substitute in baking when combined with sugar or molasses. See molasses and sugar. Because cassava is often planted on small farms, it plays an important role in preserving local cultures. Today, Nigeria is the world’s largest producer of cassava.
When peeled, cassava can vary in color from white to mustard yellow. All types of cassava contain a poisonous substance, hydrocyanic acid. Bitter cassava, with its higher poison content, is fit for consumption only after having been processed into flour. The roots must be laboriously peeled, washed, grated, compressed, and slowly heated to produce different kinds of flour, depending on the intended use. The finer the flour, the more elegant the resulting cakes and porridges will be. Grainier flours are mainly boiled for use as a starchy accompaniment to savory dishes.
Starchy cassava, or manioc, root is an important tropical staple that is processed into flour or made into tapioca to thicken puddings and sauces. The Dutch painter Albert Eckhout captured the plant’s beauty in his Still Life with Manioc (1640).
Sweet cassava is less poisonous and is therefore appropriate for home cooking; it has to be peeled and well washed before being used raw, cooked, or fermented for a couple of days in water. As the leftover water from washing the cassava roots evaporates, it results in a very fine powder, the starch, used as a thickener in puddings and sauces and also to make tapioca. See tapioca.
Thanks to cassava’s high starch content, desserts made from it typically have a soft texture midway between that of a cake and a pudding. Sweet and golden, they were originally based on Portuguese and Spanish recipes that include a generous amount of sugar and eggs. See egg yolk sweets; portugal; and spain. Examples are Filipino cassava cake, Brazilian bolo de aipim, and Vietnamese sticky coconut cassava cake, which incorporates mung bean purée in the batter.
See also brazil.
See sugar.
castoreum is a fragrant food additive harvested from castor sacs at the base of a beaver’s tail. Beavers discharge castoreum, a yellowish, viscous fluid, from their cloacal opening to mark their territories. In high concentrations, the substance can be quite pungent; diluted, it exudes a musky, leathery smell.
The unique scent is derived from the beaver’s diet. Scientists believe that antifeedants (predator-repelling chemicals) found in many trees are distilled by the beaver’s body into castoreum’s rich blend of phenolic and neutral compounds.
Castoreum can be extracted either by milking a live beaver or excising the castor sacs from a dead one. The conjoined castor sacs (historically, often misidentified as testicles) are then dried, transforming the castoreum within into a hard, brown, resin-like substance that can be diluted into an extract or oil.
Castoreum has been used in perfumes and medicines for millennia, but its use in food appears to be a more recent phenomenon. Since at least the 1920s, beaver extract has been used as an occasional flavoring ingredient in baked goods, candies, puddings, beverages, and gum—commonly as a vanilla substitute. Castoreum has also been used to flavor cigarettes and is the featured ingredient of the Swedish schnapps BVR HJT.
The additive rarely appears in mass-produced foods, since beaver posterior is a limited, and elusive, resource. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classifies castoreum as safe for consumption and does not require its explicit identification on nutrition labels. Instead, the rodent secretion is listed as “natural flavoring.”
See dental caries.
celebration cakes mark special occasions, from birthdays to religious holidays to family and civic gatherings. In the late summer of 1598, a German lawyer touring the English countryside passed a wooden cart piled high with a flower-strewn load of wheat, in which a group of people shouted as they waved a “richly dressed” effigy. This tourist was glimpsing the celebration of an ongoing harvest festival, one of many communitarian festivities staged in early modern England under the auspices of local manors or Anglican churches. Variously celebrating agricultural events (sheep washing or shearing), saints’ days and religious holidays, and ancient calendar days like May Day and Midsummer, these festivals featured music, dancing, games, mumming, and Maypole frolicking, as well as plenty of drink and special foods, including, if the hosts were generous, a great cake baked in the capacious oven of the manor house or rectory. The private celebrations of the privileged, too, were highlighted by great cakes—manorial court day, commencement day at Oxford and Cambridge, Christmas and Twelfth Night, funerals, and, above all, weddings. See christmas; funerals; twelfth night cake; and wedding.
A great cake was typically compounded of a peck, or 14 pounds, of the finest, whitest wheat flour and enriched with butter, cream, eggs, spices, and a touch of costly sugar. And it was always stuffed with masses of the small raisins called currants, which the English imported from Corinth (hence the name) in such huge quantities that an English travel writer remarked, in 1617, that the Greeks must think that the English used the fruits to dye cloth or feed hogs. Thus, the cake weighed some 35 pounds and stretched 3 or 4 feet across, making it, indeed, a great—or large—cake, and when slicked with a hard white “ice” or “frost” of egg whites and sugar, as it often was, it made a spectacular climax to the celebration. See icing. The Elizabethan great cake was raised with the yeasty froth skimmed from fermenting ale, and to us it would taste like nothing more than good raisin bread. But to Tudor farm folk, inured to the coarsest black bread eked out with rye, oats, and peas, it was a tremendous treat.
Celebration Cakes Come to America
The English great cake came to America with the earliest English colonists, but many of its original occasions did not. In place of the loathed religious red-letter days of the Anglican Church, as well as the ancient calendar days like May Day, which the Puritans deprecated as pagan, the New England Puritans promulgated various secular holidays, the earliest of which was Connecticut’s Election Day, whose boisterous celebration of drink and great cake at the colonial court in Hartford was already renowned throughout English North America by 1700. Amelia Simmons, America’s first cookbook author, installed Election Cake into enduring memory when she printed a recipe for a great Election Cake weighing close to 100 pounds. Several other American secular holidays also came to be celebrated with great cakes: university commencement days (originally celebrated in connection with Harvard and Yale), Thanksgiving Day, and, to a lesser extent, Independence Day. And early American weddings—and funerals, too—often featured great cakes. Samuel Sewall, one of the judges who condemned the witches of Salem, made several references in his diary to enjoying wedding and funeral great cakes, sometimes with cheese and sometimes with the hot sherry-spiked custard drink called posset, a favorite English cake accompaniment.
Special cakes baked to mark religious and secular occasions have been around for millennia. In this 1960 photograph, little boys in the Netherlands gather around a yuletide cake dusted with powdered sugar and festively decorated with pine branches. national archives of the netherlands
American cookbook authors continued to outline modernized (and usually batch-baked, in large quantity) recipes for yeasted, fruited election, Thanksgiving, and commencement cakes into the late nineteenth century. The survival of these cakes was partly nostalgic, but, especially in the case of wedding cakes, it was also practical. These cakes were far cheaper and easier to make than their more modern—and fancier—counterpart, the plum cake. This cake emerged in England around 1700 and took its name from its trove of raisins and currants, which the English came to call “plums” around 1660. Plum cake was not raised by yeast but rather by beating air into roughly equal weights of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. When made with a pound each of the basic materials and 4 to 5 pounds of fruit, as was typical, the cake filled a pan 14 inches across and 2 to 3 inches deep—not as gargantuan as the great cakes of yore but still an impressive cake, especially if meringue-frosted, and plenty for at least 50 people, as the cake is rich. Plum cake—often called black cake or fruitcake after 1830—reigned as the standard American celebration cake through the time of the Civil War. As cookbook author Eliza Leslie told her readers, “at the close of the evening,” it was “usual to send round a large plum-cake” to cap the festivities. Families who celebrated Christmas and Twelfth Night did so with a fine plum cake, and fruitcake was the only genteel choice for a wedding cake, not that everyone could afford one. Birthday and anniversary fruitcakes were still featured in cookbooks published into the 1930s, and wedding fruitcakes, which became tiered and acquired soft icings in the early twentieth century, remained commonplace into the 1960s. Christmas fruitcakes are still treasured by many today. See fruitcake and wedding cake.
Celebration Cakes after the Civil War
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ever more Americans came to celebrate an ever-greater range of occasions, and in more varied and generally more lavish ways. Americans of the more privileged half were becoming wealthier, and their lives easier, due to innumerable technological advances, and they found all sorts of new excuses to party—birthdays, wedding anniversaries, high school graduations, job promotions, retirements, and even whimsical non-occasions, like the change of seasons, a favorite theme of ladies’ luncheons. Instructions, often detailed, for luncheons, afternoon tea parties, dinner parties, and evening parties honoring such events appear in not only cookbooks but also etiquette and entertainment books. And many of the plans entail a special cake.
There were reasons for this. By the time of the Civil War, nearly all American households had given up cooking at the hearth in favor of cooking at the enclosed iron stove, whose easily reheated oven made cake baking a much simpler affair than formerly, especially since American women by this time had embraced much cheaper, quicker, more surefire recipes for cake, the linchpin of which was chemical leavening. See chemical leaveners. Meanwhile, technology had gifted the kitchen with cheaper cake ingredients in more convenient forms—whiter flour, granulated sugar, vegetable shortening, and innumerable flavoring extracts and food colorings—as well as the Dover egg beater, mass-manufactured cake pans in myriad sizes and shapes, and, for the ambitious, pastry bags and tips. Inevitably, American women went on a cake-baking spree. See pans; pastry tools; and whisks and beaters.
One stunning consequence of the new enthusiasm for parties and party cakes was the rise of the children’s birthday party, with its attendant cake. Before the Civil War, people simply did not throw birthday parties for children, and while they might prepare something special for the little ones on their birthdays, they did not bake cakes for them. (Catharine Beecher, in her influential cookbook of 1845, suggests an apple bread pudding as a children’s birthday treat.) But in her cookbook of 1912, Fannie Farmer unveiled for her upper-middling readers “Birthday Cake for a Three-Year-Old.” See farmer, fannie. Shown in a full-page photograph, the cake is quite a project: a fashionable new angel cake covered with smooth white icing and decorated in stunning art nouveau style, with daisies made from small nonpareil candies, roses assembled from candied rose petals, and foliage carved from thinly sliced citron. The cake is to be crowned with “three small candles placed in rose cups” made of hard sugar paste, which Farmer helpfully adds “may be bought of first-class city grocers.” The early twentieth century seems to have marked the zenith of American women’s cake-decorating ambitions. See cake decorating. In later cookbooks, celebration cakes, birthday and otherwise, are typically festooned only with a few squiggles and rosettes of colored icing and a few artfully placed candied cherries or nutmeats.
It is not possible to speak of a standard American celebration cake after the Civil War because all fashionable cakes were dragooned for celebration purposes—and fashions in cakes were ever changing. Yet there were, perhaps, some usual choices. In 1872 southern cookbook author Mrs. Porter unveiled the White Mountain Cake, a five-layer yellow cake filled and covered with meringue frosting, which, Porter enthused, was “very nice indeed, particularly for weddings and parties.” Shortly after the advent of the White Mountain Cake there emerged various red-on-white butter cakes, some layer and others loaf. See layer cake. The most popular of these cakes for receptions and other large parties was the watermelon cake, a tube cake featuring a white outer layer and a deep-red, currant-flecked core—and sometimes a green icing to complete the conceit. In the mid-twentieth century the reddened-cake idea somehow coalesced into the red velvet cake, which lay low for decades before recently becoming a mega-celebration cake, favored these days even for weddings.
During the mid-twentieth century the angel cake and the white butter cake were frequently pressed into celebratory service. See angel food cake. Angel cake was prized for its ethereal softness and towering height, and the white butter cake was loved for its delicate crumb and richness. But what really made both cakes special was their stark white color, which had exerted a peculiar fascination over American women since the invention, in the 1830s, of the white butter cake’s grand predecessor, the lady cake, a white pound cake flavored with bitter almonds and rosewater. See pound cake. In her cookbook of 1857, Eliza Leslie wrote that a lady cake, when iced “entirely with white” and decorated with “white flowers,” was “now much in use at weddings, and if well made, and quite fresh, there is no cake better liked.” Leslie meant “in use” as the so-called bride’s cake, not the wedding cake proper, which would have been a fruitcake, of course. But, by the 1940s, lady cake had indeed trumped fruitcake as the standard wedding cake, at least according to Joy of Cooking author Irma Rombauer, who wrote that her lady cake “tastes and looks like a traditional wedding cake, that is, traditional since fruit cake fell from grace.”
As Irma Rombauer clearly foresaw, another cake would soon enough replace the white cakes and all other cakes as America’s favorite celebration cake for all occasions—and would become America’s favorite cake, period. In the same edition of Joy, trailing a weary resignation, she wrote, “After entertaining I often wonder whether it is worthwhile to bake anything but chocolate cake.” Rombauer was flummoxed by the cake’s “overwhelming popularity” and could only declare, “Undoubtedly, chocolate cake has ‘it.’”
See also cake; chiffon cake; chocolate, post-columbian; flour; and rombauer, irma starkloff.
charlotte designates two types of dessert, one baked, the other not. The types are represented in two of the most famous charlotte recipes: the first, charlotte aux pommes, or apple charlotte, is formed in a charlotte mold lined with buttered bread or brioche, filled with cooked fruit, then baked; the second is for charlotte russe, for which the mold is lined with ladyfingers, filled with flavored cream or bavarois (Bavarian cream), and chilled. Both types of charlotte are deftly flipped upside down and unmolded before serving, making for an elegant presentation.
Viard’s Cuisinier impérial (1806) has what appears to be the first published apple charlotte recipe. The apples are peeled and cored, cut into small pieces, and cooked with sugar and cinnamon. Viard describes the texture of the cooked apples as a marmalade (or compote), which gives an idea of how thick the fruit filling must be so that the dessert will not collapse when it is turned out of the mold. While the apples cool, bread is cut into thin slices of equal size. They are dipped into warm melted butter and then arranged snugly and symmetrically around the mold. The filling is poured in, a hole is made in the middle of the apple filling to hold thick apricot purée, more buttered bread slices are symmetrically arranged around the top, and then the whole concoction is baked. In later recipes, the bottom of the mold is lined with buttered bread, as that becomes the top of the charlotte when served.
One of the most popular British cookbooks of the early nineteenth century, Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery, included a recipe for apple charlotte in the 1808 revised edition published in London by John Murray, two years after the first edition of the book appeared. The origins of the charlotte are quite murky, some claiming it to be a late-eighteenth-century English confection named for the wife of King George III, Queen Charlotte. Others claim it is French.
French chef Marie-Antoine Carême took credit for the creation of the cold charlotte à la parisienne, or charlotte russe. See carême, marie-antoine. He offered several cold charlotte recipes in his first book, Le pâtissier royal parisien (1815). Carême writes that while he had designated this charlotte à la parisienne, others named it à la russe (“in the Russian style”). The bottom of the mold is lined with ladyfingers cut into a decorative design—a star in Carême’s case—or simply triangles. The sides are lined with upright ladyfingers, which can be frosted (as Carême instructs) or soaked in liqueur-flavored sugar syrup. Carême instructs the cook to fill the charlotte with vanilla Bavarian cream and cover the cream with more ladyfingers. The charlotte is chilled until it is firm enough to keep its shape when unmolded. The first edition of Le pâtissier royal parisien includes Carême’s own drawing of charlotte à la parisienne, but it lacks the star design he specifies in the recipe.
Apple charlotte is equally good made with pears, peaches, plums, or any fruit that can keep a stiff consistency after cooking. Instead of Bavarian cream of any flavor, a cold charlotte can be made with Chantilly cream (charlotte à la Chantilly), a delicate almond cream (charlotte Malakoff), chocolate mousse, or even ice cream (filled immediately before serving). The addition of gelatin to either a fruit or cream filling helps to ensure that the filling is firm enough to keep the bread or ladyfingers from collapsing after unmolding. See gelatin.
The classic charlotte mold is deep, made of metal with high sides; it flares out slightly from bottom to top. Two flat metal handles near the top help with the unmolding. The extra width at the top of the mold creates a more stable bottom when the dessert is turned upside down on the serving plate. Exactly when the mold came into use is an open question. Many nineteenth-century cookbook illustrations show the unmolded charlotte with perfectly straight sides. Jules Gouffé’s Livre de pâtisserie (1873) includes an illustration of a “dessert mold” (moule d’entremets) that differs from the one we use today only in having straight, not flared, sides. Urban-Dubois’s Pâtisserie d’aujourd’hui (1894) illustrates a straight-sided mold accompanying the recipe for cooked apple charlotte, and a flared mold next to the cold charlotte russe. The early-twentieth-century catalog of the restaurant supply company J. Jacquotot in Paris indicates that both straight-sided and flared molds were called charlotte molds at that time.
See also confectionery equipment and publications, trade.
Chase, Oliver (1821–1902) set up an apothecary business in Boston, Massachusetts, as a young English immigrant in 1847. His trade involved cutting out medicinal lozenges by hand from a mixture of sugar paste and bitter medicines. See medicinal uses of sugar. Soon he began making candy lozenges from a basic recipe of sugar, gelatin, and flavorings. To improve the process, he patented the first American candy-making machine, a lozenge cutter. Chase’s wafers were round to distinguish them from other lozenges that were generally diamond shaped.
His machine looked like a clothes wringer. A sheet of candy paste was fed into one end and circular wafers emerged as brass dies on the roller stamped out the candy disks. Chase and his brother Silas Edwin founded Chase and Company that same year, setting up a small factory in South Boston. Their first product was “Chase Lozenges,” the forerunner of the now-famous NECCO Wafer. Other successful candies they later made include Canada Mints and Sweethearts.
Chase’s wafers were about the size of a quarter and came wrapped in glassine paper. See candy packaging. This durable candy with a long shelf life was the first candy sold in multipiece rolls. Chase’s NECCO Wafers (1840s), Hershey Bars (1880s), and Tootsie Rolls (1890s) are probably the three oldest candies sold today in their original form. See hershey’s and tootsie roll.
Two other candy companies competed with the Chase company: Daniel Fobes’s Hayward and Co., founded in 1848, and Bird, Wright and Co. (later known as Wright and Moody), which began production in 1856. The three companies combined in 1901 to form the New England Confectionery Company (NECCO). NECCO is one of the oldest candy companies in the United States.
See also necco.
cheese, fresh, meaning cheese that is eaten without a period of ripening, can be made from any dairy animal’s milk. Since prehistoric times, cow’s, goat’s, and sheep’s milk have been the basis of most kinds of fresh cheese. Either whole milk, skim milk, or cream can be used.
Before pasteurization, the milk was left to sour through the natural action of lactic acid bacteria; today, it is usually inoculated with bacterial cultures of the “mesophilic” type (suited for growth at temperatures between about 75° and 90°F [24° to 32°C]). Rennet or another source of enzymes may be added to further promote coagulation. Once the casein sets into a curd, it is drained and pressed to expel more whey. Renneted curd may be gently heated to firm up the texture and cut into pieces so as to present a larger surface area for efficient whey drainage. Rennetless cheeses generally omit heating or curd-cutting. The fat content of the milk or cream, the mixture of different bacterial species, the pH of the cultured milk, the strength of the enzyme solution, and the temperature to which the curd is heated are the chief variables affecting the flavor and texture of the finished cheese. Sometimes a little cream is worked back into skim-milk cheese for added richness.
Before refrigeration, fresh cheeses were simple farm products, slightly less perishable than milk but too short-lived to travel far to market. They predate modern manufacturing technology and tend to have an unsystematic array of names. In English, these include clabber (now obsolete), cottage cheese, pot cheese, farmer cheese, and (in the United Kingdom) curd cheese. French fromage blanc, German Quark or Topfen, and Russian tvorog are other members of the family. American commercial cream cheese and its reduced-fat cousin Neufchatel (unrelated to the Neufchatel cheese of Normandy) require special description (see below). The popular versions of Italian ricotta and Indian panir made by adding lemon juice or other acidulants to boiling milk are not true cheeses produced by culturing or renneting, but in a pinch they are roughly interchangeable with some kinds of fresh cheese.
When fresh cheeses are used without further cooking, their freshness is their charm. The simplest presentations are lightly sugared and eaten with fresh cream and a few “sweet” spices, or paired with berries or other fruits. Clabber was long served this way in the American South until pasteurization became universal after World War II. Farmstead fresh cheeses had begun declining much earlier in the North, though large influxes of Eastern European immigrants (especially Ashkenazic Jews) revived the idea in major American cities late in the nineteenth century.
This immigrant wave helped fuel a comeback for fresh cheeses during a great early-twentieth-century expansion of the dairy industry. Commercial versions of cottage cheese, promoted during World War I as a patriotic meat substitute, were soon advertised as a low-calorie dieter’s aid. Cream cheese, previously a generic name for various sorts of fresh cheese made by draining ripened cream, became synonymous with cheese cultured and packaged by a special “hot-pack” process involving gum stabilizers, developed at the Geneva Experiment Station in New York State in the late 1920s and also used for Neufchatel. Other versions of fresh cheese arrived after the 1980s along with new waves of immigrants from the old Soviet bloc.
Fresh cheeses—preferably dry, close-textured farmer cheese, pot cheese, or Russian tvorog—are popular fillings in strudels and other pastries. Ordinary cottage cheese is too wet and coarse-textured for the purpose without prior draining, pressing, and sieving. The same is true of Russian syrniki or tvorozhniki (lightly sweetened cheese fritters) and paskha, the celebrated Easter dish made by combining tvorog, butter, cream, sugar, and egg yolks and letting the smoothly beaten mixture drain in a special mold (or in a pinch, a flowerpot). See russia.
The most famous American fresh-cheese dessert is cheesecake. The name has historically been applied to several different sweets but during the twentieth century came to mean either a sort of custard of smoothly combined fresh cheese, sugar, cream, and eggs baked in a shortbread-like or regular pie pastry crust, or a similar dessert with a crust of zwieback or graham cracker crumbs, sometimes chilled without baking. The preferred cheese was farmer or drained cottage cheese until the late 1920s, when Kraft Foods acquired an upstate New York company then making cream cheese under the brand name “Philadelphia” (a city formerly renowned for excellent cream cheeses). At this time, “hot pack” manufacturing was boosting nationwide cream cheese sales. Kraft developed a cheesecake recipe using its packaged cream cheese just as two New York City restaurants (Lindy’s and Reuben’s) began touting cheesecakes based on a similar formula. See cheesecake and new york city. Today, most commercial as well as homemade cheesecakes employ cream cheese, sometimes with other ingredients such as pumpkin purée or chocolate (which may be swirled in for a marbled effect). Sweet fruit toppings, usually glazed, are popular.
cheesecake, originally a cooked pastry tart with a filling of soft cheese, eggs, spices, and sometimes honey, has evolved over the centuries into a nearly infinite variety of cakes whose creamy filling may be baked or unbaked on a sponge, cookie, or pastry base. The precise origin of cheesecakes remains unknown, but cakes containing cheese were served to athletes in Greece at the first Olympic Games in 776 b.c.e. The ancient Greeks enjoyed a layered pastry of goat’s cheese and honey called plakous; Athenaeus lists a wide range of cheese-enriched cakes in the Deipnosophists. See ancient world; athenaeus; and placenta.
Early Cheesecakes
Although cheesecakes were recorded in England as early as 1265, when “cheese for tarts” was listed in the account books of the countess of Leicester, the earliest cheesecake recipe in England appeared in 1390 in Forme of Cury, the first English cookery book. It was a pastry shell baked with a filling of cheese, egg yolks, ginger, saffron, sugar, and salt. Medieval luxury fare was characterized by the use of expensive spices, sugar, and imported dried fruits, ingredients that became status symbols for the self-indulgent elite. Thus, cheesecakes were regarded as luxury foods.
Early French cookbooks, such as Le ménagier de Paris (a medieval manuscript from around 1393), included recipes for tarts and cakes made with fresh cheese. A modern version, gâteau au fromage blanc, consists of fresh cheese, crème fraîche, sugar, eggs, flour, lemon zest, and vanilla baked in a dish or tin until golden.
The cheese mentioned in English medieval recipes for tarts was usually a soft, rich cheese known as “ruayn” or “rewain.” The seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn wrote that the best time to make the cheese is when the “cows go in Ravens.” This term is a variant of the word “rowan” or “rewain,” the second crop of rough grass or hay that provided autumn and winter fodder for cows. The soft cheese was mixed with egg yolks, sugar, and spices and baked in a pastry “coffyn.” See pie. Other ingredients were frequently added, such as saffron, spices, and dried fruits. Green cheese, a moist, soft cheese named for its newness, was also used. This fresh, young “gren” cheese was pounded and sieved, then mixed with egg whites, ground almonds, and sugar and baked in a pastry case. New cheese was also made from “beestings”—the first thick yellow milk (colostrum) from a newly calved cow.
Brie imported from France was familiar in medieval England. “Tart de Bry,” mentioned in the Forme of Cury, included egg yolks, sugar, ginger, and saffron. Another similar recipe called for “nessh” (a soft, fresh curd cheese), butter, and whole eggs, but no ginger or saffron.
Medieval cheese tarts survived virtually unchanged into the Elizabethan era; small cheese tarts, known today as Maid of Honor tarts, were reputed to be a favorite of Anne Boleyn. Soft cheeses and curds were also used to make boiled and baked puddings at this time. Their popularity may have led to the omission of the pastry case altogether in some recipes; by the seventeenth century, such dishes were commonly known as cheesecakes. Intriguingly, several recipes omitted the cheese entirely. These “cheesecakes” contained ground almonds or flour, but no cheese. A clue to their name comes from a recipe in Richard Bradley’s The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director (1728), where he instructs that the filling of lemon peel, hard-boiled egg yolks, cream, orange flower water, sugar, and butter be beaten “as will render it of the Consistence of Cheescake-meat.”
Modern Cheesecakes
Cheesecakes are popular throughout the world, made with whatever soft cheese is available. For over a thousand years, young white cheeses have been employed in making cheesecakes. Examples include Anari in Cyprus (made from sheep’s milk or a mixture of sheep’s, goat’s, and cow’s milk), Lor in Turkey (sheep’s or cow’s whey), Manouri or Myzithra in Greece (sheep’s, goat’s, or cow’s milk), ricotta in Italy (cow’s, sheep’s, goat’s, or water buffalo’s whey), Brocciu in Corsica (sheep’s or goat’s whey and milk), Urdă in Romania (sheep’s or goat’s whey), Quark in Germany and the Netherlands (cow’s milk), and tvorog in Russia and Poland (cow’s milk). Cheesecakes are prevalent throughout Eastern Europe: the glory of the Russian Easter table is the pyramidal paskha, rich with tvorog, sour cream, heavy cream, and butter; and sernik (cheesecake) is so popular in Poland that it is regarded as a national dish. Sernik may be baked or unbaked with the addition of poppy seeds or raisins, and it is sometimes topped with fruit and jam, poppy seeds, or chocolate. Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States, Western Europe, and Great Britain retained a particular affection for cheesecakes, which are traditional for the festival of Shavuot that celebrates the giving of the Torah to the Jews on Mount Sinai. See judaism.
Tarts filled with fresh cheese, often sweetened and spiced, are common in medieval and Renaissance Italian sources. The seventeenth-century Tuscan writer Antonio Frugoli, in his 1631 Pratica e Scalcaria, wrote at length about the uses of ricotta in cooking, including in tarts and as a filling. The traditional Easter tart of Naples, la pastiera, is made with ricotta, spices, and candied fruit baked in a pastry case. See holiday sweets. The nineteenth-century cookbook author Pellegrino Artusi described budino alla ricotta, made with sugar, eggs, almonds, and lemons, as well as a similar tart that was a favorite wedding dish of peasants in Emilia-Romagna. Even Sicilian cassata could be described as a sort of cheesecake. See cassata.
Many modern cheesecakes, particularly in the United States and Canada, use cream cheese and may be baked or unbaked; the latter have a cookie crumb base and an uncooked filling of rich cream cheese, sometimes set with gelatin. In 1872 William Lawrence, a New York dairy farmer, made an especially cream-rich cheese in the style of French Neufchatel. It was eventually branded as “Philadelphia Cream Cheese,” after the then-fashionable city, and became the popular choice for cheesecakes. Lawrence’s company was eventually acquired by Kraft, and the formula changed entirely in the 1920s. Today’s foil-wrapped bricks of soft cheese get much of their texture from the gums added to stabilize the mixture during processing.
North America has several different types of cheesecake, but New York Cheesecake—especially the recipe made famous by Lindy’s Restaurant—has become an American classic. Dense with cream cheese, cream, eggs, and sugar and flavored with orange and lemon rind, it has a buttery short crust. Philadelphia-style cheesecake is lighter in texture; Chicago-style cheesecake is firm on the outside, and soft and creamy inside; and Pennsylvania Dutch cheesecake uses pot or farmer’s cheese, which has large curds and a lower water content than cream cheese.
See also cheese, fresh; italy; new york city; and pennsylvania dutch.
chemical leaveners reduce the density of baked goods by introducing carbon dioxide (CO2) into doughs and batters through in situ chemical reactions. The source of the carbon dioxide is bicarbonate ion, a negatively charged ion with the chemical formula HCO3−. When mixed with an acid in a wet dough or batter, the mildly alkaline bicarbonate reacts to form gaseous carbon dioxide and water in the form of steam. As with yeast leavening, the resulting gas bubbles create cavities in the batter, which are preserved when the batter sets up during baking, creating a less dense material. See yeast.
Compared to leavening with yeast, chemical leavening is a recent development, first employed in the early nineteenth century. It was initially considered a poor substitute for yeast leavening, despite being a faster and more reliable method than the yeast leavenings available at the time. Quick breads are leavened with chemical leaveners, not yeast, taking their name from the speed of the rising, minutes instead of hours.
The usual culinary source of bicarbonate ion is baking soda, which has the chemical name sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3). The positively charged sodium ion does not participate in the reaction between bicarbonate and acids; chemists classify it as a spectator ion. As sodium’s only role is to serve as an electrical counterbalance to the negatively charged bicarbonate ion, many other positively charged counter ions can and are used without affecting the leavening reaction. Historically, both potassium and sodium bicarbonates have been used in baked goods. Saleratus (from the Latin for “aerated salts”), an early commercial chemical leavener, was a mixture of both potassium and sodium bicarbonate. Hartshorn, or ammonium carbonate (NH4)2 CO3 , can be used as a leavening agent, producing ammonia in addition to carbon dioxide and water. Ammonium carbonate decomposes to produce ammonia gas and bicarbonate with an ammonium (NH4 +) counter ion at low temperatures. While the ammonia gas adds leavening power, hartshorn can be used only in doughs and batters where the gas can escape upon baking; otherwise, the final product will smell and taste of ammonia. Hartshorn was, and occasionally still is, called for in traditional Scandinavian and German baking to produce crisp, well-formed cookies.
Regardless of its source, each bicarbonate ion produces one molecule of carbon dioxide upon reaction with acid. A teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate will release almost 5 liters of carbon dioxide at 350°F (177°C), enough to inflate a balloon about 8 inches in diameter, or acceptably leaven one cup of flour.
Not every dough or batter contains enough acid to convert all of the bicarbonate into carbon dioxide. Early chemically leavened recipes called for the addition of sour milk, a source of lactic acid. See milk. Subsequently, baking powders were developed. These powders contain an acid in dry form, along with a source of bicarbonate (usually baking soda). Carriers, such as cornstarch, are added to keep the acid and bicarbonate separate and dry, preventing a premature reaction. When baking powder is mixed with wet ingredients the reaction proceeds, releasing carbon dioxide and water.
Common dry baking acids include calcium monophosphate (Ca(H2PO4)2), sodium acid pyrophosphate (Na4P2O7), sodium aluminum sulfate (NaAl(SO4)2), and cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate, K(HC4H4O6)). Once the powder comes into contact with water, the speed of the reaction with bicarbonate depends on the identity and form of the dry acid. Calcium monophosphate reacts quickly, liberating two-thirds of bicarbonate’s load of carbon dioxide in less than two minutes at room temperature. Sodium aluminum sulfate triggers the reaction only when heated. The rate of release can be controlled by altering the physical form of the powder. Coating the grains of calcium monophosphate slows the reaction, as does increasing the size of the sodium acid pyrophosphate granules.
Single-acting baking powders produce a single release of carbon dioxide, while double-acting powders have two waves of carbon dioxide production, achieved by blending two or more forms of dry baking acids. The first, rapid rise is usually provided by calcium monophosphate. Sodium aluminum sulfate is an ideal second-stage leavening agent, as it is not activated until heated and thus produces a consistent “spring” (the extra rise achieved during baking). Those concerned about aluminum in the diet can find double-acting powder that uses a blend of uncoated and coated calcium monophosphate to provide the two stages. Sodium acid pyrophosphate is used commercially for the second rise, as it has a long shelf life, though it is limited to sweet goods that can mask its unpalatable aftertaste.
A simple home replacement for commercial baking powder can be made by blending cream of tartar and baking soda in a 2 to 1 volume ratio. An equal amount of cornstarch or arrowroot can be added to prolong the storage life of the mixture. Self-rising flour is flour that has baking powder added to it, and instant biscuit mixes also contain baking powder. Adding water to either triggers the leavening reaction.
See also breads, sweet; flour; and starch.
See pie.
chestnuts, once a savior for poorer communities lacking sufficient food, continue to be treasured in the form of desserts, particularly at Christmas, New Year, christenings, weddings, and feasts. Thanks to their natural sweetness, these nutritious nuts are aptly named “sweet chestnuts.”
In 1780 Antoine Parmentier, the French apothecary who taught the French to eat potatoes, discovered he could extract sugar from the chestnut. He formed this sugar into an impressively large cone weighing several pounds and sent it to the Academy at Lyon for consideration as a sugar source in place of regular cane sugar. Although chestnut sugar made transparent crystals that tasted similar to cane and beet sugar, Napoleon decided that France should prepare its own sugar from beets, whose processing was cheaper, so chestnut sugar fell by the wayside. See sugar beet. Nevertheless, the sweetness of the chestnuts themselves makes them perfect for inclusion in all kinds of confectionery, puddings, and sweet baked desserts.
Chestnut trees can grow to massive proportions. A favorite one near Mount Etna in Sicily is reputed to have sheltered 100 horsemen in a storm. The main edible varieties are the Castanea sativa of southern Europe, the Caucasus, and North Africa; China’s Castanea mollissima; and Japan’s Castanea crenata. Until the nineteenth century, Castanea dentata were found in huge quantities in the United States, but up to 3 billion of these trees fell victim to chestnut blight. The trees all but disappeared, and the habit of eating chestnuts dwindled to a minor role at Thanksgiving.
Chestnuts are highly nutritious, and few other foods are as healthy. They have saved many lives in hard times; in eighteenth-century Périgord, the local peasants ate little else but boiled chestnuts and bread, polenta, or cakes made from chestnut flour for six months of the year or more. Although the main reputation of chestnuts has been as “the bread of the poor” (in southern France, the tree is nicknamed l’arbre à pain or “bread tree”), they have also, for centuries, been eaten for pleasure. Hot roasted chestnuts perfume the streets in China, the Balkans, Europe, and the Mediterranean in the autumn, and chestnut flour is still much liked in cakes, biscuits, and fritters. Roasted or boiled chestnuts were enjoyed by nuns and monks and at the tables of noblemen, often paired with fresh fruit for dessert. They were served at a banquet held in Périgueux in 1773 for Comte Arlot de la Roque, at which 38 main courses and eight desserts were presented, including two dishes of waffles, four compotes, two iced cheeses, pralines, marzipan, macarons, and chestnuts.
Chestnut Products
Marrons glacés, chestnuts candied in sugar syrup, are decidedly bonbons de luxe. See candied fruit. Said to have originated in the time of Louis XIV, they were probably known in Piedmont as early as 1450 and were once a “must” at any high-class wedding.
In 1882 Clément Faugier in the Ardéche invented the invaluable crème de marrons using broken pieces of marrons glacés; this spread can still be obtained in tins and tubes and is ideal for cooking desserts and sweets. While commercially made crème de marrons is light and delicate, manufactured chestnut products can vary considerably in quality. Purée de marrons in a tin is often dull, and tinned chestnuts are usually tasteless. Vacuum-packed chestnuts can be very good for use in savory dishes, whereas dried chestnuts are mainly used for puréed soup or polenta or ground into flour. However, fresh chestnuts are always best.
Sweets and Desserts
Chestnuts combine perfectly with chocolate, cinnamon, cream, rum, vanilla, and orange. Maltese chestnut tartlets, pastizotti tal-qastan, are flavored with marmalade, orange, tangerine, or lemon rind, rum, and chocolate—only one teaspoon of sugar is needed to sweeten the filling. Christmas breakfast in Malta consists of chestnut soup, imbuljuta, eaten after midnight mass. It is made with dried chestnuts, cocoa, sugar, and tangerine peel cooked with the chestnut soaking water.
In Corsica the chestnut was once an essential part of life, dried in the upper stories of the house by the smoke of the open chimney ( fucone) and ground into flour to make a variety of sweet dishes. Nicci were little cakes cooked on chestnut leaves. At weddings, guests enjoyed up to 22 different chestnut desserts, flavored with wild fennel, walnuts, vanilla, honey, rum, eau-de-vie, or curd cheese.
Although chestnuts are no longer a food of necessity in Europe, they remain culturally important. In southern France and certain regions of Italy, chestnuts are still part of the 13 desserts offered to the Christ child on Christmas Eve and at christenings. Castagnaccio, a flat cake made with chestnut flour flavored with rosemary, pine nuts, and raisins or sultanas, is an Italian classic. Marrons Mont Blanc, glossy, sweetened chestnut purée piped into a cone shape to resemble a mountain, then covered with crème Chantilly to resemble snow, remains a celebratory French dessert.
Iced Nesselrode Pudding, popular in the nineteenth century and named after the Russian foreign minister Count Karl Nesselrode, contains chestnut purée, vanilla, maraschino, egg yolks, thick cream, and brandied dried fruits. An offspring of Nesselrode Pudding, Nesselrode Pie, with a filling of chestnuts, cream, eggs, gelatin, rum, and candied fruits and a topping of grated chocolate, became a favorite American sweet of the 1950s. Peking Dust, mashed chestnuts studded with glacé fruits, particularly cherries, and eaten at Chinese New Year, might be considered a relative of Nesselrode Pudding. (Westernized versions include cream and brandy.) In Japan, New Year is celebrated with Kuri Kinton, a classic dish of mashed sweet potato with chestnuts in chestnut syrup and mirin. The beautiful golden color of the dish symbolizes wealth.
See also nuts.
chewing gum is made of any number of cohesive and sticky substances that people chew but do not swallow. It can be as simple as the naturally flavored sap of a tree or as complex as artificially flavored hydrocarbon polymers like styrene butadiene rubber.
Early History
Black lumps of birch bark tar with well-defined human tooth impressions dating back to 7000 b.c.e., the Early Mesolithic era, have been found in Germany, Scandinavia, and elsewhere in Northern Europe. No one knows for certain whether prehistoric people chewed tar for purposes of pleasure, stimulation, medicine, and/or ritual. Studies of the tooth impressions indicate that the majority of chewers were children of the age when baby teeth fall out, so it may be that tar was chewed to reduce oral discomfort. Exactly how the tar was produced is also a mystery, as it can only be derived from bark under extreme heat (well over 1472°F [800°C]) and in air-free conditions, a technology known only since the Neolithic Era, beginning around 10,000 b.c.e. Sealed pots were unknown in the Early Mesolithic—perhaps the tar was formed during natural conflagrations.
There is ample evidence from around 1000 c.e. that Mayans in the Yucatan chewed on chicle, the sap of wild sapodilla trees, and that during the same era Greeks chewed on mastiche, the resin of mastic trees. Rosin from the large variety of pine trees native to the northern hemisphere, spruce in particular, has been chewed for ages. In 1848 John Curtis used spruce sap to make the world’s first commercial gum. Other natural resins and latexes that can be chewed directly from trees include the latex of jelutong trees from Borneo, Malaysia, Sumatra, and southern Thailand; and sorva, the sweet sap of the Central and South American Couma Macrocarpa tree. Today, sorva is cultivated in the Peruvian Amazon for use as rubber, plastic, medicine, and waterproofing, and is chewed by monkeys and people alike.
Modern Chewing Gum
Many people also chew on naturally occurring waxes, including paraffin, a by-product of petroleum, and it was a penny piece of paraffin chew named White Mountain that was serendipitously responsible for the creation of modern chewing gum. In the 1860s Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was several times president of Mexico and conqueror of the Alamo, had 1 ton of chicle sent from Mexico to his friend Thomas Adams Sr. in Manhattan. The plan was that the inventive Adams might discover a way to combine chicle with the sap of the rubber tree to create a less expensive blend for the making of carriage bumpers and tires. After a year of experimentation, Adams and his eldest son Thomas Jr. deemed the experiments a failure and were ready to discard the chicle when Adams Sr. happened upon a young girl asking a druggist for a penny’s worth of chewing gum—the aforementioned White Mountain—and he was struck with an idea for salvaging his chicle. The Adamses began offering chicle gumballs on consignment and met success. They expanded quickly, renting a building in Jersey City, New Jersey, where they employed a few dozen young women to hand-wrap pure, unflavored chicle in colored tissue paper and package it in boxes bearing a color picture of New York’s City Hall and environs. The new commercial product was named Adams New York No. 1 Chewing Gum, and the machine they devised to make it was awarded a patent on 14 February 1871. In 1879 William White created the first flavored chicle chewing gum by adding peppermint.
Manufacture
Chewing gum is hard to make and takes a good deal of time and care. Most twenty-first-century gum is made with three basic ingredients: gum base, softener, and flavoring. These are heated, cooled, kneaded, formed, coated, and conditioned. Chewing gum comes in stick, tablet, flake, nugget, powder, and paste form. Masticating merriment ensues when it is fancifully packaged to resemble everyday articles like checkbooks, tubs of sidewalk chalk, combination locks, and laundry soap. Artists like Betty Ruth Curtiss, Hannah Wilke, and Ben Wilson use chewing gum as their medium, and Angela Lorenz has published a book made of chewing gum titled Chewing Tzu, The Rumination Book.
In the 1990s, distressed by the plastic, rubber, and other inedible additives used by industrial gum manufacturers, boutique manufacturers like Mexico-based Chicza began producing gum in the simpler, more natural style of precommercial gum. Verve, Inc., the makers of Glee Gum, became the first fair-trade chewing gum company by employing thousands of chicleros (professional gum tree farmers) who work in a sustainable manner in the rainforests of the Peten region of Mexico and Guatemala.
Bubblegum
In 1905 twenty-three-year-old Walter Diemer, an accountant for Fleers Chewing Gum Company, tried to improve on his boss’s 1906 Blibber Blubber, a failed attempt to make bubblegum. Diemer hit on the perfect formula by accident, and distinguished the lucky batch with the last drops of food coloring in his house. Red turned pink in the test batch and thus was established the traditional soft pink color of bubblegum. Diemer summed up the importance of his work: “I’ve done something with my life. I’ve made kids happy around the world.” The Guinness Record for the world’s largest bubblegum bubble was set in 2004 at a remarkable 20 inches in diameter.
Marketing
The most famous name in chewing gum is William Wrigley Jr., who created iconic brands including Doublemint and Juicy Fruit in the factory he started in Chicago in 1898. Wrigley understood the power of marketing and once mailed free gum to over 1.5 million people listed in the U.S. phone book. His fame and fortune speak as much of gum as they do of advertising in general, and Wrigley spawned innovations like those of Topps, which began wrapping gum in comics just after World War II, and added baseball cards to gum packs in 1952.
Gum around the World
In Chewing Gum, Michael Redclift remarked, “The history of chewing gum is, at one level, an example of the globalization of taste; at another level it can be explained as the outcome of globalization.” Gum made in the United States is exported around the world and its international popularity is due in part to U.S. soldiers, who carry it wherever they go. As a result, American gum brands are often imitated with look-a-like packages and sound-a-like names such as Balonka (Yugoslavija), Wribson (Jordan), and Heart Juicy (Korea).
International tastes differ widely, and Wrigley’s has made strawberry Juicy Fruit for Spaniards and cherry-mint Orbit for Poles. Chiclets come in violet flavor in Mexico (where customers are sometimes offered candy-coated gum in lieu of small change); lemon in Thailand; and banana, peach, and apricot in Lebanon. Gum can be transnational: for example, Roma brand cardamom-flavor tablets from Guatemala are popular throughout the Arab-speaking world. Turkey is the nation with the largest number of gum manufacturers; with a few exceptions, the importation into Singapore of any chewing gum is prohibited; and Japan may be the home of gum’s most innovative styles. The Japanese are partial to the products of Korean gum manufacturer Lotte, which sells uncommon flavors like jasmine, plum, and mangosteen, as well as gums targeted at young ladies like Glamatic, which comes in a holographic blue and silver wrapper with rainbows, seahorses, and kissing angel fish. Japanese competitor Kanebo Ltd. launched “Otoko Kaoru” (male scent) in 2006, a chewing gum that contains a chemical which claims to block body odor by helping sweat glands release the gum’s menthol-rose scent. In southern Africa, xakuxaku is the onomatopoetic name of the noise made by chewers and egestors of the fruit of the Thespesia garckeana tree, a sweet, glutinous fruit known to some by the inaccurate nickname “African chewing gum.”
Medical Uses
The Greek physician, pharmacologist, and botanist Pedanius Dioscorides first used powdered mastiche as dental and intestinal medicine on the Isle of Chios around 50 c.e. In 1882 Ohio physician Edward Beeman, at the suggestion of his bookkeeper Nellie Horton, added to chewing gum the pepsin powder he had compounded as an aid to digestion. In 1899 druggist Franklin V. Canning created a gum designed to clean teeth and breath. He combined the words “dental” and “hygiene” to arrive at the name Dentyne. Over the ensuing years other medicines like penicillin and acetaminophen have been added to gum in the belief that gum maintains the potency of medicaments and that the long-chewing product slowly and evenly distributes remedies throughout the body. It is commonly believed that chewing gum helps humans relax, relieves inner ear pressure, and may also stimulate saliva and digestion. Twenty-first-century research suggests that chewing sugarless gum after colon cancer surgery can speed recovery and shorten hospital stays by as much as one-third. The connection between gum and health is complicated and should be considered on a case-by-case basis—after all, gums come in astounding variety, from candied gum that looks like real cigarettes and cigars complete with powdered sugar “smoke,” to nicotine-laced gum that counteracts the urge to smoke.
Pros and Cons
Gum is a lifestyle product that has always had issues of image. For over 25 years, Emily Post refused to mention chewing gum in her etiquette books. On the other hand, there are block-long brick walls in Seattle, Washington, and San Luis Obispo, California, where gum lovers happily stick their chewed cud for posterity. For over a hundred years, “gum chewing has been viewed as a terrible habit that Americans were imposing around the world” (Mathews, 2009). Gum makers address such problems with politeness campaigns like the one that urged consumers to be respectful and “Save This Wrapper to Dispose of Your Gum.” The Hong Kong subway system features gum “targets,” so commuters can spit their expended wads into the garbage instead of marring the floor. The New York Times summarized gum’s image by calling it a “badge of insouciance” and adding “just ask Jack Nicholson.” Regardless of individual opinion, chewing gum has long carried important commercial, environmental, and social implications the world over.
See also mastic.
chiffon cake made a sensation in 1948, when General Mills published a recipe pamphlet proclaiming it “the biggest kitchen news in 100 years.” Two years later, Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book described chiffon cake as being “light as angel food, rich as butter cake.”
For many decades, three basic foam cakes—sponge, angel food, and genoise—had held sway in the kitchen. See angel food cake and sponge cake. Foam cakes depend on the aeration of eggs, either beaten whole or separately as yolks and whites for the magnificent heights they attain in the oven. The newfangled chiffon cake was the brainchild of Harry Baker, a Los Angeles insurance salesman, baking hobbyist, and caterer. In the 1920s, he became a celebrity by baking his invention for many Hollywood personalities, as well as for the Brown Derby restaurant chain. Despite many pleas for the recipe, he refused to divulge it until General Mills paid him for the recipe in 1947. The mystery ingredient turned out to be vegetable oil.
Not much was known about Harry Baker until the writer Joseph Hart did some sleuthing and uncovered little known facts from Baker’s past. Baker had arrived in Hollywood in 1923, having been forced to leave his wife and two children back in Ohio after he was discovered in flagrante delicto with another man. His insurance business had gone south so, desperate for cash, he turned to his lifelong hobby, making fudge. Baker was able to make a living manufacturing fudge, but he decided to turn his attention to cakes. His quest was to create a moister and sweeter angel food cake. He spent years testing hundreds of different formulas, but nothing satisfied him until, as he told a reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, a “sixth sense—something cosmic” revealed salad oil as the secret ingredient.
At about the same time, a Brown Derby restaurant opened on Wilshire Boulevard and became a magnet for Hollywood celebrities. Baker brought a sample of his chiffon cake to the restaurant, where it became a signature dessert. One of the most popular flavors of the cake was grapefruit, created especially for the famous (and overweight) gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who had told the restaurant owner, “Put grapefruit on something—everyone knows that grapefruit is less fattening.”
Although people clamored for the original recipe, Baker refused, taking pains to dispose of his garbage away from home to prevent the discovery of empty bottles of salad oil. Throughout the 1930s he baked his cakes for Hollywood royalty, charging $2.00 apiece. At the height of his business, he produced 42 cakes in an 18-hour day—the batter for each prepared individually and baked in 1 of his 12 tin hot-plate ovens set up in a spare bedroom. In today’s dollars, the resulting income adds up to something like $1,000 a day.
Today, despite its wonderfully light and moist texture, chiffon cake is overshadowed by angel food cake and sponge cake.
chiffon pie is a single-crust pie with a light, fluffy filling. This filling is generally a custard mixture lightened with beaten egg whites and/or whipped cream, with or without gelatin, and flavored with an almost infinite variety of ingredients. See custard and gelatin. The pie shell was originally made from pastry, but crumb crusts are now popular.
There is much overlap among recipes for chiffon pies, gelatin pies, and soufflé pies, all of which appeared virtually simultaneously between 1919 and 1921. The first recipe found to date that fits the concept was Coffee Soufflé Pie. It appeared in Good Housekeeping magazine in June 1919 and called for egg whites, cream, and gelatin in addition to coffee.
The first known mention of a chiffon pie by that name appears in the Emporia Gazette on 6 January 1921, in an article suggesting that this type of pie was then in vogue. In November of the same year, Good Housekeeping included a recipe for a chiffon pie as “a delicious novelty.” This pie was citrus-flavored and lightened with egg whites, but interestingly, it was baked, not simply chilled, as is more typical. As an example of the variability within the concept, the chiffon pie that appeared in Crisco advertisements in 1924 was prepared in the style of a baked lemon meringue pie.
Chiffon pies fell briefly out of favor in the 1980s due to concerns about the risk of salmonella poisoning from the consumption of raw egg whites. Pasteurized egg products are now recommended in unbaked pies.
See also chiffon cake.
child labor is presumed to be older than recorded history, but the connection between child labor and the sweets industry is a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution.
As factories started to replace America’s farm-driven economy in the late 1700s and early 1800s, children began to be pressed into the industrial work force in large numbers—working up to 70 hours a week in often dirty, damp, and dangerous conditions. By 1810 more than 2 million school-age children were employed in factory work in the United States and England alone, earning wages that could be as low as 40 cents a day.
Most child laborers were employed in textile-making facilities, but a small number worked in the candy business. Cracker Jack, begun in Chicago in 1896 by a German immigrant, found itself among several sweets makers being investigated by Hull House, an early activist organization, for poor working conditions for their youthful employees. See cracker jack.
Penny candy entered the sweets lexicon in the late 1890s and was the first confection children could afford to buy with money they had earned themselves. Unfortunately, the work they did was often rendered in factories that exploited them. See penny candy.
In 1913 the sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine, as he traveled around the United States documenting child labor abuses for the National Child Labor Committee, produced an iconic photograph of child workers on the loading dock of the now-defunct Hughes Brothers Candy Factory on South Ervay Street in Dallas, Texas. Hine wrote of the encounter: “One girl told me that she is 13 years old, ‘but we have to tell them we’re 15. I run a chocolate machine’” (1998).
Hine’s work is widely credited with raising awareness that prompted many states and the federal government to pass a series of laws severely curbing child labor, most notably the national 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Britain acted much earlier, passing a number of factory acts and a compulsory school bill that abolished most child labor by 1900.
Worldwide, however, child labor remains the norm in many developing countries and no more so than in the agricultural sector—and the chocolate industry in particular. UNICEF estimates that as many as 500,000 children work on farms in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, producer of about 40 percent of the world’s cocoa. A smaller but still substantial number work the cacao fields of Ghana. Worldwide, according to the United Nations, as many as 168 million children toil as child laborers—half of them involved in hazardous work that “endangers their health, safety and moral development.” See cocoa.
Children’s rights activists have made some strides in pressuring multinational chocolate makers to reach agreements aimed at eliminating child labor in cacao growing and harvesting. A series of damaging press accounts and documentaries revealing that a subset of cocoa child laborers were actually enslaved led to the passage in 2001of the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a voluntary global cocoa industry agreement to eliminate the worst forms of West African child labor. Out of that came the formation in 2002 of the International Cocoa Initiative representing nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, and the chocolate industry to press for the reforms advocated by Harken-Engel.
The going has been slow, however, and the matter has turned litigious. Hershey Co., which controls more than 40 percent of the U.S. chocolate market, issued a press release in October 2012 declaring that it would “source 100 percent certified cocoa for its global chocolate product lines by 2020 and accelerate its programs to help eliminate child labor in the cocoa regions of West Africa.” A month later, activist shareholders filed suit in Delaware Chancery Court, seeking to force Hershey to disclose the names of its Ghana and Ivory Coast growers on the grounds that the chocolate maker “has knowingly failed to fulfill its promises” to stop the practice.
Meanwhile, Nestlé SA, maker of Nestlé Crunch, remains locked in a federal lawsuit alleging that it violated the 1789 U.S. Alien Torts Statute by allowing its Ivory Coast cacao growers to employ child slave labor—a charge it denies.
See also hershey’s and nestlé.
children’s candy was once a rarity. Because sugar was expensive, few children could expect much more than the occasional “sugarplum” at Christmas. See sugarplums. However, new sources and lower prices for sugar in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as well as the introduction of new machine production techniques and new packaging, storage, and transportation technologies, transformed candy from a local and handmade product to a regional, mass-produced commodity.
In the United States, the lowest end of the manufactured candy trade came to be known as “penny candy.” It was cheap, plentiful, and made to appeal to a child’s eye. Licorice, marshmallows, suckers, kisses, caramels, jellies, and more could be had at the candy shops found around every corner, several pieces to the penny. In the golden age of penny candy, from about 1880 to the early 1930s, children were significant buyers of candy for their own immediate consumption, and penny candies made for and sold directly to children were a significant portion of the candy market. See penny candy.
Once candy became cheap and plentiful enough to be within the grasp of even children and their pennies, children had a new opportunity to fashion themselves as shoppers. Candy was children’s entry point into a newly emerging culture of consumption. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, children as young as four or five had the freedom to travel to candy shops and make purchases independently. In the candy shop, a child could learn the value of the penny and the importance of discrimination.
Many reformers worried about children’s independent access to sweets and called on mothers to protect their children from the putative dangers of candy. Moral reformers attacked children’s candy eating, on the grounds that it would lead to more pernicious vices, including smoking, gambling, drinking, and masturbation. Food reformers also singled out candy for special abuse. The “pure food” movement of the 1890s and 1910s drew attention to the questionable ingredients and processes of new forms of industrial food processing. Alarmists alleged that cheap penny candies were liable to be dangerous, even poisonous, because of the use of artificial colors and flavors as well as degraded ingredients. Neither federal nor state food inspectors ever succeeded in locating any of the alleged “poisons” said to be lurking in cheap penny candies. On closer inspection, the frequent stories of candy poisoning turned out to be the result of simple overeating, or sickness due to other causes.
Early candy manufacturers understood the importance of visual appeal above all in enticing the child customer. This was one of the reasons reformers became so suspicious of children’s candies: they were brightly colored with new kinds of artificial dyes that were highly suspect. Novel shapes also were important, especially shapes that mimicked toys or suggested play. Nineteenth-century candy makers were skilled in the production of clear toy candy using intricate handmade metal molds, a German tradition that was brought to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. This laborious craft was transformed by the introduction of drop machines to mold hard candy, and starch molds for soft candies, which allowed for much faster and cheaper production. See gummies and hard candy. Licorice, chewing gum, and hard and soft molded candies could be made in an infinite array of shapes and colors. Children purchasing their own candy typically had limited means and sought out candies that, by virtue of low price or longevity, offered the best value. Jawbreakers, taffies, and lollipops (aka “all-day suckers”) were long-lasting candies that would stretch a penny’s worth of candy into an afternoon of pleasure. See chewing gum; licorice; and lollipops.
“Better” candy stores avoided penny candy sales, viewing the children’s trade as an inconvenience and a distraction. Profit margins on penny goods were razor-thin, and the penny candy merchant had to spend more on labor to serve the demanding but small-spending customers making numerous small purchases. Nevertheless, the children’s trade was significant. In 1932–1933, it was estimated that nearly 18 percent of total U.S. candy production corresponded to the juvenile penny candy market.
The children’s penny candy scene changed dramatically during World War II. U.S. entry into the war in 1941 brought with it the rationing of sugar and other candy ingredients. Although the candy industry was still able to secure access to needed supplies, prices rose significantly. During the war years, about half the nation’s candy production went into provisioning the military, thereby reducing the amount of candy that could be sold domestically. The result of these forces was to drive out the penny candy trade. Bulk and box candies were far more profitable, and for manufacturers, even those with nostalgic ties to the candy past, penny lines no longer made economic sense. By 1947 the portion of total candy output that was produced for the penny market had fallen to less than 4 percent. Few of the little shops that had sold penny goods and catered to the children’s trade were able to survive, and the corner candy store largely disappeared after the war.
In the 1950s and 1960s, candy for children’s consumption was increasingly purchased at large self-service grocery stores, where it was packaged in cellophane bags or other “family-size” packs rather than offered as individual pieces. Many other forms of highly sweetened food were developed and promoted as special foods to appeal to children’s appetites, and these began to compete with more established kinds of candy. Frosted Flakes, Sugar Pops, and Trix cereals were born in the 1950s. See breakfast cereal. Sweet snack cakes, already popular, became sweeter: Hostess added crème filling to its popular cupcakes after World War II, while the coconut- and marshmallow-covered Sno Balls debuted in 1947 and by 1950 had been amped up with a crème filling. See hostess.
Advertising for candy and other sweet foods in the 1950s was primarily aimed at mothers who were encouraged to see these products as a wholesome way to please their children. In the 1960s, manufacturers for sweet cereals, candy, and snack foods began to target children directly with advertising during the Saturday morning block of television cartoons and kiddie shows. See advertising, american. A new movement of antisugar food reformers and antiadvertising media activists in the 1970s put pressure on candy, soda, and cereal manufacturers to curtail their efforts to hook children on what many were coming to view as sugar-laden junk food, but that movement had little lasting effect.
Most of today’s well-known branded candies first appeared in the decades before World War II, when the American candy industry was ascendant and the pace of innovation was dazzling. Today, chocolate candy bars appeal equally to children and adults, as did nonchocolate candies in the prewar era. However, since the 1950s, sugar-based candies—ranging from early 1900s classics like NECCO Wafers, Tootsie Rolls, and Chuckles to more recent brands like Jolly Ranchers, Starburst, and Skittles—have come to be seen as appealing primarily to children and teens, although some adults also like them. See candy bar; tootsie roll; and necco.
Candy marketed exclusively to children continues to emphasize visual appeal and play value, as in Ring Pops, Fun Dip, and pressed candy novelties such as candy necklaces and interlocking blocks. Whereas mainstream candies are moving toward natural colors and flavorings, vivid and surprising colors achieved with artificial food dyes distinguish the juvenile lines. The most notable candy innovations in the postwar era have incorporated surprising or extreme tastes and textures to appeal to the youth market. Zotz (1968) brought the fizz of baking soda plus acid to the inside of a hard candy (same idea as those science club “volcanos”). Razzles (1966) started out like a candy and morphed into gum. Pop Rocks (1975) unleashed the power of carbon dioxide to explode between the teeth. Super-sour candies coated in edible acids first began to appear in the 1980s and continue to grow in popularity. See extreme candy.
Children’s candy consumption today accounts for only a small portion of added sugar in the diet (about 6 to 8 percent, with the portion being higher for younger children). However, many other significant sources of added sugar might be termed “invisible candy,” including breakfast cereals, fruit snacks, snack bars, and sweetened drinks. It is the ubiquity and popularity of these products, soda in particular, that has led to the rapid rise in children’s sugar consumption. Significantly, opponents have targeted sugar in drinks by renaming these beverages “liquid candy.” Although candy itself may not be the problem, reformers today invoke candy as shorthand for danger and dietary woe, just as they did more than a century ago. See soda.
See also gag candy.
children’s literature has a direct relationship with sweets: the text is not just sweet but is itself a sweet. “A is an apple pie,” reads one alphabet verse—a seventeenth-century ditty that continues to be re-illustrated up to the present, the drama of which is founded on the consumption of “A Apple Pie.” In Giles Gingerbread (1820), the whole alphabet is a confection: Giles learns to read with letters made of cake, studying his “gingerbread book” until “he gets it by heart, And then he eats it up, As we eat up a tart.” In some seventeenth-century Jewish teaching methods, new students are invited to lick honey from the alphabet. In these and other tales of edible alphabets, children’s literature and learning are presented as mouthwateringly enticing: sweet letters draw children in and children, in turn, draw those letters into themselves, where literature and literacy become part of their very formation, bodily and intellectually.
Many eighteenth-century titles advertise wholesome children’s stories as sweets—such as John Newbery’s The Twelfth Day Gift, with its dedication “to all good Little Masters and Misses who have a true relish for the sweet-meats of learning, this Sugar-Plumb is most humbly inscribed by their obedient servant, the author” (1767), or the Glasgow publication The Sugar-Plumb, or Sweet Amusement for Leisure Hours: being an entertaining and instructive collection of stories (1786). In these titles, “sweet” suggests a valuable and licit pleasure: something desirable and good to desire, promising pleasure for the moment and fortification for the future. The song “Just a Spoonful of Sugar” in Disney’s Mary Poppins (not in P. L. Travers’s original story) is only one example in centuries of positive temptations reflecting Newbery’s marketing, summed up in his motto delectando monemus (instruction with delight). Indeed, the efficacy of sweetness in attracting the young to educational experience—whether as readers or as characters in stories—goes virtually unchallenged throughout the history of children’s books.
And no wonder: breast milk itself is sweet, designed for (or creating) a taste for sweets in the newborn. Writers and illustrators play on this early taste, and incidents involving cakes, cookies, candy, and pie are pervasive in children’s stories. Indeed, stories that dwell happily on the sheer pleasure of eating sweets show the rationale for more complex tales that illustrate the moral and social pressures generated by powerful desire—within the fictional context of the stories and also in the “real” world, where over time, the increasing availability of sweets, both literal and literary, affects the texts of children’s stories and our ideas about children’s literature itself.
In the Grimm Brothers’ story “Hansel and Gretel” two children find a witch’s house “with walls of bread, a roof made of cake, and windows of transparent sugar.” This lithograph by Robert Ambrose Dudley appeared in Once Upon a Time, a collection of fairy tales published by Ernest Mister around 1900. private collection / bridgeman images
The sheer pleasure of eating sweets often marks moments of well-earned indulgence—triumphant ends to communal adventures in which the pleasure of company, sweets, and a completed adventure merge. Hence, Captain Flint’s declaration in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930): “All the best sea fights end with a banquet” and the subsequent strawberry ices, parkins, bath buns, rock cakes, ginger nuts, chocolate biscuits, and cake with “a picture of two little ships done in pink and white icing.” So, too, the splendid conclusion in Mr Gumpy’s Outing (1970): “It’s time for tea.” Cherries and cherry cake are resplendent in John Burningham’s picture of wordless, culminating conviviality—as is “plum pie in the sun: I spy everyone!” in the last image of Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s classic Each Peach Pear Plum (1978). Pleasure, sweets, and adventure merge in personal feasts as well, as we see in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The Adventures of Paddington Bear (1958). Here, sweets consumption and sweetness of disposition are linked: the heroes’ taste for sweets endears them to their friends, and Pooh’s overindulgence in honey gets him into a “tight place,” but the worst said to or about him is a loving endearment: “silly old bear!” See winnie-the-pooh. In both communal and personal contexts, then, sweets associate unalloyed pleasure and fulfilled desire.
Conflicting Messages
However, that very pleasure and desire provide the rationale for why, more often than not, sweets in children’s stories bear complex, conflicting messages—of abundance and scarcity, desire and restraint, obedience and disobedience. In Little House on the Prairie, when Mr. Edwards swims the Verdigris River to bring Laura and Mary candy and cakes from Santa Claus, the sweets highlight scarcity. The awed pleasure with which Laura tastes her one stick of candy, or notices the pure white flour and sugar of her tiny cake, is born of their rarity. She tastes her candy right away, “just one lick.” But that is not enough for Wilder’s story; she goes on to comment, “But Mary was not so greedy. She didn’t take even one lick of her stick.” Even in the context of scarcity, she implies, where there is pleasure, there can be sin; indeed, the possibility for reprehensible self-indulgence in relation to sweets is a theme that is thoroughly mined throughout children’s literature.
Nowhere are conflicting messages more iconically present than in Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel, when the starved children find a witch’s house “with walls of bread, a roof made of cakes [Küchen], and windows of transparent sugar.” Their enthusiastic consumption of the house alerts the cannibalistic witch to their presence; the sweet house functions as temptation and deceit, a sign of the children’s own edibility and a concealment of the witch’s unsweet (and unsavory) nature. For psychoanalytic interpreter Bruno Bettelheim, “The house stands for oral greediness and how attractive it is to give in to it” (1976, p. 161); for literary scholar Maria Tatar (1992), however, this is not a cautionary tale about greed but a therapeutic story empowering readers with the example of Gretel’s resourceful self-rescue. The house’s very energy as an icon comes from its paradoxical double value as a focal point for both scarcity and luxury, and the contradictory impulses of need and desire, dependency and self-reliance.
Generally, a surfeit of sweets provides a simple forum for testing self-control, as it does in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). For Charlie, whose family barely subsists, the chocolate factory offers a dream ending to basic hunger; but for the over-indulged children on the tour, the candy gives occasion for disobedience and punishment in a manner reminiscent of Hilaire Belloc’s or Heinrich Hoffman’s punitively cautionary tales. Self-restraint and obedience are rewarded; self-indulgence inevitably leads to physical humiliation.
C. S. Lewis focuses an even more complex self-indulgence on candy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) when Edmund, already morally weak, accepts Turkish Delight from Narnia’s evil usurping Queen. Having consumed it, Edmund only wants more: “The Queen knew … that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it until they killed themselves.” Edmund’s subsequent actions are governed by an addictive desire that erodes his sense of family loyalty, justice, and every virtue the story values. Through plot and imagery, Lewis links this complicated Turkish Delight to Christian interpretations of the fall of Adam and Eve. He makes clear that there are bad sweets (addictive candy offered by a usurping, dominant female) and good sweets (the wholesome “great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll, steaming hot,” which sates the siblings at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver); they are differentiated by the moral qualities of both host and consumer. So, too, does the chocolate in Robert Cormier’s young adult novel, The Chocolate War (1974), carry a freight of moral compromise: when Jerry Renault refuses to join his Catholic school’s chocolate sale fundraiser, he is beaten down by a hierarchy of bullies, from priest to schoolmates. The chocolate here is an arbitrary commodity, ironically signifying a marked absence of literal and figurative sweetness—polluted with human sin by its very provenance.
Desire for sweets thus provides the engine for many fictional stories, but it reflects a desire that operates prodigiously in our world and brings with it “real-world” ethical issues. The less poetic, more factual aspects of sweets-related moral choices have long had a place in children’s texts. Responding to criticisms concerning racism, Dahl revised his original description of Willy Wonka’s factory workers, the African Oompa-Loompas, “tiny, miniature pygmies” with “almost black” skin that makes Charlie think they are made “out of chocolate”; in the revision, they are notable for their “funny long hair,” hail from fictional Loompaland, and do not remind Charlie of chocolate.
The controversy over Dahl’s text evokes an earlier explicit connection between labor, sweets, and children’s literature: Amelia Opie’s moving poem for children, The Black Man’s Lament or How to Make Sugar (1826). “Oh! that good Englishmen could know / how Negroes suffer for their pleasure!” laments the protagonist of this abolitionist story, stirring young readers to political action. See sugar cane. A century or so later, however, in the children’s pamphlet The Romance of Chocolate (1934), the William Nielson Ltd. chocolate company admitted no qualms about enjoying the aesthetic aspects of “native” labor in cacao harvesting:
Only natives can stand the hard work, and their crude methods require white overseers. … There is no more picturesque sight than the variegated patches of colour due to the brilliant hues of the pods … the coloured native men cutting them …; the women, in showy garments, scooping out the glistening pulp. …
See cocoa. Political and social attitudes are thus variously embedded in children’s stories about sweets, moving from the personal “guilt” associated with self-control to the broader scope of social awareness.
Inflation
Stories relating to labor illustrate the shifting valuation of sweets and sweets making in factual and fictional contexts. In domestic fiction, the making of cakes measures girls’ skill and maturity: in Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne’s liniment-flavored cake cures her of “carelessness in cooking”; in Emily of New Moon (1925), Emily’s successful production of a cake causes her aunt to concede Emily’s identity as a competent family member. In recent years, however, comic culinary ineptitude is celebrated: “Puffy popcorn chocolate soufflé or carbonated exploding swamp?” Saffron asks of a burned cake she and her friend Sarah bake in Hilary McKay’s Permanent Rose (2005). The hilariously disastrous cake is a sign that like Saffron’s mother, a successful artist and kitchen incompetent par excellence, the girls are interesting, creative people. After two failed attempts, they resort to a prepared cake mix, and the resulting confection is received with as much enthusiasm and respect as one “made from scratch.”
The casual way McKay’s girls dump two failed cakes suggests easy access to sugar and chocolate—a long way from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s awe at the white sugar in her tiny cake—but the changing valuation of sweets in children’s books is most clearly apparent in descriptions of the witch’s house in the various retellings of Hansel and Gretel. The original bread, cake, and spun-sugar house grows increasingly sugary as it moves through and beyond the twentieth century, and sweets become easily available. “Its walls were made of gingerbread, its roof was made of cake. It was trimmed with cookies and candy, and its window-panes were of pure transparent sugar,” writes Wanda Gág (1936); for Michael Morpurgo, “Amazingly, it was built of sugar-coated gingerbread! And the roof was made of icing. The chimney was a stick of licorice! As for the window-panes, they were marzipan, and the panes of glass were of purest sugar. The front door was made entirely of shortbread … ” (2008). Illustrations reflect this fantastic glut—with peppermint cane pilasters, candy hearts, raspberry jellies, gumdrops, gingerbread men, hundreds-and-thousands, and lashings of icing in Susan Jeffers’s version (1980); or pinwheel cookies, tarts, madeleines, macarons, profiteroles, candied cherries, icing, nuts, and the glistening buttery brown gloss of sweet pastries in Pauline Ellison’s (1981). See children’s candy and penny candy.
In the Grimms’ text, the now seemingly modest house of bread, cake, and sugar was a luxurious remedy for starvation; today, only a superabundance of candy evokes a suitably ecstatic desirability for a young audience. Or perhaps Harry Potter’s success shows that ordinary candy is not enough: literary taste now demands “Special Effects” sweets such as those sold in Honeydukes in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999): “Tiny black Pepper Imps (‘breathe fire for your friends!’), Ice Mice (‘hear your teeth chatter and squeak!’), peppermint creams shaped like toads (‘hop realistically in the stomach’) … ” and, of course, the famous (now produced in our “real” world) Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans.
In children’s books, sweets are a dependable fulcrum for moral, political, and social messages. That children desire sweets is accepted as an unassailable fact fundamental to the stories, and this desire is what provides leverage for the stories’ points—a desire rooted in the child’s physical being, and understood by its very bodily force to exercise heart, mind, and soul. Children’s writers and illustrators manipulate this desire to convey taste as well as intellectual and moral nourishment; it also operates in the very experience of children’s reading. Giles Gingerbread’s cake letters are meant to attract the young, but they show also that children’s literature is itself a confection designed to whet desire.
Never has this been more apparent than at the launches of the Harry Potter books in the first decade of the twenty-first century: in the early morning of the release day of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a boy squeezed himself into a shopping cart in a supermarket. Not content to put his book down even for a minute, he sat among the family groceries enjoying the biggest treat of all. He was deliciously, compulsively reading the 636-page Goblet of Fire in the context in which he understood it: as a sweet comestible, a Sugar-plumb beyond the imaginings of even John Newbery.
See also candy land and literature.
See baumkuchen.
China. Chinese food encompasses a wealth of sweet dishes and sweet snacks, but no dessert course is served at the end of a typical meal, and the conceptual boundary between sweet and savory foods is much less strict than it is in Western cultures. Most meals in most parts of the country consist solely of savory dishes, and if a separate course is served at the end of a repast, it will normally be fresh fruit, either whole or, on more formal occasions, cut into elegant pieces. Sweetness is just one of the traditional “five flavors” (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and pungent) that must be combined harmoniously in a meal, in no predetermined order. Cookery books, with occasional exceptions, tend not to include sections on desserts or sweet dishes: sweet foods are normally subsumed into other categories, such as dian xin (otherwise known as “dim sum”: dainty snacks or refreshments that are eaten between meals), or cold appetizers.
Mostly, sweet foods are eaten as snacks between main meals, and on special occasions such as the Chinese New Year, when they symbolize the sweetness of life, but they may also be incorporated into a menu at any point. See chinese new year. In the southern Yangtze region, the set of appetizers served at the start of a feast might include cold kumquats in syrup (bing tang jin ju) or fried peanuts and seaweed with a sprinkling of sugar (tai cai hua sheng mi). In Sichuan, a sweet dish such as ba bao guo zheng, a stir-fried pudding of cooked wheat flour, lard, sugar, nuts, and candied fruits, might occasionally be served toward the end of a banquet, but it is classed as a “hot dish” rather than a separate sweet.
Though some Chinese dishes and snacks might accord with a Western conception of dessert, like the toffee bananas (ba si xiang jiao, literally “bananas trailing silken threads”) and red bean pancakes served in place of dessert in Chinatown restaurants abroad, countless others straddle the supposed borders of “sweet” and “savory” dishes. For example, the old-fashioned Sichuanese dish tian shao bai, a favorite at rural celebrations, consists of slices of pork belly laid in a bowl, topped with sweet black sesame paste and glutinous rice mixed with lard and sugar, and steamed. No one would call such a dish a “dessert,” but it is undoubtedly sweet.
Sweetness and Sweeteners
In general, sweetness in China carries similar connotations to sweetness in other cultures. The oldest Chinese character for “sweet,” gan (甘), also means “pleasant” and “willingly”; it appears in compounds meaning “contented,” “delicious,” and “smooth-tongued.” Both gan and the character that later largely replaced it, tian (甜), symbolize the happier side of life: “sweetness and bitterness” is a common metaphor for life’s ups and downs.
The character for “honey” (mi 蜜) appears among the oldest extant examples of the Chinese script, the characters engraved on excavated “oracle bones,” while the earliest manmade sugar was malt sugar or maltose (yi), mentioned in the ancient Book of Songs. Sugarcane juice was known very early on, but it was not until the Tang dynasty (618–907 c.e.) that the production of cane sugar became widespread. In modern China, honey may be stirred into hot water and drunk as a tonic. Malt sugar is still widely used in pastries and confectionery, and to lend gorgeous color to roasted and barbecued foods. Rock or crystal sugar, known in Chinese as “ice sugar” (bing tang), is often favored as a sweetener for tonic foods, such as a comforting soup of silver ear fungus and goji berries (yin er geng). Brown sugar, known in Chinese as “red sugar” (hong tang), is used to lend flavor and color to various sweetmeats and sweet–savory dishes, while regular white sugar made from cane or beets is mostly widely used in all aspects of the culinary arts.
Key Ingredients of Sweet Foods
One of the most striking differences between Chinese and European sweet food traditions is the general absence in China of the dairy foods and chocolate that are so important in European sweets and desserts. In traditional Chinese sweet pastries and cakes, lard or pork fat often plays the part of butter in other cuisines. Chocolate has so far made few inroads into Chinese cooking. There are some exceptions when it comes to the use of dairy, including the delicate milk custards of the Cantonese south and the imperial palace sweetmeats of Beijing. In the old neighborhood around the Drum and Bell Towers in Beijing, there are small shops specializing in imperial dairy foods, including gently baked junkets seasoned with fermented glutinous rice wine (nai lao), and “dried junket” (nai lao gan), a caramel-dark, fudgy mass of sweetened, dehydrated junket. See junket.
In European cuisines, the plant ingredients used in sweets are predominantly fruits, nuts, and spices; the Chinese additionally make liberal use of root vegetables such as taro and sweet potato, and pulses, including mung, azuki, and occasionally haricot beans. This open-mindedness toward the creative possibilities of all ingredients leads to creations that would be regarded as eccentric in the West, such as a warm, sweet wood ear fungus smoothie in Taiwan, and stir-fried fava bean paste with lard and sugar (can dou ni) in Sichuan.
Certain ingredients used in sweet foods stand out as distinctively Chinese. Among fruits, jujubes or “Chinese dates,” persimmons, and haw fruits are favored in northern China; lychees, longans, and Chinese apricot (mei) in the south. Lotus seeds, a traditional symbol of fertility, are often made into a sweet paste to fill dumplings and buns. Mung and azuki beans are commonly used in sweet or savory soups and congees: azuki are the main ingredient in “red bean paste” (dou sha), one of the most common stuffings for buns and pastries. See azuki beans. Potatoes and sweet potatoes can be mashed, mixed with sugar and lard, and then deep-fried into bing (the generic word for round, flattened foods from pancakes to patties). When it comes to nuts, sesame seeds, walnuts, and peanuts are most widely used. Peanut brittle (hua sheng su) is made in many parts of the country, and shoppers can sometimes watch muscled men crush the nuts by hammering the warm toffee with enormous wooden mallets.
In autumn in the southern Yangtze region, the scent of tiny yellow osmanthus flowers fills the air like honey; the flowers provide one of the most delightful Chinese sweet flavors. Osmanthus flowers are brined and sugared to preserve them, and then mixed with lard and cooked flour to make stuffings for dainty snacks; they are also used in sweet soups, sauces, and jellies. Rose petals, bruised with white sugar to make a preserve, are another sweet flavoring.
Notable Sweet Foods
There are some distinctive major categories of Chinese sweet foods. Round mooncakes (yue bing), commonly but not exclusively sweet, are eaten at the Mid-Autumn Festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when people traditionally gather to admire the fullness of the autumn moon. See mooncakes. Another festival food found across the country is tang yuan or yuan xiao, the boiled glutinous rice spheres eaten at the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, symbolizing the sweetness of family reunion and marking an end to the Chinese New Year holiday. They are often stuffed with a sweet black sesame paste made glossy with lard.
Traditionally, baking ovens were a rarity in most parts of China, which may explain the greater reliance on steaming as a method for cooking cakes and breads. For the Double Ninth Festival on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, you may see crowds of people queueing in Shanghai to buy the appropriate seasonal sweetmeat, steamed chong yang gao, a colorful sandwich of green- and pink-colored glutinous rice paste layered with red bean paste. Peach-shaped, pink-tinted steamed buns with sweet fillings are a traditional birthday food, particularly for elderly people, because peaches are a symbol of immortality. Sweetened, leavened doughs made from corn or rice may be wrapped in maize husks or other fragrant leaves for a rustic snack—a kind of Chinese tamale.
Another whole genre of Chinese sweet snacks are flaky pastries made from wheat flour pastry layered with lard. Pieces of raw pastry may be cleverly shaped so that, after a gentle deep-frying, they puff out into fantastical forms such as water lilies, straw hats, or hedgehogs. A more dramatic variation is the “rippled-silk oil-cake” (bo si you gao), a small dumpling with a sweet filling that flowers up into crisp, fragile waves in the cooking oil.
Warm, sweetened creams made from nuts or seeds, such as apricot kernels or walnuts, mixed with ground rice, are a favorite belly-warmer, and just one type of the liquid sweets that are an important aspect of Chinese food culture. Another soupy sweet is “oil tea” or “fried flour gruel” (you cha), a food beverage made by mixing toasty fried wheat flour, chopped nuts, and sugar with piping hot water. Jiu niang yuan zi, small glutinous rice dumplings in a broth seasoned with sugar, osmanthus flowers, and fermented glutinous rice, is a popular snack in eastern China. Other delicacies are neither solid nor liquid, like san he ni, the sweet, lardy paste of ground rice studded with candied fruits that is an old-fashioned Sichuan street snack.
Regional Variations
Although many kinds of sweet foods can be found in different forms across China, there are striking regional variations. In Hunan, savory main dishes are rarely sweetened, while the people of Suzhou and Wuxi in eastern China are notorious in other parts of the country for adding sugar to almost everything. Local specialties include Wuxi sweet-and-sour ribs (wu xi rou gu tou), Suzhou cherry-red pork (ying tao rou), Suzhou “squirrel” fish (song shu yu), and Suzhou “boat snacks” (chuan dian): the little steamed dumplings ingeniously colored and sculpted to resemble fruits, nuts, and animals that were once served on the pleasure boats that thronged Tai Hu Lake. This local predilection for sweetness is also felt in nearby Shanghai, a melting pot of culinary influences from its surrounding region.
In the Cantonese south of China, the Chiuchow region, a center of sugarcane production, is known not only for seafood and savory street snacks but also for sweetmeats, including rich taro paste, sautéed water chestnut cake, and candied chestnuts and pumpkin with Chinese dates. See chestnuts. And in Hong Kong, the territory’s colonial history and status as an international port is reflected in the European-derived sweetmeats such as custard tarts that are served in dim sum restaurants alongside Chinese preparations. Notable Beijing sweets include wan dou huang, a cool jelly made from dried peas that was beloved by the Dowager Empress Cixi; sa qi ma, a Manchu nibble made from strips of rich, soft, deep-fried dough mixed with syrup and compressed into a cake; and “sugared ears” (tang er duo), deep-fried dough twists drenched in syrup that recall the sweetmeats of the Middle East.
Candy and Confectionery
The Chinese also enjoy what Americans call “candy”: confectionery that is eaten between meals, for pleasure rather than nutrition. Some street vendors specialize in sugar-blowing (chui tang), handling thick malt sugar syrup like Venetian glass, blowing it into animal shapes to the delight of watching children. In Chengdu, peddlers make pictures by drizzling molten caramel onto a board, and picking the flat image up with a wooden stick to make a marvelous lollipop. See sugar painting. Also in Chengdu, itinerant street traders sell “Ding Ding” malt sugar toffee (ding ding tang), announcing their arrival with metal clappers that make the sounds “ding ding dang!”—hence the name. Another spectacle of a sweetmeat is Dragon’s Beard toffee (long xu tang), made like a miniature version of hand-pulled noodles by pulling toffee into hair-thin threads. In Beijing, childhood is often associated with the local equivalent of toffee apples, skewers of red haw fruits dipped in toffee (bing tang hu lu). See toffee. Since the 1950s White Rabbit creamy candies, in their distinctive red, white, and blue packaging, have been the most instantly recognizable commercial Chinese sweet.
As of the early 1990s, sales of sugary confectionery have steadily grown. Mars Foods (China) has successfully promoted Dove chocolate bars, M&M’s, and Snickers, which have become familiar sights in convenience stores across the country: in 2013 Mars had a 40 percent share of the Chinese chocolate market. See mars and m&m’s. Although Western confectionery is making significant inroads in the Chinese market, consumers also enjoy modern manufactured sweets that are more suited to local tastes, such as individually wrapped sweetcorn gums in the shape of tiny ears of corn. Demand for sugar-free sweets is rising alongside a general growth in demand for candy, as more sophisticated consumers try to make healthier food choices in the face of soaring rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes. See sugar and health.
See also fried dough; honey; malt syrup; sticky rice sweets; sugar; and sugarcane.
Chinese New Year, the precise date of which is determined each year on the lunar calendar, is the most important of nine major holidays celebrated by most Chinese. Called Chunjie or Nongli Nian in Chinese, its practices vary by location and by the Chinese population celebrating it both in China and abroad. Each year is named sequentially after the 12 animals that came to see Buddha (for instance, the Year of the Horse began on 31 January 2014 and the Year of the Sheep on 18 February 2015; the year of the Monkey will commence on 8 February 2016). New Year traditions are practiced by almost all Chinese, whether they actually believe in them or not, because they offer a sense of identity and a touchstone to the past.
On the eighth day of the twelfth month of the old year, to signal the imminence of the New Year, people traditionally eat laba porridge made from sweet rice, in addition to other propitious foods like millet, berries, seeds, beans, and special sweets such as sugared coconut pieces and sugared dried fruits.
Before New Year’s Day, homes are cleaned of every speck of dust so as not to sweep out good fortune once the holiday begins. People also purchase new clothes, often in red—the color of blood, health, strength, and happiness—along with other special items in preparation for this event. It is their most important annual festival.
On the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth month of the old year, families use a sweet, sticky substance such as maltose or corn syrup to smear the lips of the image of the Kitchen God that usually hangs above their hearth. See corn syrup and malt syrup. They then light firecrackers and burn the image to send off the god to the Jade Emperor in heaven, where he will report sweet, good things about them and their extended family. Many families prepare or purchase sticky rice cakes or other sweets to send off with the Kitchen God, such as Eight-Treasure Pudding made with nuts, sweets, seeds, candied fruits, and honey. See sticky rice sweets. The god will return on the last day of the old year when families hang a new picture of him above their hearth.
During the last week of the old year, business owners host a banquet for their employees and hand out red envelopes with even amounts of cash to help their workers attend the traditional family reunion dinners held on the eve of the New Year. Chinese New Year celebrations once lasted for 15 days, with festivities beginning on the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar, sometime between 21 January and 19 February. Today, the holiday is also called Spring Festival, and the government gives workers seven days of vacation. Homes are decorated for the holiday with peach branches and other symbols of longevity and happiness. Before New Year’s Day, all debts are settled, and throughout the holiday people eat honey to purify their systems for health in the year to come. Families paste couplets on their front door for blessings and happiness, and light incense before the reunion dinner, which is attended by all generations of the extended family. This is a time to kowtow to photographs of the ancestors and pay respects to all elders. The special reunion dinner includes many vegetable dishes; noodle dishes made with long noodles to symbolize a long life; a whole fish for prosperity; and sweet sticky rice to ensure a sweet year. Some Chinese families exchange gifts, with southerners giving flowers and northerners offering sweet pastries and wine. All families give red envelopes called laisze filled with even amounts of cash to children, elders, the infirm, and the poor.
Days before this dinner, many families make hundreds of dumplings called jiaozi to bid farewell to the old year and welcome in the new. These dumplings are said to be shaped like gold ingots to wish everyone treasure in the coming year. Other families make niangao, or New Year cakes, with glutinous rice flour to symbolize going “higher and higher.” These special foods are eaten both at dinner and at other times throughout the holiday. When families share holiday foods and sweets, they never use knives so as not to symbolically cut their luck. Many also abstain from eating animals during all or part of this holiday, to show respect and enhance their own longevity. On New Year’s Day, no garbage is taken out so as not to cast out any family fortune, and no hair is cut for the same reason. On the fifth day of the New Year, everyone stays home to welcome the God of Wealth. Businesses close for the first three to five days of the New Year and reopen with a ceremony to this god.
Every Chinese person’s birthday is customarily celebrated on New Year’s Day, since the Chinese believe that at birth every child is already 1 year old and thus will turn a year older each time the New Year comes around. Throughout the holiday, guests are welcomed with tea and sweets from an eight-section round or octagonal dish called the “tray of togetherness,” which is supposed to bring luck and sweetness to all who share it. The contents, which vary according to region and ethnic group, often include red melon and lotus seeds for happiness and many children; kumquats for prosperity; sweetened coconut for togetherness; dried bamboo shoots so that all will go well; candied melon for good health; and so on. Some families have a nine-sectioned tray, to include wishes for wealth. Guests are expected to bring oranges or tangerines as wishes for their hosts’ prosperity; their edible gifts are reciprocated with items from the host’s tray of togetherness.
See also china.
chocolate, luxury, refers to high-quality chocolates and chocolate confections that are lushly packaged and often sold in elegant specialty shops. The cachet of specialty brands and confectioners, and of course price, figure into what are now considered luxury chocolates. However, the distinction between high-end and ordinary chocolate scarcely existed until the early twentieth century, when chocolate was first mass-produced from inexpensive materials. Before then, chocolate was always a luxury good.
In Aztec society, where Europeans first encountered it in 1519, chocolate was served as a beverage that only the highest classes were allowed to consume—the royalty, the military, and long-distance traders. Beginning in the mid-1500s, when conquistadors brought it to the court of King Philip II of Spain, chocolate became a luxurious imported good available only to royalty and nobility, and to Catholic clergy because of their foothold in the New World. Served almost exclusively as a beverage, chocolate spread to European royal courts through marriages and alliances.
Chocolate became available to other social classes through the proliferation of coffeehouses and chocolate houses in the 1600s. See café. However, it was more expensive than coffee and remained a luxury drink. After the French Revolution, artisan chocolatiers began setting up shop in Paris. In 1807 Grimod de la Reynière’s L’Almanach des gourmands, a publication with food reviews, praised a shop for its “exquisite chocolate prepared with cacao selected with uncommon care.”
In the nineteenth century, technologies invented in Europe transformed chocolate into a substance that could be made into bars and confections. Entrepreneurs gradually realized the profits to be made by bringing such products affordably to the general public.
Some of those who mass-produced chocolate confections marketed them with an aura of luxury. Festive packaging, often with themes of holidays and romance, symbolized luxury even when the chocolate was less expensive. In England in 1861, Cadbury created elegant packaging called “The Fancy Box” for its filled chocolate candies. Over the years the boxes became more elaborately decorated. The candies were given French names to make them sound more elegant. Overall, luxury chocolates took the form of beautifully presented candies. See bonbons; chocolates, boxed; and chocolates, filled.
By the early 1900s, especially with the rise of Hershey’s in the United States, chocolate became affordable for almost everyone. See hershey’s. However, the quality of chocolate suffered. Manufacturers used inexpensive Forastero cacao beans and substituted cheaper fats for cocoa butter. Such material was used ubiquitously in chocolate candies, including those represented as luxury chocolates, until the late 1980s. The difference between what was sold as a luxury good and what was marketed as inexpensive chocolate often lay in the presentation and the marketing.
Some of the first chocolate candies presented as luxury goods in the United States were Sherry’s, founded by Louis Sherry, whose name was associated with New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel even though he died in 1926, a year before it opened. From 1881 to 1919, Sherry sold expensive chocolate confections made from ingredients “of the highest quality” to wealthy customers such as J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts in his upscale candy shop. He packaged his chocolate candies in signature ribbon-festooned boxes.
Almond Roca, founded in 1912, consisted of chocolate-covered toffees sold in supermarkets throughout the United States. But they were individually wrapped in gold-colored aluminum foil and packaged in beautiful pink cans that gave the candy an air of luxury.
Around 1985, with France leading the way, a few small companies such as Valrhona began to make chocolate from high-quality beans from specific regions. See chocolate, single origin and valrhona. The rare, prized Criollo variety was sought out and employed (and more trees were planted as demand increased), followed by Trinitario, a cross between Criollo and Forastero beans. In 2003 Domori, an artisanal Italian company, produced the first 100 percent Criollo bar. As high-quality chocolate became available, artisan confectioners sprang up to create chocolate candies with fillings or additions made with quality ingredients to match the chocolate.
The concept of luxury chocolate begins with the quality of the chocolate itself, emphasizing single-origin chocolates and the concept of terroir, or the skillful blending of high-quality beans. Truly excellent chocolate will also contain cocoa butter as its fat and pure vanilla. See vanilla. The packaging may list the percentage of cocoa solids (ground cacao beans) contained in the bar. Such chocolate is mostly produced by small companies, making quality chocolates rare and exclusive. They are usually carried in high-end retail stores and through exclusive websites. Wine pairings with specific chocolate bars add to the perception of luxury.
Some artisan confectioners began experimenting with unusual flavors such as tea, wasabi, bacon, mushrooms, beer, basil, and fennel pollen. Others feature regional ingredients. Handmade candies are often miniature works of art, and some artisan shops have become destinations for people seeking the finest foods. With ever more innovations in agriculture, manufacture, and confections, the concept of luxury chocolate will continue to evolve.
See also café; chocolate, post-columbian; chocolate, pre-columbian; cocoa; confection; and toffee.
chocolate, post-Columbian, refers to the culture of cacao after Spanish explorers brought New World cacao beans to Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century. Unlike the very wary reception of two other New World crops, potatoes and tomatoes, cacao was much more readily embraced by Europeans, thanks to its similarity—once roasted, ground, and prepared as a beverage—to two other popular, nonalcoholic drinks, tea and coffee. See cocoa.
Although it would take a few hundred years for some of the New World crops to be incorporated into Old World dietary systems, cacao’s trajectory was much shorter. Still, there was nothing inevitable about chocolate’s reception in Europe when Spanish conquistadors returned with those first cacao beans, which they referred to as “almonds.” (Hernán Cortés and not Christopher Columbus is generally believed to have been the first European to introduce cacao to the Old World, although no proof of this exists.) See chocolate, pre-columbian.
The bitter, murky, and undersweetened (by Spanish standards) beverage was not appreciated by all. Furthermore, the Galenic theory of medicine frightened off potential takers of the exotic new beverage, as its hot and dry (according to some) or cold and humid (according to others) properties were considered dangerous. These initial health concerns did not prove a deterrent for long, however, as some medical practitioners claimed that when roasted, ground, and properly prepared, hot chocolate was nutritious and would make one happy and strong.
One theory as to why this drink spread rapidly in Catholic Spain was that it could be consumed on fast days. As a beverage, it did not break the fast, and unlike coffee and tea, it provided sustenance due to its high fat content. On an empty stomach, theobromine (chocolate’s caffeine-like compound) increased the drink’s stimulating effects.
Naturally, the Spanish colonists living in New Spain developed the same appreciation for chocolate as did their confrères back home, and the steady interchange between Spain and New Spain fostered the creation of different preparations for hot chocolate that were better suited to European taste buds. The more familiar spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg, anise, cloves, mace, and cardamom replaced ear-flowers, chili peppers, achiote, and other New World ingredients. It was, therefore, a creolized culture of cacao developed after the Conquest that was exported back to Spain and subsequently to the rest of Europe. These hot chocolate recipes would continue to evolve (both black and white pepper would be substituted, and chili pepper would subsequently be reintroduced) as chocolate traveled between Europe and the New World.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, a number of treatises and monographs on chocolate and its medicinal uses were published first in Spanish and soon thereafter in English, French, and Italian; many were translations of earlier Spanish works. Some of these volumes were published by priests, others by medical doctors; in some instances, the writers had lived for long periods of time among the Native populations of the New World. In addition to their firsthand observations of traditional ways with cacao, and analyses of “cacao nuts” and their effects on the human body, these books featured a number of hot chocolate recipes, all initially water-based, as there had been no cows in the New World until the Europeans introduced them. A hot chocolate preparation containing milk was, therefore, a significant development.
One of the earliest such preparations combining milk with water may be found in Englishman John Chamberlaine’s translation of Sylvestre Dufour’s treatise on coffee, tea, and chocolate, published in London in 1685 as a translation of the Spaniard Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma’s much earlier monograph from 1631. One of Chamberlaine’s hot chocolate recipes calls for adding milk to the water along with one egg yolk for every ounce of milk used. Whether it was the Spanish, English, or French who first began adding milk to hot chocolate preparations is difficult to establish. What is known, however, is that the addition of milk to chocolate dramatically reshaped the history of cacao.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, chocolate had joined coffee and tea in London coffeehouses as an Enlightenment beverage: one that, unlike alcoholic drinks, promoted clear thinking. See café. One could sip chocolate all day long and remain clearheaded and productive. Fashionable, delicious, and nutritious, chocolate was all the rage among the affluent on the Continent and across the Channel.
Colonial Americans, in particular seafaring ones, quickly recognized the nutritional aspects of chocolate as well as its portability. And cacao beans, like rum and sugar from the Caribbean, were much-sought-after imports in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hot chocolate preparations joined coffee and tea as nonalcoholic alternatives to cider and beer. (The passage of the Townsend Acts beginning in 1767 made chocolate or coffee drinking a patriotic act, as tea was heavily taxed under these new measures.) Hot chocolate could be enjoyed outside the home, or unsweetened, coarsely ground chocolate cakes could be purchased at an apothecary or dry goods shop and prepared in one’s own kitchen. The cakes would either be dissolved into the liquid first and then warmed, or shaved into a pot in which the liquid had already boiled.
The chocolate breakfast (ideally while one was still in bed or even in the bath) came into vogue in Italy and France in the eighteenth century, and in response porcelain manufacturers like Meissen (and later Sèvres) expanded their coffee and tea service offerings to include double-handled chocolate cups (often with lids) set on deep saucers, known as trembleuses, and chocolate pots that were designed expressly for the new beverage. See chocolate pots and cups. French and Italian Rococo artists like Nicolas Lancret and Pietro Longhi depicted world-weary lords and ladies sipping hot chocolate in their private chambers. Chocolate, served in such surroundings, was deemed the antithesis of coffee, as the latter symbolized work and industriousness. Chocolate, on the other hand, represented studied leisure and idleness.
The Spread of Cacao
Besides the (drinkable) chocolate breakfast, desserts in Italy and France at this time began to feature chocolate as a flavoring in custards and creams. Across the Channel, the 1726 edition of Patrick Lamb’s cookbook Royal Cookery featured a French-inspired, meringue-topped chocolate tart. Such tarts and especially meringues were also popular in colonial America. See meringue.
The increased consumption of chocolate among Europeans was made possible by the spread of cacao plantations throughout the Caribbean. Following its introduction in the Caribbean by the Spanish, the English, French, and Dutch were soon experimenting with cacao in Brazil, Curaçao, Guadalupe, Hispaniola, Jamaica (which soon became England’s main source of cacao), Suriname, the West Indies, and Venezuela (and later in Africa and Indonesia). With cacao’s increased importance in the colonies came increased production, which led to the founding of two early chocolate factories, the first in Providence, Rhode Island (Brown Brothers in 1752), and the second in Dorchester, Massachusetts (Walter Baker and Co. in 1765). The founding of Baker’s Chocolate (by a chocolatier and a physician), the year after a smallpox epidemic in Boston, is perhaps not coincidental. Chocolate was frequently recommended for those afflicted with smallpox. See baker’s.
With the growing demand for chocolate on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not surprising that improved means of processing cacao beans would be developed. The nineteenth-century inventions of a small handful of Dutch, Swiss, and English chemists revolutionized the processing of cacao beans and reshaped an entire industry. As production capabilities increased due to mechanized grinding, so did the demand for an ever-greater supply of cacao beans. African countries like Ghana and Ivory Coast (with no history of cacao) were planted with the New World trees in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century had become the most important producers on the world stage.
Coenraad Van Houten’s mechanized grinding of cacao beans allowed for the separation of the fat (cocoa butter) from the solid (cocoa mass) and made possible the mass production and marketing of a powdered drinking chocolate. See van houten, coenraad johannes. The hydraulic press he invented with his father in 1828 proved inspirational to Roger Fry in England, who had been searching for a way to produce a paste of chocolate that would be thin enough to pour into molds for bars.
Henri Nestlé’s invention of powdered milk in 1867 made possible chocolatier Daniel Peter’s winning creation: milk chocolate. In 1879 the first milk chocolate bar was produced by adding (dry) milk solids to cocoa mass. See nestlé and peter, daniel.
The next great Swiss innovation, also dating from 1879, was Rodolphe Lindt’s invention of “conching,” a refining process that causes the cocoa liquor, or paste, to be ground into a micron size so small that no solids can be detected on the tongue. Although most foods do not benefit from mechanized processing, cacao is an exception. Without the refining and conching stages, perfectly smooth chocolate with a clean melt would be unknown. See lindt, rodolphe.
Tempering, too, invented around this time, greatly advanced the culture of chocolate. It remains a vital step in chocolate making today, as untempered chocolate does not have the same sheen and snap. By raising and lowering the temperature of the melted chocolate, the molecular structures of the fat and sugar crystals are aligned and become stable, thus maintaining the shine associated with well-made chocolate.
By the close of the nineteenth century, chocolate was already a popular flavoring ingredient for desserts in the United States. The 1896 edition of Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook features almost 20 recipes for cakes, frostings, puddings, cookies, and ice cream, some of which specifically called for Baker’s chocolate. As the twentieth century dawned, milk chocolate in confectionery reigned supreme. Milton Hershey introduced the Kiss in 1907 and a year later a milk chocolate almond candy bar. See farmer, fannie; hershey’s; and kisses.
Chocolate as Candy
The decades of the 1920s and 1930s saw the creation of such iconic American candy bars as Mr. Goodbar, Snickers, Baby Ruth, Three Musketeers, Butterfinger, and Milky Way bars. See candy bar. These candy bars, more caramel, nuts, and nougat than chocolate, came to define what most Americans considered chocolate to be. It was only with the arrival of Valrhona chocolate in the United States in 1984 (initially only for pastry and chocolate professionals, not the general public) that perceptions about chocolate began to change. Dark chocolate became an important ingredient on its own, not just a supporting actor to nuts, ice cream, milk, coconut, or caramel. In well-made flourless chocolate cakes, mousses, tarts, and sculpture-like plated desserts, chocolate had the starring role. Soon the public began to make a distinction between milk and dark chocolate. Origins and cocoa percentages began to matter. One of the first new-wave American barsmiths (as bean-to-bar producers are known) was Napa Valley winemaker John Scharffenberger, who founded Scharffenberger Chocolate with Robert Steinberg in 1996. The company was sold to Hershey’s in 2005. America’s oldest bean-to-bar chocolate company still in family hands is Guittard, begun in San Francisco by Frenchman Etienne Guittard at the time of the Gold Rush. See guittard and valrhona.
With the increased public awareness of food around the turn of the twenty-first century, a great number of sustainable-minded bean-to-bar companies were established in the United States and abroad. Socially and environmentally conscious, these chocolate artisans shunned beans from countries where farmers or children were exploited. See child labor. Working in small batches, often on nineteenth-century equipment, with fine, flavorful beans (frequently without vanilla or lecithin), these producers redefined the taste of chocolate.
As a means of reconfiguring the first-world or third-world economic model of chocolate making, cacao-growing countries have now become chocolate-producing countries. Despite the challenges of producing chocolate in a tropical country, companies in Grenada, Ecuador, and Madagascar are currently doing so and maximizing profits for cacao farmers. The revolution set in motion by these vanguard producers was quickly noted by the Lindts, Mars, and Hersheys of the world. Soon these industrial producers were adding single-origin and high cocoa content bars to their portfolios. See chocolate, single origin and mars.
Fine Chocolate
In recent years, as producers large and small, in the United States and abroad, began to worry about the world supply of cacao beans, Mars and Hershey’s undertook the genetic sequencing of the cacao bean in order to ensure a sustainable future for cacao. Their findings, published in 2010, have helped to identify the most flavorful, disease-resistant plants that are robust producers. Concern over the plight of cacao farmers, among the world’s most impoverished workers, has increased as public awareness about chocolate in general has grown. Seeking to shorten the food chain, many barsmiths are traveling the world, forging direct connections with cacao collectives rather than sourcing beans from brokers. This practice ensures that the premiums they pay for superior beans actually end up in the farmers’ pockets. In many ways, the traditional model of chocolate making has been turned on its head, with cacao-growing countries now becoming chocolate-making nations.
As the worldwide demand for chocolate increases and global production flattens, countries with no history of cacao cultivation are beginning to plant trees, with varying degrees of success. At the same time, countries that were once producers are revitalizing their industries. And so the history of chocolate continues to unfold in much the same way as it always has. Just as cacao was once taken from its New World home clear across the world, traveling as seedlings aboard wooden sailing ships, so it is with cacao today that is planted in Thailand, India, and Australia, miles from its origins in the Americas.
With the public’s appetite for chocolate growing ever more voracious as media outlets tout the health benefits of dark chocolate, and with tasting classes, festivals, and chocolate-centered ecotravel itineraries further tempting consumers, the world of chocolate is also becoming ever more niche. In 2014 an important chapter in chocolate’s history was ushered in with the creation of the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Initiative, dedicated to identifying, preserving, and propagating the finest-flavor cacao, and at the same time recognizing and rewarding the growers who cultivate it.
Drinkable, spreadable, enjoyable in many forms, Theobroma cacao, the food of the gods, remains a favorite food among mortals throughout the world.
See also chocolate, luxury; chocolates, boxed; chocolates, filled; plated desserts; and spain.
chocolate, pre-Columbian, was the New World’s most dazzling gift. Made from cacao seeds, or “beans,” enclosed in thick-skinned pods that sprout straight from both the trunk and branches of the slender, evergreen cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), chocolate is one of the most complex foods on earth. Nourishing, stimulating, packed with more than 400 chemical compounds that produce nuanced flavors and can heal and even alter mood, chocolate also has a mystical aspect. It is the stuff of desire and obsession, and has been a marker of class and status through the ages.
When you cut open a cacao pod, you find beans enveloped in ivory-colored, mucilaginous pulp with a sweet-tart flavor reminiscent of litchis. Attached to their central “placenta,” the beans, with their white, purple, lavender, or pinkish cotyledons, are often bitter and astringent in raw form, tasting nothing like chocolate until they have been fermented, dried, roasted, and ground. How did the people of tropical America stumble upon these processes? Where did cacao originate, and who first domesticated it? These questions have puzzled scholars for centuries.
If the history of chocolate were a 24-hour cycle, glossy chocolate bars and confections would represent a few seconds, while cacao and chocolate beverages would account for the vast majority of a long saga that began in South America 56 centuries ago, at least 1,670 years before the Egyptians built their first step pyramid. In 2010, research to decode the cacao genome established that the species originated in the Upper Amazon region. This pioneering project, launched with funding from Mars, Inc., was carried out mainly at the Subtropical Horticultural Research Station of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Division, in Miami, Florida. There, the Venezuelan-born geneticist Juan Carlos Motamayor also broke the long-established paradigm of two main types of domesticated cacao—Forastero (bitter and astringent, with purple cotyledons) and Criollo (nutty, nuanced, and sweet-tasting, with white cotyledons), plus a hybrid of the two called Trinitario—and shed new light on the complexity of genotypes within the species. Motamayor announced in 2008 that there were 10 distinct genetic clusters, a number that has grown to 15 as scientists have continued to examine samples of cacao gathered in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, and this number has continued to rise.
Cacao was essential to Maya and Aztec culture. The beans were dried and ground into a paste that was dissolved in hot water for a savory and nourishing drink. This illustration of a cacao tree is from the Tudela Codex, a sixteenth-century Aztec cultural encyclopedia. album / art resource, n.y.
While the genome sequencing project helped clarify the origins of cacao as well as the relationships among the types, it also raised questions about the absence of anything resembling chocolate in the plant’s native territory. At the time, no pre-Columbian ceramic or stone vessel containing traces of the alkaloid theobromine, the key chemical marker of cacao, had been found in the species’ Amazonian cradle, nor did there seem to be a tradition of chocolate making among contemporary Amazonian people. The consensus was that cacao was domesticated further north, in Mesoamerica, where it had arrived from South America in pre-Columbian times, and that it was in Mesoamerica that it had been first turned into chocolate.
A scene painted on a Late Classic Maya vase from Guatemala, now at the Princeton Art Museum, shows a woman pouring a chocolate drink from one vessel to another, the first held high above the second to create a head of foam, the most valued part of the beverage. This scene is the first known painted representation of a timeless ritual passed down to the Aztecs and then to Spanish colonists (who added their own twist, the molinillo, a wooden stick ending in a knob or rings used to agitate the liquid). It was also the first to show the crucial role of women in the making of chocolate beverages among the Maya.
The women spread the beans on a flat surface to dry, most likely after using the pulp for drinks. They roasted and shelled the dried beans before grinding them into a sticky paste that could be dissolved in hot water straight from the three-legged grinding stone called a metate; or, once dried, in cold water to make nourishing beverages.
Pre-Classic Maya pottery vessels dating from 500 c.e. found at Río Azul in the Petén region of Guatemala in 1987 offered tantalizing clues as to the antiquity of such chocolate drinks. Scrapings from their interior walls and bottoms analyzed by W. Jeffrey Hurst, senior scientist at the Hershey Foods Technical Center, yielded traces of theobromine. Even more thrilling, the Maya epigraphy expert David Stuart decoded two fish-shaped glyphs painted on one of the beautiful, stirrup-handled vessels as “kakawa,” or cacao. These findings led to other momentous discoveries that kept pushing back the date of the first Mesoamerican chocolate. Spouted pots from Colha, Belize, dating to 500 b.c.e., were found to contain residues of cacao, as were sherds from narrow-necked pottery dating to 1400–1100 b.c.e. excavated at the Puerto Escondido site in the Lower Ulúa River Valley in Honduras. The oldest milestone in the Mesoamerican chocolate saga came from traces of cacao on a single pottery sherd dating to 1900–1500 b.c.e. found at Paso de la Amada, a village on the Pacific coast of today’s Chiapas State in Mexico occupied by the Mokaya, a farming and fishing community.
Did the Moyaka or the people of the Ulúa River Valley consume chocolate or were they drinking fresh cacao juice or fermented cacao pulp drinks? Some scholars argue that the spouted, narrow-necked shape of the vessels points to the latter use, but it is incontrovertible that cacao had been domesticated and was consumed as a food by some of the earliest ceramic-using peoples of Mesoamerica.
There have been challenges to the Mesoamerican claim to chocolate primacy, however. Archaeological work at Santa Ana-La Florida, a pre-Columbian site near the town of Palanda in the Ecuadorian province of Zamora Chinchipe, 3,040 feet up the eastern slopes of the Andes, have brought cacao’s center of origin into revised focus. In 2003, a Franco-Ecuadorian team led by the Ecuadorian archaeologist Francisco Valdez excavated tombs and funerary offerings, a small ceremonial center, and domestic structures in this river valley by the Valladolid, a headwater stream of the Mayo Chinchipe River, which is a tributary of the mighty Peruvian Marañón. Their findings reveal an upper Amazonian culture of the early formative period now called Mayo Chinchipe-Marañón that had spread throughout the basin of the Chinchipe River. They practiced sedentary agriculture in a transitional cloud forest zone called ceja de montaña (eyebrow of the mountain) known for high plant diversity, and had a fairly advanced material culture of stone carvings and ceramics. Most important, residues contained in two beautiful, intact, anthropomorphic, stirrup-spout vessels, stone bowls, and a ceramic vessel recovered from tombs dating to 3500–3350 b.c.e. tested positive for cacao. That conclusion was based on analysis of cacao starch granules, which are less perishable than theobromine, by the archaeologist Sonia Zarrillo at Calgary University.
Thus, it seems that cacao not only had been grown in the ceja de montaña for millennia, but also that it had made the leap into drinks of ceremonial importance at least 1,450 years earlier than in Mesoamerica. In her doctoral dissertation Zarrillo (2012) writes, “It is interesting that starch granules of maize, especially, and chili peppers, reminiscent of the Mesoamerican chocolate recipes, were recovered from the same context as the possible T. cacao starch granules.” The starch granules of plant species identified at Santa Ana-La Florida—peppers, yuca, sweet potato, arrowroot, and cacao—date from the first formative period, and are the earliest evidence of the use of cacao to date.
Meanwhile, researchers from Ecuador’s Instituto Nacional Autónomo de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (INIAP) and France’s Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD) determined that trees growing at the Mayo Chinchipe-Marañón site were direct ancestors of Ecuador’s prized Nacional cacao strain. The tombs and ceremonial space excavated there also contained marine shells, most important Spondylus, from today’s coastal provinces. In other words, by 3300 b.c.e. trade routes across the double Andean mountain range connected the Amazonian region and the Pacific coast, showing that the lands that later became a part of Ecuador had developed a vertically integrated agricultural economy—the same system perfected by sixteenth-century Inca rulers that allowed the exchange of products from various altitudes and ecosystems.
The Aztecs, and the Maya before them, may not have been the first to experiment with cacao, but there is general agreement that they brought drinking chocolate to a high degree of sophistication, often combining roasted ground cacao beans with masa made from fresh or boiled lime-treated dried corn and a number of aromatic flavorings. The glyphs arranged around the rims of the tall, straight-sided polychrome vessels used for drinking chocolate show that the Maya colored, spiced, and perfumed the beverage with flavorings such as achiote, chiles, vanilla, honey, maguey sap, and flowers. The glyphs also spell out the names of green cacao drinks, meaning that fresh cacao pulp, unsweetened “bitter cacao,” “honeyed cacao,” and “foamy cacao” were drunk from these vessels.
Ethereal, foamy toppings were created by pouring chocolate drinks from a height from one cylindrical container to another, as depicted in the Princeton vase, but the survival of ceremonial recipes in some contemporary Maya communities of Guatemala suggests that by beating a masa made with ground cacao and its relative Theobroma bicolor (pataxte) together with a masa of lime-treated corn while adding hot corn gruel (atole), the cocoa butter and some of the corn float to the top as a firmer white topping.
Commissioned from local artists, chocolate-drinking vases were part of an elaborate gift-giving system that cemented social relations and alliances among the Maya nobility. On some bright ceramic paintings of the Classic Period (250–550 c.e.), nobles are shown seated on low platforms next to tall vases brimming with chocolate drinks topped with a reddish foam, a clear reference to achiote-colored drinks, and squatter vessels containing thicker corn-enriched atoles, more likely combined with chocolate.
The pairing of cacao and corn is a constant in the Mesoamerican history of chocolate to this day, as is a predilection for achiote as a coloring for chocolate. Achiote (known as annatto in English) is an important edible dye obtained from small, hard seeds enclosed in the red pods of a small tropical shrub. When ground with cacao beans, achiote imparts an intense brick-red color to chocolate drinks that the Maya equated to the blood of sacrificial victims, a central theme of Maya religious beliefs and rituals. While the color red was a favorite, the preferred flavoring for chocolate was the woody flower of an annonaceae, known today as ear flower (orejuela). On a beautiful Maya vase, two courtiers are shown bringing bouquets of ear flowers to a Maya chieftain seated on a low platform. When toasted, as most flavorings for chocolate are to this day, ear flowers taste like white pepper.
The cacao-growing regions that sustained the flowering of chocolate in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica were few. Information coming from the early colonial period shows that the most intensive production occurred in a few scattered spots in a rather narrow region of the tropical lowlands, including points on the Pacific coast of today’s Guatemala and the state of Chiapas in Mexico, Tabasco State on the Gulf coast of Mexico, and Honduras. Not coincidentally, they overlap with the spots where archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence of cacao used as food or drink: Paso de la Amada, El Manatí (an Olmec site), and Ulúa. Isolated areas of lesser production were found further north and south on both the Pacific and Gulf coasts (Colima and Tuxpan, respectively) of Mexico.
Recent discoveries of pottery containing traces of cacao in pre-Colombian sites in the Midwest, Southeast, and Southwest of the United States reveal the far-reaching influence of the Mesoamerican chocolate culture. In 2009 the archaeologist Patricia Crown reported that shards from tall, cylindrical clay jars dating from between 1100 and 1125 c.e., found at the Pueblo Bonito site in the Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, had tested positive for theobromine and caffeine, two chemical markers of cacao. More recently, the archaeologist Dorothy K. Washburn has found traces of cacao in older ceramics from the eighth-century Alkali Ridge site in southeastern Utah and from Mississippian platform mounds, dating from 1050 and 1250 c.e., respectively. There is still ongoing debate about whether the biomarkers found in the Mississippian pieces belong to Theobroma cacao or to Yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria), used to make a stimulant brew that archaeologists call Black Drink, but the latest evidence seems to point to cacao.
Given the towering importance of cacao in the value systems of the Maya and their contemporaries, it was inevitable that people living outside of cacao-producing regions would take up arms to gain control over to the prized crop. Cacao wars were fought among various powerful, bellicose peoples of the Guatemalan highlands, where cacao would not grow. Before the Spanish conquest, the Quiché Maya had repeatedly invaded areas of the coastal Pacific plains in order to get their hands on land suitable for cacao orchards. The food historian Sophie Coe and her husband, the archaeologist Michael Coe, report that the subjugated peoples were required to pay tribute in cacao to the overlords, the same demand imposed by the Aztecs when they conquered the cacao-growing areas the Maya had fought over. The most important of these regions was Soconusco in today’s Chiapas State.
By the time the Aztecs conquered Soconusco and other parts of Mexico in the late fourteenth century, they had already developed a complex chocolate culture based on tributes in the form of cacao and cacao flavorings from the subject tropical lands where it grew. As in other parts of Mesoamerica, cacao was highly valued and used as a form of currency among the Aztecs. We know that the Aztecs hungered for cacao without being able to grow it in their own cities. It reached Tenochtitlan, their cold capital on the highlands, from the subject tropical regions on the shoulders of porters (tlamemes), who walked for thousands of miles with bundles of the precious cargo fastened to their foreheads with straps.
From Spanish eyewitnesses of the early colonial period, including the Dominican friar Bernardino de Sahagún, author of the monumental Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain), we get a detailed picture of the place of cacao and chocolate drinks among the Aztecs. All histories of chocolate among the Aztec begin with the classic story of the fifteenth-century emperor Motecuhzoma II (Moctezuma II) imbibing cacao drinks daily from cups that looked as if they were made of gold. Upper-class families served chocolate at the naming ceremonies of their children, and the powerful merchant class incorporated it into banquets to celebrate successful trading journeys. It was an essential element of ceremonies where slaves were sacrificed and their flesh eaten. The paraphernalia of chocolate serving, such as decorated gourds and tortoise-shell stirrers, were among the gifts given to special guests.
A marker of class, chocolate drinks in colors ranging from white to red and black, and flavored variously with peppery ear flowers, sweet honey, and aromatic vanilla, came to the tables of the nobility at the conclusion of lavish banquets. As tokens of conspicuous wealth, even servants were handed gourdfuls of the precious brew. Bernal Díaz del Castillo comments that about 2,000 gourds of chocolate were doled out to the servants and staff at Motecuhzoma’s court after the emperor had consumed about 50 jicaras (gourdfuls) of the brew.
At the time of the Spanish conquest, cacao beans were available for purchase at the great market of Tlatelolco, where retailers displayed them by quality and provenance. In pre-Columbian times, the peoples of Mesoamerica learned to cultivate a particularly fine strain of cacao originally native to a region of Venezuela between Lake Maracaibo and the Andes. Other strains were known throughout the South American tropics, but the multiple pieces of the genetic puzzle had to await modern genomic sequencing. What the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Spanish colonizers all recognized was the superiority of the cacao that came to be called Criollo, now identified as one of the genetic clusters of the Theobroma cacao species. In the rich, well-watered volcanic Maya lands stretching along the Pacific coastal plain from Soconusco to parts of Guatemala and El Salvador, Criollo was valuable enough to make fortunes both before and after the Spanish conquest. What made Criollo special were its white cotyledons and its mild, nutty flavor, laced with herbal notes in some cultivars. When lightly toasted and ground, it made a honey-colored chocolate light enough to showcase colorings such as achiote.
The same merchants dealing cacao at the market sold the main flavorings for chocolate: tlilxochitl (vanilla), ueinacaztli (ear flower), and mecaxochitl (the thin, elongated flower stalk of Piper aurantium, or hoja santa). See vanilla. Prized by the Aztecs, these flavorings came to Tenochtitlan, like cacao, from warmer lands in the empire. The Spanish historian Diego Durán, in his Historia de las Indias (History of the Indies), tells us that late in the reign of Motecuhzoma I, a fifteenth-century predecessor of the last emperor, the ruler’s brother and chief advisor suggested an ambitious plan “that would bring him glory and praise after his days were done”—nothing less than a botanical garden near Tenochtitlan, warm and well-watered enough to raise hopes that plants from other regions might survive.
The chosen spot was Huaxtepec near Cuautla in today’s Morelos State (still the site of famous gardens). Here Motecuhzoma commanded that cacao trees and other plants bearing sweet-scented flowers be brought from the southern lands that supplied some of the most treasured goods in the imperial storehouses and the Tenochtitlan market. The task was undertaken with the most solemn sacrifices and rituals, and thanks to the care of skilled gardeners, every plant bloomed luxuriantly within three years—a result that Durán is careful to ascribe to the Devil’s cunning snares. The emperor and his brother wept with joy at being able to “bequeath to Mexico-Tenochtitlan and all the nations in the provinces associated with the Aztecs the refreshment and the delights of the flowers they had lacked until then.”
Besides vanilla and intensely fragrant flowers like the rosita de cacao, the Aztecs added corn in varying proportions to most chocolate drinks. Women ground the cacao beans on a metate several times with boiled, nixtamalized corn to achieve the right texture. The resulting paste was dissolved in water to make drinks on the spot. The amount of water and corn added to the cacao mixture were important variables determining quality (the more water or corn, the less desirable the drink). Even more important was the amount and beauty of the froth on the top of the drink, not unlike the head of foam on a contemporary cup of cappuccino.
Startled at first by the inordinate importance given to chocolate by the Aztecs, the conquering Spaniards succumbed to its charms and made it their own, absorbing the millennial technology that had transformed a tropical fruit into a dark brew of desire, and changing its flavor with Old World spices like cinnamon and sugar. Enthroned as the beverage of the upper classes and imbued with an aura of prestige, chocolate drinks traveled with colonial officials, merchants, sailors, nuns, and friars to Spain and capitals of the Spanish colonial empire from Mexico to the Philippines. The indispensable grinding stone, the metate, the gourds from which chocolate was drunk, and many of the recipes that had been created in the Americas also made the journey. What ensued was a new, transcontinental chocolate empire, a fluid world built on a Mesoamerican chocolate culture, which gave rise to new rituals and recipes that would flow back and forth across the Atlantic.
In the Americas, where it had all begun, two worlds of chocolate coexisted during the colonial period and beyond, one based on the elite drinks transformed by the Spaniards, which gradually lost their flavor complexity, and another fiercely clinging to ancient pre-Columbian traditions that never died, particularly in Mexico and Central America. Wherever one travels in the old lands of cacao, women still roast beans on clay comales and grind beans on metates. They make chocolate drinks like the bupu of Oaxaca, with its crown of froth, and the tejate of Oaxaca, with its firm white topping, redolent of rosita de cacao. At the same time, artisanal producers throughout Central America and micro-batch chocolate makers in North America are experimenting with flavorings so old that they seem new again.
See also chocolate, post-columbian; chocolate, single origin; cocoa; latin america; mexico; and spain.
chocolate, single origin, is a buzzword of today’s fine-chocolate industry. “Single origin” is perceived as a mark of distinction, even quality, promising consumers chocolate made with cacao beans from a verifiable source, not an anonymous blend. Use of the term is not standardized or regulated, however, and chocolate manufacturers have applied it in various ways, some of which are more meaningful than others.
One of the least meaningful is to label a chocolate made of beans sourced in a single country as “single origin.” While it can be generalized, for example, that Ecuadorian cacao has recognizable delicate and elegant flavor notes, each cacao-growing region of the country—Esmeraldas, Manabí, Guayas, Los Ríos, El Oro, Amazonia—has a distinct flavor profile determined by genetics and terroir. Even cacaos from a single plantation might be a mixed bag of hybrids and clones, not necessarily of excellent quality, and few plantations can prove claims of growing pure, single cultivars of rare, fine beans, such as the prized Criollos of Venezuela. Nevertheless, single-origin chocolates, when produced by conscientious chocolate makers who source their beans directly from reputable farmers, can deliver a luscious lesson in how genetics and terroir in its broadest sense—geography, growing conditions, and post-harvest practices—conspire to determine flavor.
For much of the twentieth century, American chocolate makers produced mild, sweet candies from hardy beans grown in Brazil and West Africa, while Switzerland’s Lindt and other European brands owned the fine-chocolate market, with little focus on the origin of the cacao. Beginning in the late 1970s, American consumers began to show interest in darker chocolate, often from Belgium or France, and in the 1990s, Valrhona began marketing its line of “grand crus,” chocolates with high percentages of cacao bearing romantic names like Manjari, Guanaja, and Pur Caraïbe that were loosely associated with particular cacao-growing regions. See chocolate, post-columbian; and valrhona.
Venezuela is South America’s premier producer of quality cacao, and its venerable Chocolates El Rey, founded in 1929, played a key role in advancing this trend. In 1984 the company launched traceable, single-origin couvertures (tempered chocolate with a high cocoa-butter content) using complex Carenero beans, a commercial blend of cacao strains that have grown in the Barlovento region northeast of Caracas since colonial times. Following Valrhona’s lead, El Rey also made chocolates with varying cacao content, displaying the percentages on the packaging. El Rey became the most progressive chocolate maker in Latin America, with a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to the production of chocolates with premium Venezuelan cacao. Its first export market was the United States, where in the 1980s, El Rey sponsored lectures on the concept of single-origin chocolates that attracted chocolate professionals. El Ray also created a program called La Ruta del Cacao (The Cacao Road) to take leading chocolatiers, pastry chefs, and journalists on trips to Venezuela’s cacao farms and El Rey’s factory in Barquisimeto. Motivated by the success of Valrhona and El Rey, artisanal American chocolate makers began producing chocolate from carefully selected beans with high cacao content and without the alkalis, fillers, and artificial flavors common in mass-produced chocolate. They found an eager audience among chefs and sophisticated consumers. Food lovers who had learned to distinguish between Robusta and Arabica coffees and to appreciate nuances of wine varietals were beginning to approach chocolate in the same critical fashion.
One of these American pioneers was Robert Steinberg, who interned with the Lyon chocolate maker Bernarchon. In 1996 Steinberg opened a small chocolate company with the former champagne maker John Scharffenberger, blending beans, as was the practice in France. Scharffen Berger Chocolate debuted with two couvertures with varying percentages of cacao and composed of at least seven beans. In the early 2000s Steinberg began experimenting with single beans, developing two outstanding couvertures with beans from Cuyagua, an isolated plantation on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, and Hacienda La Concepción, a progressive plantation in the Barlovento region northeast of Caracas. These were followed by El Carmen, a single-plantation chocolate with a whopping 75 percent cacao from fermented beans sourced from a small sector of La Concepción. With its amazing complexity, intense fruitiness, and remarkable smoothness, El Carmen was a perfect example of the excellence the best American chocolate companies were beginning to achieve.
The San Francisco company Guittard, founded in 1868 by Frenchman Etienne Guittard, soon followed with blends of high cacao percentage and single-origin couvertures. One of Guittard’s early single-origin chocolates was Sur del Lago, made with a blend of premium beans from the area south of Lake Maracaibo, the cradle of the fine Venezuelan Criollo cacao known as porcelana. See guittard.
The success of these companies, along with the innovations of European manufacturers like France’s Michel Cluizel and Italy’s Amedei and Domori, inspired micro-batch chocolate producers in the United States. Large manufacturers have also gotten into the action, among them Hershey, which in 2006 acquired Scharffen Berger, keeping that company’s line of fine chocolates and introducing its own line of single-origin chocolates.
While Latin America is still known primarily for the raw material rather than the finished product, a few small firms have joined El Rey in producing premium chocolates. In Quito, Ecuador, tiny Pacari Chocolate is successfully competing with the world’s best brands. Working only with sustainable organic and biodynamic cacao sourced from genetically diverse old farms, Pacari has created bars that capture the distinctive flavor of various Ecuadorian and Peruvian regions. Its single-source Pacari Piura Quemazón, with complex notes of citrus, dried fruit, and a lingering dairy tinge, was named the world’s best dark bar at the International Chocolate Awards in London in October 2013, followed by another major victory in 2014 for a bar made with heirloom Nacional cacao.
As our chocolate choices increase, the selection process can seem bewildering. To the rescue come chocolate tastings, which have become as commonplace as wine, cheese, or olive oil tastings, as well as chocolate blogs, chocolate shops where one can sample the wares, and a growing number of chocolate guides that take you by the hand as you navigate the brave new world of single-origin chocolate.
See also cocoa; chocolate, pre-columbian; latin america; and lindt, rodolphe.
chocolate pots and cups are used to prepare and serve drinking chocolate. Chocolate was consumed primarily as a beverage before the nineteenth century, and material objects contributed significantly to its sensory impact and cultural meaning. Among the Maya and Aztecs, the fruit of the cacao tree could express religious beliefs, elite status, and the power of rulers. Between the thirteenth century b.c.e. and the Spanish conquest of the 1500s, various cacao-based liquids figured in rituals related to warfare, diplomacy, marriage, and burial. Artfully designed containers cast this symbolic potency in permanent form. They included cylindrical jars, footed vases, and spouted bottles made of clay, as well as round cups fashioned from calabash gourds. Decoration ranged from rhythmic patterns to detailed scenes of cacao consumption. An inscription might identify a specific type of concoction or an owner’s name and title. Preparation could be a dramatic performance as a beverage was poured from one vessel to another to produce a delectable layer of foam.
Recipes and values changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as native Mesoamerican and Spanish foodways influenced one another and chocolate became available throughout Europe and colonial North America. People debated the merits of a drink that now incorporated the sugar and spices of Old World cuisine. Many embraced it as a cure for numerous ailments or a luxurious treat at social gatherings, but others worried about harmful side effects. Preparation involved multiple steps. Prepared chocolate (cacao beans that had been fermented, roasted, husked, ground, and sometimes seasoned) was grated and dissolved in simmering water or milk. Sweetness and spice were adjusted, and enriching ingredients like eggs or ground nuts were sometimes added. The thick, potent mixture required vigorous beating to incorporate a fat content of around 50 percent.
European chocolate pots, designed to serve the fashionable new beverage in style, had a short spout set high on a cylindrical, conical, or pear-shaped body, and an opening in the lid through which a stirring rod was inserted to emulsify and froth the chocolate. This silver and wood chocolate jug was crafted by Henry Louis Le Gaigneur around 1740. image © sterling and francine clark art institute, williamstown, massachusetts (photo by michael agee)
Euro-American chocolate was served from many types of containers, including modest earthenware jugs and copper beakers. For wealthy consumers, especially during the eighteenth century, chocolate’s appeal was enhanced by specialized pots crafted from expensive silver or porcelain. Porcelain was a novel medium, imported in large quantities from China and commercially produced in the West only after 1710. Some chocolate pots belonged to larger services for coffee and tea—two other imports gaining favor during the same period—or to travel kits equipped for grooming and letter writing. Many resembled and probably doubled as coffee pots. Shared elements could include a short spout set high on a cylindrical, conical, or pear-shaped body; a curved or horizontal handle placed at a right angle to the spout; and three slender feet that raised some vessels above the tabletop like dancers on tiptoe. Certain features contributed to functionality as well as elegance. Wooden handles remained cool to the touch. Some designs addressed chocolate’s oily consistency with longer, lower spouts that kept separated fat from escaping into cups, or with heating stands to optimize temperature and viscosity.
The only feature that definitively marked a vessel as a chocolate pot was an aperture in the lid, often covered by a finial or sliding disk. Found on both modest and ornate models, the opening accommodated a stirring rod, usually made of turned or carved wood with a bulbous end rather like that of a modern honey dipper. Rolling this implement briskly between the palms lightened the drink’s texture by emulsifying fat and creating a frothy head. Invented in Mesoamerica sometime before or during the Spanish conquest, the device became known by various names, including molinillo, moulinet, or mill, and is still used in parts of Latin America today.
Blended to unctuous perfection, chocolate was served in very small portions. Elites often enjoyed theirs from delicate porcelain cups with matching saucers. Generally taller and narrower than tea cups and purchased in sets, chocolate cups could also be used for coffee and were available in a wide range of designs. Most had a single handle, but there were also tulip-shaped tumblers without handles, and two-handled models with lids to keep the beverage warm. Their smoothly glazed exteriors might be painted with delicate bouquets, flirtatious couples, or exotic Asian landscapes.
Luxury chocolate wares were fundamentally social objects. During morning toilettes, afternoons in the garden, and candlelit balls, one was expected to appreciate containers as much as their contents. Pots and cups expressed an owner’s taste and status through precious materials, fine workmanship, fashionable style, and sometimes a monogram or coat of arms. Decorative motifs stimulated conversation; sipping daintily from tiny cups demonstrated refined comportment. The frothing process, whether undertaken by masters or servants, provided moments of entertaining adult play. The implications of design could be quite tantalizing. In the ongoing debate over chocolate’s physiological effects, some claimed it was an aphrodisiac, while others considered it a balm for delicate constitutions. Both possibilities were engaged by special saucers with indentations or mounts that prevented cups from spilling in the trembling hands of over-exerted drinkers. And in a society that appreciated erotic innuendo, the brisk action of a phallic stirring rod inside a curvaceous vessel may have inspired witty remarks. Chocolate paraphernalia also facilitated a sense of cultural control over a substance still associated with foreignness. Virtuoso containers materialized colonial conquest, literally enclosing chocolate in evidence of Euro-American aesthetics and consumer power.
The use of chocolate pots diminished during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Coffee and tea became far more ubiquitous and consumers favored chocolate in the newer forms of solid confections and hot cocoa. Milder, less fatty, and easier to mix than the beverage of previous centuries, cocoa was also better suited to middle-class conceptions of good health and family life. Currently, chocolate pots are enjoying a modest comeback inspired by interest in novelty tableware, historical recipes, and premium bittersweet chocolate laced with spices. Some contemporary models feature transverse handles, splayed feet, or frothing devices that recall traditional designs. Yet even if chocolate beverages have regained a certain allure, aficionados can only begin to imagine what it once meant to whirl an exotic substance inside an elegant pot and savor it slowly, one precious sip at a time.
chocolates, boxed, traditionally include various individual chocolate-covered confections or bonbons, placed next to one another in single-portion cups within a tin or cardboard box. The term “bonbon” encompasses creams, fruits, nuts, caramels, jellies, and other bite-sized confections enrobed with chocolate. See bonbons. It is generally accepted that the French are responsible for elevating chocolate to new gastronomic heights with the creation and ascendant popularity of bonbons beginning in the seventeenth century. Due to their costly processing, exotic ingredients, and delicate nature, only royalty and the privileged elite enjoyed bonbons at this time.
Bonbons were safely packaged and presented in beautiful handmade boxes that came to be known as bonbonnières. These were presented at weddings, religious events, and celebrations, their contents infused with symbolic meaning. One of the earliest recorded mentions of a chocolate boette (box) comes from 1659, when King Louis XIV of France granted a royal patent to the queen’s confectioner David Chaliou, allowing him the exclusive privilege “for twenty-nine years to manufacture and sell chocolate liquor, pastilles, boxes and in other ways that please him.” As chocolate and sugar became more readily available in the late eighteenth century, French chocolatiers marketed bonbons in fancy paper boxes adorned with paintings and rococo embellishments. Consuming delicate boxed chocolates represented exactly the sort of elite pastime that democratic French revolutionaries aimed to destroy in 1789.
A different sort of revolution made the transport and processing of cocoa and sugar increasingly cheaper and more accessible during the early nineteenth century. See cocoa. Industrial Britain saw the rise of competitor firms Fry and Cadbury, each vying for dominance of the burgeoning chocolate market. See cadbury. In order to compete with Fry’s popular Chocolate Cream Sticks, Richard Cadbury looked to France for inspiration of a new product line: the Fancy Box, introduced in 1861. Brilliant chromolithographed pictures decorated the box’s exterior, many designed by Cadbury himself. Inside, lacy doilies caressed colorful, assorted chocolates tempting the beholder with their silky texture. Many of the bonbons were given French names like chocolat du Mexique and chocolat des delices aux fruits, adding to their exotic appeal. Cadbury’s boxed chocolates were all the rage in Britain and Europe during the 1860s and 1870s. Assortments often emphasized a particular category of palate: Fruit & Nut, Double Milk, and Extra Superfine Chocolate Creams.
As the turn of the century neared, the popularity and variety of chocolate boxes exploded, with competitors Fry and Rowntree featuring dozens of different assortments, each housed in a specially designed box. The public eagerly anticipated the arrival of the Christmas- and Easter-themed assortments, and especially the chocolates commemorating the coronation of King George V. So popular were specialty and limited-run assortments that many chocolate makers began to produce commemorative metal tin boxes for their chocolates, capitalizing on the collectible nature of the boxes themselves.
Despite the early market saturation of the British chocolate boxes, it was an American who takes honors for the earliest recorded commercial chocolate box, one that remains famous today. Stephen Whitman opened his confectionery shop in Philadelphia in 1842, when he was only nineteen. By 1854, with his modern steam-powered confectionery producing chocolates in high volume, Whitman introduced his Choice Mixed Sugar Plums packaged in an “elegant box, pink and gilt, lavishly decorated with designs of rosebuds and curlicues.” From the start, Whitman understood the effectiveness of magazine advertising and began to market his packaged chocolates to a national audience. In 1888 his son Horace became the first to incorporate cellophane in boxes of chocolate to preserve the freshness of the bonbons. Yet real genius struck in 1912 when company president Walter Sharp found inspiration in an old needlework sampler on the wall of his home. With the help of a Philadelphia artist, Sharp designed and marketed the Whitman’s Sampler, the first-ever box of chocolates with a printed key revealing the contents of the chocolates. Housed in a now-iconic yellow box with a needlework design, the Sampler by 1915 had become the top-selling boxed assortment of chocolates in the United States. Since then, the Sampler has remained king of chocolate boxes worldwide; the company estimates that a box is sold every 1.5 seconds.
No article on chocolate boxes would be complete, however, without a certain heartfelt mention. Ever since it was introduced to Europe, chocolate has been associated with temptation and imagined to have aphrodisiacal properties. See aphrodisiacs. Both Casanova and the Marquis de Sade extolled the virtues of chocolate in their pursuit of love. Cupid struck Richard Cadbury in 1868, when he introduced the first heart-shaped chocolate box. Today, over 35 million heart-shaped boxes are sold worldwide each year for Valentine’s Day. See valentine’s day. As much as they symbolize love, however, boxed chocolates are also a metaphor for uncertainty. As Forrest Gump famously said in the eponymous 1994 film, “My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’”
See also chocolate, luxury; chocolate, post-columbian; chocolate, pre-columbian; and chocolates, filled.
chocolates, filled, consist of a hard chocolate coating around a center, usually made of nougat, ganache, toffee, fruit, or nuts. They originated with the nineteenth-century invention of conching, which emulsified the chocolate and made it smooth. Previously, chocolate had been drunk as a beverage, or used as a gritty, oily paste to flavor pastries and sweets.
The first solid chocolate bar was produced in 1847 by Roger Fry in England. His company, Fry’s, also invented the first filled chocolate candy, Cream Sticks, in 1853. These were essentially sticks of mint-flavored boiled and hardened sugar dipped into melted chocolate. To produce the sweet on a larger scale, Fry’s created molds into which the mint sticks were placed, and melted chocolate was poured over them and allowed to set. In 1866 these candies were mass-produced as Fry’s Chocolate Creams.
In 1861 the English firm Cadbury offered the Fancy Box, a decorated box of chocolate candies filled with marzipan, orange, chocolate ganache, and fruit-flavored crèmes. Richard Cadbury imported a Parisian chocolatier to develop recipes for the fillings. The confections were christened with elegant French names, such as Chocolat des delices aux fruits.
In 1868 Cadbury created one of the Fancy Boxes in the shape of a heart for Valentine’s Day. Boxes of filled chocolates, heart-shaped and otherwise, quickly became widely associated with the holiday. See chocolates, boxed and valentine’s day. After the 1880s Swiss innovation of milk chocolate for eating (milk chocolate for drinking had been invented a few years earlier), Cadbury began to employ milk chocolate as a candy coating, calling it Dairy Milk. By 1910 the company had created Dairy Milk–coated candy Easter eggs. Whitman’s of the United States offered its Sampler box in 1912 and provided the first pictorial guides within the boxes to the fillings inside each chocolate.
A major step toward mass production took place in 1913, when Jules Sechaud of Montreux, Switzerland, invented machinery for filling chocolates. Two main methods of mechanically filling chocolate confections are used today:
The best filled chocolates are covered with couverture, meaning “covering.” Couverture contains at least 32 percent cocoa solids and has cocoa butter for its fat. Sugar and vanilla, plus a small amount of soy lecithin to keep the fat and chocolate from separating, are the remaining ingredients. The chocolate is then tempered, an exacting process of heating it to a specific temperature and cooling it down. Tempering imparts to chocolate coating a glossy appearance and a crisper texture. Tempering also gives coatings a longer shelf life and helps avoid “bloom,” when the cocoa butter and chocolate separate and white blotches appear on the finished product. Compound chocolate or compound coating, made with a smaller percentage of chocolate and vegetable fats instead of cocoa butter, is used in the production of lesser-quality filled candies.
One of the most universal and well-loved filled chocolates is the truffle, a spherical confection in which a chocolate coating surrounds a center of creamy chocolate ganache. The most common coatings are couverture or cocoa powder, sometimes with finely chopped nuts added. The ganache centers may be flavored with liqueurs and other additions. The best chocolate truffles are handmade, and can be concocted by home cooks with a fair amount of ease. See truffles.
Boxes of assorted filled chocolates with a variety of fillings remain ubiquitous in the United States and Europe. They are mass-produced by large companies in varying qualities. Small artisan businesses offer boxes of handmade assortments created from high-quality ingredients.
See also chocolate, luxury; chocolate, post-columbian; and chocolate, pre-columbian.
Christianity and sweets present us with a paradox. Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples centered on bread and wine, and throughout Christian churches the Eucharist commemorating his life, death, and resurrection is identified with these staples of a frugal meal. The commonest alternatives then and now are bread (leavened or not) and unfermented grape juice, or water, or bread alone. Yet Christians have created and adopted an ever-expanding array of sweet treats—from fig cakes and St. Lucia’s Eyes to Trappistine creamy caramels—as ways of celebrating their spirituality in everyday life. See spirituality. These treats also draw their vitality from biblical scriptures, perhaps above all from the paradox that sweetness in Christianity is inseparable from bitterness.
Christianity emerged in Roman Palestine some 2,000 years ago among Jews who considered Jesus of Nazareth to be the mashíakh (“anointed [one]”), translated into Greek as Khristós, whence “Jesus Christ” in the letters of the 50s c.e. attributed to the apostle Paul. To the “Old” scriptures they shared with other Jewish sectarians, Christians added scriptures canonized as “New” over the next 300 years. In 380 c.e. Emperor Theodosius proclaimed Christianity as defined at the Council of Nicaea (325 c.e.) the official religion of the Roman Empire, but Christianity has kept diversifying in keeping with centuries-long tensions between priestly and populist strains. Theodosius’s partition in 395 c.e. of his eastern and western domains between his two sons contributed over later centuries to distinctions among Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianities, Roman Catholicism, and eventually Protestantism.
Sweets in Christianity are thus rooted in biblical ideas and practices of food and eating shared with Judaism—above all, the conviction that food, articulated in meals, expresses God’s Word, divine Wisdom. See judaism. Throughout the world, who feeds or eats what with whom, when, where, and how, speaks directly to people’s closest social relations. Biblical meals express the covenant binding people and God. Jewish sectarians, including early Christians, used the language of meals to state their understanding of the divine covenant. “O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him” (Psalms 34:8), echoed in the New Testament (Hebrews 6:5, I Peter 2:3). The sweetest of all sweets in the Bible is the “law of the Lord … the decrees … the precepts … the commandment … the ordinances of the Lord…. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalms 19:7–10, echoed in Psalm 119:103).
Hearing with the Mouth
How did such sweet words taste to Christians in Roman Palestine and the growing diaspora? The biblical land “flowing with milk and honey”—the favored description of the fertile promised land of Canaan in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—actually flowed with dvash in Hebrew (dibs in Arabic), translated as méli in the Greek Septuagint and New Testament, a term having the same broad meaning. These sweet, thick substances (“sticky” is the root meaning of dvash) included fruit syrups made from figs, dates, grapes, pomegranates, and carob pods, as well as wild and domesticated honey. See dates and honey. The common feature of these early honeys—and the syrups, cordials, jams, pastes, compotes, and comfits made from them—is the intensity of their sweetness, the result of time- and labor-intensive practices we still celebrate in bees and in the occupational language and practices of confectioners: chopping, boiling, straining, concentrating, and compounding. Sugarcane, introduced from India, was grown in the seventh and eighth centuries c.e., but did not become a significant cash crop until the tenth century. See sugarcane.
Thus, to feel the visceral impact of the words “sweeter than honey” to early Christians—indeed, all Christians into the late nineteenth century—twenty-first-century readers in the United States would have to forgo the roughly 76 pounds of sugar consumed per person per year. The ancient sweets were rare and precious. Furthermore, they were crucial to life. According to the humoral theory of Galen (129–216 c.e.), prevalent among Jews, Christians, and Muslims for over a thousand years, their warm and moist qualities contributed to the vitality of the body in health and its restoration in sickness. The antiseptic and healing properties of bees’ honey were used to treat wounds as well as preserve foods, medicines, and (in Egypt) bodies.
Above all, words sweeter than honey had a bitter aftertaste. Early Christians drew on the complexity of sweetness in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Revelation to John (10:8–11) echoes Ezekiel (2:10–3:6) in describing the angel’s command to prophesy God’s word made flesh—Jesus Christ—to the world: “‘Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel…. Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter. Then they said to me, ‘You must prophesy….’” The sweet scroll in Ezekiel’s stomach was filled with the bitter “words of lamentation and mourning and woe” he must prophesy to the “rebellious house” of Israel. John’s sweet–bitter revelation is the “good news” (euangélion, whence “Godspel” or “gospel” in English) that Christians’ salvation is born of Jesus Christ’s suffering and death.
Sweet Offerings in Everyday Life
Sweets thus have a complicated history in Christianity. They remain central to the meals and words with which Christians have celebrated their faith over the past two millennia. Yet they prevail not in the formal rituals of Christian churches, but in ceremonies at homes, graveyards, and neighborhoods. They accompany births, baptisms, and marriages as festive treats. See birth; funerals; and wedding. But their spiritual significance emerges mainly in funerals and ancestral commemorations in which the dead are made present again among the living. The table or grave becomes an altar, and the sweet offerings take on Eucharistic dimensions; they are often shaped like the body of the dead and may be inscribed with his or her name. Women are the cooks and main officiants, especially where church rituals remain in men’s hands. Fertility, growth, and love are among the life-and-death issues with which they are concerned, surely entwined with longing as in the biblical Song of Solomon, but this aspect of Christian sweets remains veiled.
Among Eastern Orthodox Christians, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days from the Levant to Siberia center on a dish of boiled grains (usually wheat berries), honey, nuts, and spices, made in many local varieties: ameh masslouk or snuniye (Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan); sliha (Syria) or burbara (for Eid il-Burbara, St. Barbara’s Feast throughout the Middle East); cuccia (Sicily); koliva (Greece); koljivo (Serbia); colivă (Romania); kolivo (Bulgaria); and kutia (in eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia). The mound of porridge, likened to the grave, is decorated with the initials or full name of the dead spelled out in fruits, nuts, or candies, and in some cases a portrait. See wheat berries.
Except for the koliva made by monks at some monasteries on Mount Athos, grandmothers, mothers, wives, and daughters make these dishes. On All Souls’ Day in Greece, the women take their delicacies to the church where the priest blesses them in the names of all the dead, but each woman takes her koliva to the grave of the deceased, after which they are shared among all. The koliva, called makario (“that which is blessed”), is identified symbolically with the body of the deceased, called makaritis (“she or he who is blessed”), described in one funeral lament as “My little ear of wheat husked and reaped before your time.” Among Lebanese Christians, wheat berries (seeds) are symbols of rebirth.
Future research may clarify whether these dishes spreading north and east from the Mediterranean are related historically to the bsisa still made by women in Arab-speaking Sephardic Jewish families in mid-twentieth-century Jerba (Tunisia) and Tripoli (Libya). The porridge of grains (wheat, barley, and sorghum), ground into flour and combined with sugar, herbs, and spices, crowns the festive meal celebrating the first day of the three weeks culminating in Passover. See passover. The bsisa presages fertility and sweetness for the family in the coming year.
From Honey to Sugar
Sweets in eastern Christianity are still based on honey, its taste, consistency, and color being tied to the particular flowers and fields that went into bees’ making, even though it may be covered with cane-sugar frostings or decorations. In Western Christianity, cane sugar imported from around the Mediterranean began to replace honey beginning in the tenth century because it was seen as more delicate and refined, whiter, and healthier. See medicinal uses of sugar. In the wedding banquets depicted in Sandro Botticelli’s series “The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti” (1483), said to show the marriage of Giannozzo Pucci and Lucrezia Bini in Florence, cane sugar sweets cover the tables and fill the trays that servants offer to the viewer. The costly sweets—assorted comfits (sugar-coated nuts, seeds, and spices), pine-nut cakes, marzipan, and candied fruits—mark the high status of the alliance as much as the familial emblems, silver and gold vessels, lavish clothing, and jewelry adorning the guests. See candied fruit; comfit; and marzipan. Sweets were significant gifts between families and individuals in health and illness because of their festive-nutritional-medicinal properties, suitable to every age and temperament.
In contemporary Sicily and in the Sicilian diaspora, the feast Day of St. Lucia of Syracuse (13 December) is still celebrated with cuccia, but also with St. Lucia’s Eyes (Occhi di Santa Lucia): sweets of cane sugar, flour, eggs, milk, and flavorings, shaped like eyes. The dough may be rolled, sliced, deep-fried, and dusted with sugar, or shaped into little doughnuts and frosted, or into little round cookies topped with curls of candied fruit. Research in Renaissance Italy and colonial Peru shows that many Saints’ and All Souls’ sweets originated as the creations of elite women who became nuns when their marriage prospects failed. Sweet making may have been a form of spiritual expression, but giving sweets also kept them in touch with their families, even at the expense of their order. Only later did “convent sweets” become a source of income. See convent sweets. Suor Maria Celeste, who was not wealthy, wrote to her father Galileo in 1629 from the Convent of San Matteo, Arcetri: “I also want to know how you feel, Sire, … and, not having anything better to send you, I offer a little poor man’s candied quince, by which I mean that I prepared it with honey instead of sugar.”
Sweets such as St. Lucia’s Eyes, St. Agatha’s Breasts, Bones of the Dead, St. Joseph’s Staff, and St. Anne’s Book replicate the long-prevailing iconography of the saints and saints’ relics in paintings, sculptures, and prayer cards. Even saints’ sweets that are not shaped like sensitive body parts are intensely personal because they are one with their cooks: nuns in convents; women in families; families over generations, neighborhoods, regions. St. Agatha’s Breasts are miniatures of the cassata identified with Palermo and its Monastero delle Vergini: round sponge cakes soaked in fruit juice or liqueur, filled with a custard of ricotta and candied fruits, covered in marzipan (green and white since the eighteenth century), coated with frosting, and decorated with candied fruit. See cassata. St. Agatha’s cassatelle—also called Minni di Vergine (“virgins’ breasts”)—are adorned with cherry-nipples and sold in pairs.
St. Agatha and St. Lucia, named in the Canon of the Latin Mass, are now found among Catholics worldwide, but domestically they speak local culinary dialects. Sicilian migrants treasure their families’ recipes for St. Lucia’s Eyes. So do Catholics in Scandinavia who celebrate Sankta Lucia by eating Lussekatter (“Lucia cats”): yeasted sweet buns flavored with saffron (and sometimes other spices) and raisins (or currants or sultanas). Some are eye-shaped, like S-shaped St. Lucia’s Breads in Sicily with a raisin in each center, but they also take other forms. In Swedish families, the eldest daughter is their cook. Dressed as Saint Lucia in a white gown and a leafy candle-lit crown, she serves them to her parents on St. Lucia’s Day to celebrate the morning of the first day of Advent. Or, she buys them premixed or frozen from the Swedish company IKEA through the Internet.
Sweetness and Sin
Following the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, sumptuary laws barred excess in sweets as in other luxuries among Catholics and Protestants alike. Changing theologies of divinity and humanity were associated with changing theories of the human body in health and illness, expressed in efforts to separate the “Greek” elements of Galenic theory from its “Arab” elements. Sugar and sweets were redefined as burning, corrosive, and hard to digest. The “burial cakes” (Beerdigungskuchen, usually Blechkuchen, or sheet cakes), “death cakes” (doodkoecks), and avral (or avril) bread or funeral biscuits of German, Dutch, and English Protestants still found in Europe and among their migrant communities in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect these changes in theology, medicine, sociality, and food. Like Catholics’ sweets, Protestants’ sweets also speak in the vernacular. The avral breads in nineteenth-century Yorkshire’s North Riding were small, round “crisp sponge” cakes “slightly sprinkled with sugar,” but large round “Scotch short-cakes” in the West Riding. In Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, and Shropshire, they were oblong “sponge biscuits” or “sponge fingers,” but pieces of “rich cake” in Cumbria and “hot plum-cake fresh from the oven” in Radnorshire in Wales.
The cakes, biscuits, or cookies might be dipped in wine at the funeral, but they were also taken home as mementoes of the dead to be shared or saved uneaten. The practice among some Protestant sectarians of marking “funeral tokens” (as they were also called) with the initials of the deceased suggests that they might have developed historically from sweets more explicitly shaped like human bodies. Yet Protestants would have heeded their preachers’ debates over whether the bread and wine in the Eucharist were the trans- or consubstantial body and blood of Christ, or simply emblems thereof. Perhaps owing to such concerns, Protestant funeral tokens were also decorated with generic Christian images like crosses and doves, or even motifs drawn from commercial funeral paraphernalia. Sweets served in contemporary Protestant rites of passage from births to funerals are indistinguishable from the everyday fare of all-too-human beings.
“Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19)
Multisensory meals are memorable everywhere. In Christian meals, living people commemorate the dead, and in remembering their generations in the face of death, they consider the foundations of their existence. The prominence of sweets outside church services is a sign that Christianity in its many forms is reproduced by clergy in universalizing terms and also by congregants who create their sweet–bitter confections out of their everyday experiences of living and dying.
See also day of the dead; easter; islam; and manna.
Christmas is a major, month-long Christian festival that coincides with the midwinter solstice in the northern hemisphere. Doctrinally, Christmas is a feast celebrating the birth of Christ, yet it has absorbed so many pagan and non-Christian practices that one need not be an observant Christian to enjoy the bounty. The season opens with Advent, starting on the Sunday four weeks prior to Christmas Day. Originally a fasting period, it is now a whirlwind of socializing, with different festivities that vary by country and culture. In areas with Roman Catholic and Protestant heritage, Christmas Eve (24 December), Christmas Day (25 December), New Year’s Eve and Day (31 December–1 January), and Twelfth Night (6 January) are the most commonly celebrated; less widespread are the Dutch St. Nicholas’s Day (6 December) and the Swedish St. Lucy’s Day (13 December). Eastern Orthodox Christians observe Christmas Day on or about 7 January.
Sacred and pagan symbols mingle throughout the holidays. For example, the 13 desserts (lei tretze dessèrts) of Provence—an unpredictable assortment of fresh and dried fruits, nuts, nougat, biscuits, and cakes that appears for several days in France—are said to represent Christ and His Apostles, while the bûche de noël, a log-shaped cake decorated with a forest’s worth of meringue mushrooms, pays homage to the Old Norse jól festival, marking the winter solstice. See bûche de noël and holiday sweets. Other sweets allude to a darker side of folk celebrations, often linked to the unruly Roman Saturnalia. The tiny comfits that noisily erupt from Christmas crackers conjure charivaris, rowdy parades where participants loudly went door-to-door extorting food, drink, and money from their economic betters until this public carousing was domesticated in the nineteenth century; caroling now replaces the marauding. Yet the unsettling origins lurk in the words of one popular carol, when singers demand figgy pudding, threatening, “We won’t go until we get some.”
Specific sweets became Christmas specialties only in the late Middle Ages. Early Christmas confections used expensive sugar, spices, dried and candied fruits, and nuts, making them suitable for gift giving. These were not newly invented dishes, but ones retrofitted with symbolism. What distinguished them was their appearance: they evoked religious and cultural emblems, whether through the design of the cook or the attribution of pointed meanings by opinion makers. Gingerbread men, bûche de noël, and candy canes shaped like a bishop’s crozier appear only at Christmas, notwithstanding that gingersnaps, rolled cakes, and peppermint hard candies are found year round. Color coding with red and green foodstuffs, dyes, and packaging also helped turn standard sweets into Christmas specialties in the late nineteenth century.
Dried Fruit Hashes, Puddings, and Cakes
Mincemeat pies and plum puddings originated as hashes of meats, offal, suet, spices, fresh and dried fruits, and sugar or honey before evolving into their modern, usually meatless dessert versions in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Puritans and other strict Protestant sects in England and especially America freighted mincemeat pies with religious disapproval, equating the expensive spices with the Magi’s frankincense and the oblong pie crusts with Jesus’s crèche, calling this “food of the Papists” and “idolatrie in a crust.” See mince pies. The closely related plum pudding, with its traditional 13 ingredients, was identified with Christ and the Apostles: those who still celebrated Christmas ritually stirred the pudding from east to west in the belief that emulating the direction of the Magi’s journey would bring good luck. By the nineteenth century the religious food fight subsided, and plum pudding became an iconic conclusion to many Anglophone Christmas dinners, set ablaze with spirits and marched into the dining room with confident pomp, or fretted over by the literary likes of poor Mrs. Cratchit in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Rich and boozy fruitcakes are eagerly anticipated treats in the United Kingdom and most of its former colonies, although they have never found favor in the United States, notwithstanding their ubiquity. See fruitcake. Garishly studded with cherries candied in the unnatural, if Christmasy, hues of emerald and vermillion, they are the butt of jokes: urban legend holds that they are never eaten but given to unlucky recipients, who regift them the following year. More appealing is the Scottish black bun, an exceptionally dense dried fruit mélange wrapped in pastry and served on Hogmanay, the Scottish name for New Year’s Eve. The Italian panforte, literally “strong bread,” a specialty of Siena, is nowadays a dense mash of candied fruit and nuts, piquantly spiced.
Panettone is a Lombardian specialty that legend attributes to a poor fifteenth-century baker named Tonio with a beautiful daughter adored by the scion of a wealthy family: only after Tonio became rich by adding sultanas and candied citrus rind to the standard Christmas bread could the couple marry. This fable’s nexus of Christmas to marriage resonated on grounds theological and customary: Christian dogma analogizes the love of Christ at Christmas to that of spouses, and in pre-industrial Europe and America, the period between Christmas and Epiphany, when larders were fat from the winter slaughter, was a popular wedding season.
The Veronese pan d’oro, essentially a panettone minus the fruits, is baked in a tall, star-shaped mold said to evoke the Star of Bethlehem; it is especially popular on New Year’s morning, falling at the midpoint of the Magi’s journey. When the identical recipe is baked instead in a dove-shaped mold and garnished with almonds it becomes the Easter colomba. Stollen is a German culinary cousin; at Christmas, it is baked in a tapering pan with a central ridge. When dusted with powdered sugar, it becomes Christollen, for the swaddled Christ Child. These cakes, requiring special pans, are beyond the ken of all but the most intrepid home bakers, making them popular commercial products, primed for gift giving in beribboned packages. See breads, sweet and stollen.
In Sweden, St. Lucy’s bread, a saffron- or orange-flavored leavened bread, is served on 13 December, most frequently bedecked with lighted candles. Other gift cakes are the French gâteau de roi, a round or ring-shaped yeasted sweet bread, the Iberian roscón de reyes, and the now-rare Twelfth Night cake, all served on Epiphany. These cakes traditionally include a bean and a few other small trinkets, and the people finding the trinkets have special privileges or obligations. Twelfth Night cakes, the most visually dazzling member of this culinary family, faded in the nineteenth century as the Christmas tree became the holiday decoration of choice. See twelfth night cake.
Decorative Cookies and Candies
The modern Christmas tree started as a vehicle for displaying Christmas confections. Cookies, especially gingerbread men, and paper cones cradling old-fashioned comfits, were among the most common nineteenth-century ornaments. Candy canes still festoon trees; although likely first appearing in the 1840s as a handmade confection, they became the emblematic Christmas candy in the 1950s, when production was successfully mechanized. See candy canes.
The gingerbread men trace their roots to ancient confections, with archival documents from the thirteenth century describing a bread made with honey and black pepper. Similar pepper, ginger, and other sweet spice-flavored hard biscuits are found throughout Northern Europe: a brief catalog includes Norwegian pepperkaker, Swedish pepparkakor, Danish brunkager, the Dutch speculoos (a specialty for St. Nicholas’s Day), and the German Lebkuchen. See gingerbread and speculaas. The cities of Nuremberg and Dijon were famous for their dry gingerbreads, with guilds of gingerbread makers established in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; although made year round, holiday versions were crafted in ornate molds carved with the image of Father Christmas. Gingerbread houses remain a German specialty that spread with German emigration patterns to the United States. Another beautiful German cookie is the springerle, distinctively flavored with anise or caraway and embossed with designs, often on the theme of love and marriage. See springerle. Similar treats generically called “cookeys” show up in America as the first confections specifically labeled for “Christmas” in late eighteenth-century cookbooks. New cookies, incorporating such nontraditional ingredients as chocolate and coconut, swell the ranks of American cookie exchanges. These parties, taking place in early December and at which each attendee brings dozens of cookies to trade, are a modern riff on the gluttonous feasting that has historically marked Christmas.
See also candied fruit; christianity; comfit; dried fruit; egg drinks; festivals; marzipan; mulled wine; nougat; pudding; and scandinavia.
See fried dough.
See spices.
clafoutis designates a rustic cherry flan or tart. See flan (tart). Larousse gastronomique describes clafoutis as a thick fruit pancake. It is a specialty of the Limousin region in central and southwest France and features the region’s black cherries. In the Occitan language, the old language of the south of France, the word “clafotis” means “to fill”; this may be the origin of “clafoutis.” A clafoutis is made by putting the cherries directly on the bottom of a buttered, sugared tart dish and pouring a thick crêpe or pancake batter over them. When the clafoutis is baked, the batter browns and the tops of the cherries are just visible as dark red dots on the surface. The top can be dusted with confectioner’s sugar once the flan cools slightly. It is served warm or cold. Some cooks insist that for a true clafoutis the cherries must not be pitted, but few recipes advise this.
The prolific cookbook author Henri-Paul Pellaprat (1869–1954) noted that like many local specialties, clafoutis is not an elegant dessert. However, he adds, “It is certainly pleasant in the countryside, which is without the resources of the Parisian pastry shops” (1927, p. 51). Clafoutis are made all over France, and cooks use a variety of different fruits, including peaches and apricots. Many add a dash of liqueur to the batter. Susan Herrmann Loomis, in her French Farmhouse Cookbook (1996), writes that this “is a dessert that all French farm women have at their fingertips” (p. 363) for a frequent afternoon snack, with no need for a recipe. In fact, Loomis says that no single formula exists for making a proper clafoutis. For a more refined appearance, some cooks make clafoutis in a tart dish or flan mold lined with a short crust.
See also france.
cocoa technically refers to cocoa powder, although the term “cacao” has been Anglicized to “cocoa” over the years. By the time the Europeans discovered cacao in the New World in the beginning of the sixteenth century, it had been used to produce chocolate in the Americas for over 2,500 years. See chocolate, pre-columbian. Mesoamerican societies referred to the tree or fruit of the tree as cacao, or kakaw, as part of their spoken or written languages. Today, the term “cacao” refers to the cacao tree, pod, or bean.
Chocolate as a Drink
Until eating chocolate was developed in the late 1800s, drinking chocolate was the primary form of chocolate consumption. Chocolate drink recipes included chocolate liquor (roasted, ground cacao), sugar, and a variety of spices that produced an enticing aroma and a rich flavor and mouthfeel. Drinking chocolate was prepared by melting chocolate in a liquid such as water, milk, or brandy; it was consumed at or after mealtimes. The chocolate drink had an intense chocolate flavor and aroma and a thick, satiating mouthfeel. When someone drinks hot chocolate today, it is usually hot cocoa, a beverage made with cocoa powder, milk powder, sugar, and water. Although this is a pleasant drink, particularly in the wintertime, hot cocoa does not have the flavor, texture, or mouthfeel of real hot chocolate.
The process by which cocoa butter is removed from chocolate to create cocoa powder was pioneered by the Dutchman Coenraad van Houten in the early nineteenth century. This poster advertising cocoa was commissioned by the Amsterdam chocolate manufacturer F. Korff & Co. around 1900, most likely for the French market.
Creation of Cocoa
One of the inherent problems with regularly drinking chocolate was the high cocoa butter content of the cacao beans that, when overconsumed, resulted in excessive weight gain and digestion issues. To reduce the cocoa butter content of the chocolate drink, various processes were developed to extract and separate the cocoa butter from the cacao solids. Cocoa butter was a by-product of these processes and found utility elsewhere as a fat in other foods or in cosmetics. Coenraad van Houten, an early-nineteenth-century chocolate maker from Amsterdam, developed an industrial-scale cocoa press to extract butter from the chocolate liquor. See van houten, coenraad johannes. It took many years for the butter press to become a standard process in the chocolate industry. By the 1860s, the Englishman George Cadbury, searching for a way to differentiate his chocolate from the competition, added cocoa presses from van Houten. See cadbury. The resulting product, named Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence, was the first reduced-fat cocoa powder available in England at the time, and it launched the long-term success of the Cadbury business. By the end of the 1800s, the pressing process was commonplace throughout the industry.
Cocoa Process
To produce cocoa, the cacao beans are roasted, the shells removed, and the nibs ground into chocolate liquor. The liquor is pumped into pots in a hydraulic press and squeezed to separate the butter from the solids. The defatted liquor is compressed into disks called cocoa cakes, which are milled to produce cocoa. The cocoa attributes are affected by the type of cacao beans, the roast level of the beans, and the residual fat content of the cocoa. Cocoas are typically pressed to produce high-fat cocoa (22 to 24 percent fat), medium fat cocoa (10 to 12 percent fat), or defatted cocoa (less than1 percent fat). The nibs, liquor, cake, or cocoa can also be alkalized to modify the pH, color, and flavor. Because cacao beans are naturally acidic, chocolate makers have developed methods to reduce the acidity. The Aztecs reduced the acidity by mixing wood ashes into the chocolate. Because of the lack of sophistication of the Aztec wood ash addition, European chocolate manufacturers did not appreciate the potential of this alkalizing process until years later. In the 1860s, the Dutch company van Houten was the first to industrialize the alkalization process for cocoa. Because of its origins, the alkalization process is also referred to as “dutching,” or the “Dutch process.” Treating cocoa with alkali can produce various flavors and colors, ranging from brown to red to black.
Uses of Cocoa
Cocoa consists of finely ground cacao cells of the de-shelled and partly defatted cacao bean. The two most important features of cocoa are flavor and color, but the cocoa also influences the mouthfeel, shelf life, stability, and structure of the end product. Natural, or nonalkalized, cocoa typically has a yellowish-brown color and an acidy cocoa flavor. Natural cocoas are suited for cream fillings for wafers, chocolate truffles, compound coatings, icings, and fat-based syrups and pastes. Alkalized, or dutched cocoa, is available in colors ranging from light brown and red to deep dark brown, red, and black. Alkalized cocoas are used with dairy products, instant products, bakery products, cake mixes, desserts, ice cream, syrups, and coatings. Because product colors can create taste expectations and consumers can detect very slight differences in color, the choice of cocoa type is critical. See vision.
The color of the cocoa in its dry form is referred to as its external color and is strongly influenced by the light absorption of the residual fat in the cocoa. The external color of the cocoa is important when it is sold as a retail product or used in dry blends. When cocoa is used in a water- or fat-based product, the external color disappears, and only its intrinsic color plays a role. The interchangeability of natural and alkalized (dutched) cocoa is dependent on the flavor, color, and pH requirements of the finished product. To avoid unintended changes to the finished product, alternate cocoas should be tested before the product recipe is altered.
See also chocolate, pre-columbian and chocolate pots and cups.
coconut, the fruit of the coconut palm Cocos nucifera, has multifarious food applications. The principal products used for sweet goods are the fresh grated or shaved mature flesh of the nut, coconut milk and cream extracted from this flesh, and desiccated coconut flesh, usually marketed in grated form. Coconut flesh has a high percentage of fat but does not contain trans fats or cholesterol and has a low sugar content. Because of the laborious process of extracting the fresh flesh, coconut is most often processed and combined with other ingredients for use in sweet foods, although it is also sold at street markets in cities as diverse as Honolulu and Venice. It is the desiccated form of coconut that is used primarily in American and European sweets, particularly in famous confectionery brands such as Bounty Bars and Tunnock’s Snowballs. It also finds use in baked goods such as coconut cream pie, coconut macaroons, and coconut cakes, although the freshly grated form makes these desserts even more delectable. In cakes the coconut is not only incorporated into the sponge mix but also used for external decoration.
In Asia coconut milk and cream are key components of a wide range of sweet foods. Coconut is made into custard to be baked in hollowed-out pumpkin shells in the Thai dish sankaya. In Indonesia the coconut milk is used to cook a black rice pudding that is consumed with extra coconut cream and palm sugar for breakfast. See palm sugar.
Vietnamese cuisine offers a range of puddings and cakes that combine coconut milk and cream with a selection of ingredients including banana, cassava, tapioca, and beans. Some mimic French foods, such as crème caramel, whereas others include tropical ingredients that yield dairy- and gluten-free sweets.
Thailand has a dazzling array of khanom (puddings) that rely on coconut and are often cooked and presented in intricate banana-leaf packaging. They are convenient street food as well as a welcome conclusion to a spicy meal. In tako coconut cream is set on top of a sweet jelly seeded with chips of fresh coconut flesh. Khanom sai sai wraps the banana leaf around a coconut cream and rice-flour paste, which in turn shrouds a core of more coconut, banana, or taro.
See also cake; nuts; pie; and pudding.
See café and coffee cake.
coffee cake, as Americans know it today, descends from ancient honey cakes, yeasty French galettes, medieval enriched breads, and seventeenth-century German kuchen. The practice of pairing sweet cakes with exotic hot beverages is of long standing. Nearly as soon as coffee, tea, and chocolate were introduced into Europe in the seventeenth century, patissiers and confectioners began making sweet foods to accompany them.
In Germany, Henriette Davidis’s popular nineteenth-century middle-class German cookbook Praktisches Kochbuch (Practical Cookbook, 1879) offered recipes for cakes (Kuchen) especially suited for serving with coffee. See kuchen. These included Westphalian Butter, or Coffee or Sugar Cake, a yeast-based warm-milk kuchen topped with coarsely chopped almonds, cinnamon, and butter cut into thick strips; and American Cake, which she advised eating with coffee or tea or for dessert. Davidis carefully explained how to serve coffee and “small friendly” cakes, providing a long list of baked goods appropriate for such occasions. Although the book’s 1904 American edition, German National Cookery for American Kitchens, offered many of the same recipes, Davidis’s notes on coffee service were eliminated, and the single recipe titled Coffee Cake featured coffee as an actual ingredient—not at all a traditional Kaffeekuchen.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “coffee cake” as a “U.S. breakfast bread,” deferring to American dictionaries for descriptions and dating. Stuart Berg Flexner’s Listening to America (1982) confirms that the term “coffee cake” came into common usage in the 1870s, which historic American cookbooks bear out. However, the meaning differed from our current understanding: the earliest American “coffee cake” recipes listed coffee as an ingredient, with no reference to a specific meal or beverage pairing. Estelle Woods Wilcox’s Buckeye Cookery (1877) is typical: “Coffee Cake. Two cups brown sugar, one of butter, one of molasses, one of strong coffee as prepared for the table, four eggs, one tea-spoon saleratus, two of cinnamon, two of cloves, one of grated nutmeg, pound raisins, one of currants, four cups flour.”
Early American print references connecting coffee cake and coffee drinking are scant, although one newspaper circa 1876 mentioned dunking coffee cake in coffee. Cookbooks grouped recipes for coffee cake in the bread and/or cake sections, depending on the specific formula. An early Philadelphia source recommended shaping coffee cake into pretzels, perhaps hinting at a connection with Pennsylvania Dutch (German) heritage. See pennsylvania dutch. The more likely connection lies with German Jewish immigrants who brought German baking traditions to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. In her history of Jewish life on New York City’s Lower East Side, Jane Ziegelman (2010) writes that their yeast-based cakes “came in an assortment of shapes and with a variety of toppings and fillings. There were chopped nuts or poppy seeds, pretzel-shaped cakes, and cakes that were rolled up like snails then brushed with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar and currants…. The Germans called then kuchen, but we know them as coffee cake.” Over the ensuing decades, recipes for German-style coffee cake proliferated, and by the 1920s the kuchen-style coffee cake familiar to us today had achieved distinct genre status, meriting separate index headings and chapters in cookbooks. In 2013 the Library of Congress “coffee cake” subject heading listed nine books published on the subject since 1967.
Preserved fruit, cheese, yogurt, and other creamy fillings, similar to those used in Danish pastry, are often called for in today’s American coffee cake recipes. Crumb and streusel toppings are not uncommon; icing is rarely used, and then only as a drizzle. American coffee cakes may be yeast-raised or chemically leavened; sizes, shapes, and packaging vary. While generally consumed with morning coffee, coffee cake is a welcome snack throughout the day. Not as sweet as doughnuts, nor as plain as bread, this type of cake offers appealing balance.
See also breads, sweet; chemical leaveners; and streusel.
colonialism entails the occupation, exploitation, and continued repression of peoples in one territory by another more powerful nation-state through both material and human forms of exploitation. The opening up of the New World was a result of colonial prowess and dominance punctuated by violence in virtually every domain, including the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. The demand for sugar profoundly affected not only the New World but also the balance of European imperial power, as exemplified by the rise of the British Empire in the seventeenth century and the rapid increase in sugar consumption, which grew in proportion to Britain’s influence. The virtually complete transformation of nations such as Barbados into massive sugar plantations was accompanied by simultaneous changes in European habits of consumption and domestic culture that fundamentally altered the world.
The insatiable demand for sugar in Europe in the seventeenth century necessitated the development of large agricultural-industrial complexes requiring extensive commitments of capital and labor. At the same time, the production of sugar, a heavily labor-intensive crop, became increasingly racialized, with slavery an integral and indispensable part of the commodity production process. The linkages between black history and white sugar are widely acknowledged. The dislocation and displacement caused by plantation slavery not only led to new configurations in the New World but also changed the very manner in which Africa came to be incorporated into the global system. See plantations, sugar; slavery; and sugarcane agriculture.
This collectors’ card from around 1900, from the French chocolate company Chocolat Guerin-Boutron, shows a dark-skinned boy picking cacao beans while a light-skinned schoolboy enjoys chocolate, the fruit of his labors. Western chocolate consumption increased dramatically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made possible by the spread of cacao plantations throughout the Caribbean. musée national des arts et traditions populaires, paris / archives charmet / bridgeman images
Although a trade in slaves preceded plantation slavery, it was the intensity and scale of this latter form of slavery that transformed the way in which Africa was treated within European discourse. The slave trade ensured that Africa was constructed as not having its own history, of not belonging to the world, and this idea of Africa became deeply embedded in the European imagination.
While colonialism was linked inextricably to the development of the New World by plantation slavery, Africa remained on the margins of the European-constructed world. This absence pervades every analysis of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trade triangle that connected Europe, Africa, and the New World. In this configuration, manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to Africa, African slaves were shipped to the Americas, and produce from the New World was shipped to Europe. See sugar trade.
The development of the trade triangle and the narrative of plantation slavery parallel the manner in which Africa was dealt with in European discourse. As its people were denigrated and the continent’s very history denied, Africa became the logical place to pilfer in order to populate the New World.
Africa was initially the location from which slaves were taken to the New World. The slave trade was the single most important factor in the depopulation and diminishment of the African continent. The slave trade, begun well before Columbus’s famous voyage, was introduced into the New World with considerable zeal. The growth of the slave trade corresponded to Britain’s and Europe’s insatiable demand for sugar, which not only necessitated the extension of empire but also fundamentally altered taste and domestic patterns of consumption.
The abolition and emancipation of slaves in the New World in 1863 did not signal an end to the plantation. Rather, the end of slavery produced new dislocations through the use of indentured labor, which was essential in not only the New World plantations but also newly developed sugar-producing areas such as Natal, Mauritius, and Fiji. The movement of indentured labor across the globe to work on sugar plantations was one of the most significant demographic forces in world history.
The Dutch introduced sugarcane into the African island countries of Mauritius and Reunion in the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth century it had become the basis of their export-oriented economies. However, sugarcane was not introduced onto the mainland until early in the twentieth century, at which time sugar production developed along the lines of the New World plantation system. The adoption of the plantation in Africa exemplifies the manner in which the process of transculturation between the New World, Europe, and Africa produced new organizational forms considered to be the best systems of production. These interactions, however, were underpinned by the colonizers’ assertion of unquestioned superiority, as the civilizing mission upon which colonialism was legitimated had become imbued deeply within Western culture.
See also race and sugarcane.
comfit is an archaic word for spices or nuts repeatedly coated with thin layers of sugar syrup that form a shell around the center. Important types include sugared almonds and various spice-based confections, including caraway comfits.
Like the word “confetti,” comfit originates from conficere, meaning “to put together”—the same Latin linguistic root as confection; but comfit, along with sugarplum (which had roughly the same meaning), has almost vanished from English usage. The contemporary industry name, panned sweets, refers to panning, the process of making them.
Comfits originated as spices and other items dredged with sugar. This may have aided preservation, but, perhaps more significantly, was thought to enhance medicinal qualities of various items. In the Middle Ages, they were served at the end of a meal and considered to aid digestion. They may have developed from honey-based versions made in the classical Mediterranean world. Comfits eventually became important in European social rituals as part of dessert and developed strong associations with Carnival and other festive events; those made with almonds are still used as wedding and christening favors in Continental Europe. Still-life paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show comfits, emphasizing their interesting shapes and textures: small irregular balls or long comfits that used matchstick-like slivers cut from cinnamon sticks as their centers. As recorded by Sir Hugh Plat in Delightes for Ladies (1609), making items such as “ragged comfits,” which had a rough, heavily textured surface, was part of the special skill of the comfit maker.
British aniseed balls belong to the comfit tradition; so, more tenuously, do North American cinnamon hots, although both have lost the actual nucleus of spice. Comfits based around pieces of licorice are still made in the United Kingdom, and French confectioners continue to make various types, such as anis de Flavigny. Although comfits are still well known in the English-speaking world, no collective term has emerged to replace this word in common usage, and these confections now tend to be known under individual names.
competitions belong to a lengthy tradition of professional cooking contests. The earliest may have taken place in the seventh century b.c.e., when the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, who was known for his love of feasting, organized a contest that rewarded the winner with money and honor. In 1882 the first concours culinaire was held in Paris. This cooking competition quickly became an annual event, with pastry and confections featuring so prominently that by 1894 a critic complained that they dominated the offerings. Similar tests of culinary prowess were organized over the next decades in Vienna, London, Brussels, and New York. The Internationale Kochkunst Ausstellung, or “Culinary Olympics,” is the oldest international competition, its title picking up on an enduring kinship between cooking and spectator sports. Four nations participated in the original IKA, which took place in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1896 with the goal of promoting tourism via the exchange of culinary techniques and ideas. Today, the Culinary Olympics—which includes pastry as both a team and individual event—takes place every four years and features more than 750 professional chefs from 31 countries.
A growing number of international competitions are devoted exclusively to pastry, including the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie, World Pastry Championship, StarChefs International Pastry, and the World Dessert Championships. In keeping with its long tradition of elite competitive cooking, France is home to the Meilleurs Ouvriers (crafts competition) in pastry and candy making, where a highly select group of patissiers competes for the exclusive title of M.O.F. (best craftsperson in France) awarded by the French Ministry of Labor. The drama of training and competing in the Meilleurs Ouvriers was captured in the 2009 film Kings of Pastry, which shows the exclusive (and all male) makeup of the competitors and judges.
The United States has demonstrated a more democratic bent in baking, pastry, and confectionery competitions, which are traditionally associated with such populist venues as fairs, local festivals, cook-offs, and bake-offs. In keeping with more general patterns in the culinary world, elite, professional competitions (typically designated by the more lofty term “pastry” rather than the homier categories of “baking” or “candy”) tend to be dominated by men, whereas the reverse is true of amateur dessert contests. In the United States, the first of these was the brainchild of Elkanah Watson, who sought to attract women to his 1813 agricultural fair in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, by holding contests for domestic products, needlework, and jams. The concept soon caught on with newspapers, which used recipe contests to attract readers and glean materials for cookbooks. Food manufacturers such as Knox Gelatin, Perfect Baking Powder, and Pillsbury seized on the cooking competition as a way to gain name recognition and promote their products. Today, the Pillsbury Bake-Off, which started in 1949, continues to be among the most prominent of such contests.
Although televised baking and pastry competitions are a relatively recent phenomenon, cooking shows have been a part of television programming since James Beard’s I Love to Eat premiered in 1946. The most famous early TV chef was Julia Child, who delighted viewers with her ebullient personality and charming approach to the occasional on-air culinary disaster. Following the success of her series Cooking with the Master Chefs, Child created a spin-off called Baking with Julia that featured one pastry chef or baker per episode and aired from 1996 to 2001. Competitive cooking became part of the U.S. television repertoire with the unexpected success of the campy Japanese import Iron Chef in 1999, and an American spin-off that first aired in 2005. Although Iron Chef tended to feature a range of courses—savory and sweet—organized around the surprise “ingredient of the day,” cable television soon began to feature programs devoted exclusively to dessert. Citing the rising popularity of such televised dessert competitions, Food and Wine Magazine declared 2010 “The Year of the Pastry Chef.” These shows include The American Baking Competition, Cupcake Wars, Sweet Genius, Next Great Baker, Ultimate Cake Off, Top Chef Just Desserts, and Last Cake Standing, as well as special segments of Food Network Challenge. Airing in the evening, they steer away from the more how-to nature of daytime cooking shows. Instead, they treat dessert making as a sport practiced largely by professionals, accompanied by play-by-play commentary and emphasizing speed, precision, and spectacle.
The popularity of these programs suggests that television viewers are less interested in making their own desserts than in watching others do so under ever more sensational circumstances. At the same time, the rising numbers of actual dessert contests indicate an equally powerful desire among both amateurs and professionals to be not just spectators but to enter the ring as competitors in their own right.
See lindt, rodolphe.
confection denotes any type of sweetmeat, especially candy and sugary items. By extension, “confectionery” has become a collective noun for these goods, and a “confectioner” is one who makes them, especially for commercial sale. Sugar plays a prominent role in all confections, but chocolate and flour also have important functions.
The word “confection” derives from the Latin conficiere, meaning “to make up.” Closely related words are found in several European languages. In Italian, confettiere is one who makes sweets, and confetti is a general term for the product. This latter term is related to the English word “comfit” for items made by panning. See comfit; confetti; and panning. Conficiere transformed into confiseur and confiserie in French, and confiteria in Spanish. (Confusingly, in French, un confection is made up of cloth, such as a dress for a special occasion, as is una confección in Spanish.) The German word Konditor, and various similar words in European languages, come from a different Latin term, conditus, meaning to have “stored” or “preserved” something.
The idea of a confection as a noun for sweet foods requiring special skill with sugar is a Western one, although Middle Eastern languages contain the word “halvah,” a general term for all sorts of sweet foods, from sweet desserts of semolina and nuts to more specifically sugar-based items. See halvah. Of all the countries that use the word, Turkey has a particularly strong tradition of working with sugar, including a special guild of sugar workers, as explored by Mary Işın in Sugar and Spice (2013). See turkey.
In English, the idea of confectionery now tends to be one of industry, and it is often used in relation to companies such as Hershey’s or Cadbury and their products. “Confection” carries overtones of technical formality, professionalism, and artifice, and now seems mildly archaic. Numerous more colloquial expressions are used for confections made primarily of sugar, bought as treats and consumed casually, especially by children. These include “candy” in North American English, bonbon in French, and “sweets” in the United Kingdom. See bonbons. The latter is a contraction of the term “sweetmeat,” meaning any sweet food, but it also applies to items for dessert, as does the word dulces in Spanish. None of these diminutives fully encompass the range covered by the idea of a confection, and numerous other terms exist in European languages for sweet items and the craft of making them. Some languages make clear distinctions between sugar workers and pastry cooks (for whom sugar is one ingredient among many); in French, they are confiseurs and patissiers, respectively, while in other languages, such as British English, a “confectioner” was historically responsible for many sweetened foods, including cakes and desserts.
“Confection” is an important word whose history illuminates much about the early roles of sugar in special mixtures. It was first recorded in English during the late Middle Ages and refers to a wide range of recipes, not always sweet, and not necessarily edible. It had overtones of subtlety and secret knowledge, and was particularly associated with compounding drugs and medicines. It is through this aspect that sugar confections developed such prominence. See pharmacology.
The Ancient and Essential Role of Sugar
Sugar was vital to the development of confections. Originally, Europeans sweetened foods with honey (which is still used in nougat), or in grape juice boiled down until thick and syrupy, but these products have distinctive flavors and tend to be colored. When sugar first reached medieval Europe from the East during the period of the Crusades, it must have seemed magical, with its ability to be refined into limpid syrups, crystals of sparkling transparency, or worked until pure white in color. Using special knowledge of the “secrets” of working sugar as a material, craftsmen could make it up into various confections with interesting textures that snap and crunch and crumble when eaten.
Apothecaries were the first European confectioners, because sugar was thought to be an aid to good health. See medicinal uses of sugar. Ideas about health and techniques for working with sugar were both taken from Arabic practice. In Sweets: A History of Temptation (2002), Tim Richardson explains how sugar was perceived by medieval physicians. Adhering to the Galenic theory of the four elements—an abstract notion of hot, cold, moist, and dry elements that permeated all things—they considered sugar to be hot and moist. It was suitable for making up confections intended to maintain an ideal temperament in the human body, and for counteracting diseases thought to be induced by excessive cold. Sugar was classed among spices, such as cinnamon and caraway, which themselves had medicinal applications. The role of sugar as a preserving agent, especially for fruits, made it valuable to apothecaries who needed to store plant materials out of season. Sugar sweetened bitter drugs, and as a medicinal substance in its own right it could be nibbled during religious fasts such as Lent. In addition, the high price that sugar commanded (unimaginably high by modern standards) gave it mystique and enhanced its reputation as a medicine. Confections were also enjoyed as pleasurable foods with delicious flavors, vivid colors, and interesting textures.
These ideas, although at odds with many current perceptions about sugar and health, had worked their way deep into the consciousness of Europeans by the time of the great voyages of exploration, and until recently underlay the idea of sweetness as good. The special properties of sugar syrups when boiled, worked, and cooled gave us the ancestors of confections still eaten today. Some items appear originally to have been valued partly for the form they took, such as sugar candy formed in large crystals and sticks of pulled sugar. See pulled sugar. Others were combined with various ingredients, for instance, caraway comfits, marshmallow, or licorice, or with almonds to make marzipan. See licorice; marshmallows; and marzipan. Candied ginger, candied fruit, and candied flowers exploited the preserving powers of sugar (and encompass the notion of storing, as conveyed by the idea of the Konditor). See candied flowers and candied fruit.
Sugar could be mixed with gum Arabic or gum tragacanth to make a malleable paste similar to today’s pastillage. See pastillage and tragacanth. Ideal for conveying drugs, sugar could be cut into lozenges whose sizes were calculated to give accurately measured doses. Drugs could also be administered in a syrup, of which various types—electuaries, robbs, lohocks, and sherbets—derived from Arabic practice. Sugar-based mixtures could be used to convey aphrodisiacs or poisons. See aphrodisiacs. Syrupy mixtures also made cooling drinks and cordials, and the skills of the confectioner-apothecary often included the art of distilling alcoholic drinks flavored with fruit or herbs and sweetened.
Wheat flour also went into early confections. Prominent among these were wafers, which together with comfits and wine, were served at the end of meals, a habit that evolved into dessert. See wafers. Eggs whisked with sugar and mixed with flour and sometimes caraway seeds, and carefully baked at a low temperature until dried out, was known under various names, including Savoy biscuit, Naples biscuit, or diet bread, and may be connected to the origin of sponge cake. See sponge cake.
In the sixteenth century, the medicinal aspect of sugar work remained strong, and methods for working it were recorded by men of such subtle knowledge as Alexis of Piedmont and Nostradamus. See nostradamus. In the parts of Europe that remained Catholic, some items became convent sweets, specialties of various religious establishments. See convent sweets. So confections, in their journey westward through Europe and then across the Atlantic to the Americas, were freighted with far more than mere sweetness.
Confections to Impress
Confections were beautiful in their own right. In Italy, during the Renaissance, wealthy noblemen sometimes provided spectacular displays of intricate sugar sculptures known as trionfi to celebrate festivals or great events. Medieval feasts in England could also involve elaborate sugar work, presented as “sotleties” between courses to impress, amuse, and flatter the guests. See sugar sculpture.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, making confections became a fashionable, creative pastime for aristocratic English women, alongside the more practical aspects of making up medicines. They perfumed and colored pastillage, then made it into striped or marbled lozenges to sweeten the breath, or shaped it as their fancy took them into gloves, shoes, keys, and numerous other ornamental items. Sugar syrup, boiled to a point at which it would candy, was molded into animal or fruit shapes, as was marchpane (marzipan), which was also made into large, decorated disks for celebrations such as the wedding feast. The women gathered fruit from their gardens and orchards and preserved it with sugar; made marmalade and fruit paste, which could be rolled into long strings and worked into complex knots; tried their hand at panning comfits; and distilled flower waters as well as more powerful alcoholic drinks. See flower waters and fruit pastes. They sometimes also made Savoy biscuits, other rich sweet cakes, wafers, macarons, and gingerbread.
These confections had to be shown off. They were often served in a special, small banqueting house, as part of a fashionable sugar banquet. See banqueting houses. These collations of sugar work, sweet wines, and dairy dishes like syllabub, fool, and junket were highly popular. See fools; junket; and syllabub. Books played a part in this fashion, especially during the seventeenth century, when several volumes of “secrets” including sugar work were published. These were often based on family manuscripts in which wealthy women recorded recipes for confections, or “banqueting stuffe,” alongside recipes for cookery, medicine, perfumes, and cosmetics. Settlers took this habit to New England. Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats, from the family of Martha Dandridge Washington, is an example of such a compilation.
Both apothecaries and confectioners continued to trade on special skill and knowledge. Confections such as comfits and pulled sugar were tricky to make well and therefore best left to those with training. Books based on domestic manuscripts rarely give detail about either of these techniques. Comfit making required much attention to detail, as shown by information recorded by Sir Hugh Plat in Delightes for Ladies (1602). See plat, sir hugh. Artists, especially in the Netherlands, delighted in the complex textures of such confections and included them in many still-life paintings.
During the seventeenth century, published recipes began to show increasing professionalism. Sometimes they formed sections within larger works, as in Cuisinier françois, attributed to La Varenne (1651), or they appeared as separate small volumes. A notable example in English was The Queen-like Closet (1670), whose author, Hannah Woolley, claimed that she had raised her status from servant to free agent by practicing as a confectioner. Such books included recipes for preserved fruit, fruit pastes, marzipan, and increasingly elaborate pastry work.
The presentation of confections continued to evolve in the eighteenth century, especially under French influence. Ornamental desserts of different types of confections built up into tall pyramids on special saucers became fashionable at the French court, later replaced by intricate layouts including sugar sculptures, classical scenes, and gardens. Le cannameliste français by Joseph Gilliers (1751) showed idealized illustrations of elaborate table layouts from the mid-eighteenth century. See gilliers, joseph.
Books conveyed knowledge and acted to some extent as advertisements for the skills and careers of confectioners. See confectionery manuals. A notable example was Elizabeth Raffald, who worked in Manchester, and whose book The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) details many recipes for confections, including ornamental jellies. But it was the shops that really brought in the customers. Bedecked with jars of sugar confections and fruit both fresh and preserved (confectioners were often fruiterers as well), their window displays were a source of amazement and wonder to all who passed by. In England, shopkeepers acted both as retailers and outside caterers, providing all kinds of food for parties, cakes for weddings and Twelfth Night, and ornamental desserts. London had several famous establishments, including one belonging to the Gunter family that became famous for a novel confection, ice cream, for which published recipes soon became available in books such as that by M. Emy. See emy, m. and ice cream.
Some books published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were written by men who had been employed by Gunter’s, notably William Jarrin. See jarrin, william alexis. In the United States, sugar work was important in the cities of the East Coast; the earliest published work on the subject of pastry and sugar work appeared in Boston as Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats by Eliza Leslie (1827). Recipes for confections became increasingly detailed as knowledge such as the stages of sugar boiling lost its arcane and faintly magical-sounding overtones and became something controlled by weight, volume, and the use of thermometers.
Confections for Everyone
Industrialization, cheaper sugar supplies, changing social attitudes, and nonconformist religion all played a part in increasing the availability of confections in the nineteenth century. They were still loved for their flavors and textures. Sugar continued to be used as a preservative, and some of the old notions about its efficacy as medicine persisted. But confections of all sorts were also a source of profit, especially for individuals from sects like the Quakers, who sought to combine philanthropic work with making money in trades such as food production. In England, their drive laid the foundations for many chocolate confections.
Chocolate is the great contribution of the Americas to confectionery. Echoing the customs of the Aztecs, it was initially taken as a drink by Europeans. Sugar counteracted the bitterness of cacao, and like any other drink, it could be made up with substances thought to be good for health—wine, eggs, spices, and milk. Chocolate, like sugar, was an exotic, expensive novelty when it reached Europe sometime in the sixteenth century, and one that needed careful attention and special skills. A few chocolate confections were made from an early date (including, by the eighteenth century, various chocolate pastilles, creams, and chocolate puffs, like little chocolate-flavored meringues). However, it was nineteenth-century mechanization and industrialization that allowed enormous chocolate confectionery companies to develop on both sides of the Atlantic. Initially, they produced block chocolate for drinks, then as an ingredient for confectionery; eventually, they produced cocoa powder. See cocoa.
Some British chocolate manufacturers trace their origins to the craft confectioners of the eighteenth century, notably Fry’s of Bristol (which merged with Cadbury in 1919) and Terry’s of York. All are now part of Mondelēz International. The three original companies continued to produce a full range of sugar confections, as well as increasing volumes of block chocolate, and eventually devised ways of incorporating the two. Fondant, a soft, melting confection developed in the nineteenth century, provided the filling for both the earliest chocolate-coated candy bar and for a novelty in sweetmeats, luxurious chocolates presented in beautiful boxes. See candy bar; chocolates, boxed; and fondant. Other developments took place in Continental Europe, as Daniel Peter and Henri Nestlé worked on another novelty, milk chocolate. See peter, daniel and nestlé.
Milk and butter also went into a range of other confections that lent themselves to factory production. Toffee and butterscotch both became popular, made by numerous enterprises from local sweet makers to the newly emerging giants of the confectionery trade. Caramels were a North American innovation, made by Milton S. Hershey at his Lancaster Caramel Company before he went on to found his famous chocolate company. Toffee and caramels both became hugely popular in Britain and its current and former colonies. See butterscotch; caramels; and toffee.
The realm of sweetened flour-based confections also expanded during the nineteenth century. Cakes, cookies, British biscuits, and many sweet pastries developed numerous forms. Although the skills of the confectioner-sculptor were revived by Antonin Carême, desserts lost their emphasis on sugar confections. See carême, marie-antoine. Further opportunities for enjoying confections opened up with the popularization of exotic, expensive, and of course, fashionable drinks in the form of coffee and tea. The latter allowed the development of a whole new meal, afternoon tea, whose dainty rituals demanded the finest and most fragile cakes and pastries.
The original confections of the medieval apothecary existed alongside all these (as they still do today), produced by backstreet sugar boilers, craft confectioners, and the burgeoning new confectionery companies. They turned out vividly striped and brightly colored hard candy and sugar toys, cheap treats for children. Nineteenth-century innovation brought yet more novelties: fizzy sherbet powder, curiously elastic chewing gum, motto lozenges with little sayings written on them, and fortune cookies. See chewing gum; fortune cookie; and sherbet powder. These developments continued into the twentieth century with products such as fruit-flavored gums like those made by the German company Haribo. See gummies and haribo.
Confections had become part of consumer culture on both sides of the Atlantic. In both North America and Britain, they increasingly became products of large factories in the twentieth century. Although new shapes, textures, and colors of confection constantly appeared, many relied on techniques already known to medieval apothecaries or eighteenth-century confectioners. Innovation was more about new combinations, as in chocolate bars like the Mars bar, or in new ingredients that had technical functions, such as glucose, corn syrup, and modified starches. This approach contrasts with some parts of Europe, especially France, where many towns still have craft confectioners who make some local specialty, and Italy, where various biscotti and other pastries are highly regionalized. See biscotti.
The names now used for retail premises—candy stores in the United States, sweetshops in Great Britain—reflect this move away from skilled artisan production in the back room of a shop to purely retail establishments. The journey of confections from health foods imbued with the magic of sugar, through the sparkling displays of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century craftsmen, to modern industry has brought them within the reach of everyone. This, in turn, has generated ambiguous feelings, as ideas about the negative effects of sugar on health and sugar addiction have increased. See addiction. Yet the magic of confections is still alive, and brilliant displays of handcrafted sugar work, ingeniously decorated cakes, and boxes of truly delicious chocolates still amaze and delight.
See also biscuits, british; cake decorating; candy; children’s candy; corn syrup; dessert; gingerbread; glucose; hard candy; hershey, milton s.; honey; liquer; lozenge; macarons; marmalade; measurement; nougat; pastillage; sugarplums; sweet meals; twelfth night cake; and wedding.
confectionery equipment, like the tools used for making pastry, has changed very little over the last 200 years. Electricity has allowed for more powerful tools and equipment, and therefore great efficiency and perhaps better quality. The basic design of most hand tools, such as knives and spatulas, has not changed, but composite materials like plastics have made hand tools lighter and more durable. New synthetic coatings for bowls, pans, and pots, and higher-quality metals such as aluminum and stainless steel, have made these objects lighter and more efficient for conducting heat rapidly and evenly, which is essential when making candies and confections. Listed here are some of the specialized tools used for the confectioner’s art.
Tools for Professional and Home Confectioners
An acetate sheet is used as a base to create designs and shapes in chocolate that can be transferred to desserts while keeping the chocolate shiny.
Caramel bars are 1-inch-square metal bars used to shape and hold caramel candy mixtures. They can be arranged into a wide variety of square and rectangular shapes. See caramels.
A chocolate transfer sheet is printed with designs made of cocoa butter and dry food coloring that are transferred onto chocolate candies and truffles. See truffles.
A comb is used to create a decorative, textured line on candies and confections. Combs look like wide rulers with different-size ripped edges (teeth) on opposite sides; they are usually made out of sturdy plastic, rubber, or stainless steel. Some are triangular, with three different comb-edged widths.
Cutters and portion cutters include cookie cutters and handheld disc cutters with multiple wheel-shaped blades. A guitar cutter is made of stainless steel and cuts candies and confections into equal-size pieces in a variety of shapes, including rectangles, squares, triangles, and diamonds.
Dippers and forks are handheld tools used for dipping candies and truffles in tempered chocolate. They have a small handle with spiral, round, square, or fork-shaped ridge wires that allow excess chocolate to drip off before the confection is transferred to another surface to set up completely.
A fondant funnel dispenses equal portions of fillings for chocolates and marzipan and is used for making fondants. See chocolates, filled; fondant; and marzipan.
A flower nail looks like a regular nail but has a larger flat head about 1.5 inches in diameter. It is used to make small designs that are transferred onto candies and confections.
A marble slab is useful for tempering chocolate by hand. Because the slab is porous, it cools the chocolate quickly.
In an offset spatula, a flexible blade is offset from the handle and stepped down, forming a “z” shape that makes this tool excellent for spreading mixtures in shallow pans and for moving candies and confections from one place to another without damaging their sides or top.
Pastry bags, sometime referred to as piping bags, are used for portioning out mixtures and for decorating. They are cone-shaped, with the narrow end open for fitting pastry tips, and are usually made of cloth lined with polyethylene. Disposable pastry bags are also available. Pastry bag tips fit in the narrow end of pastry bags. They can be bought individually or in sets that include multiple size openings and designs. A coupler is often included to secure the tips in the bag. In confectionery, pastry bags and tips are used for piping out truffles, filling truffle cups, and for molded candies.
Tools for Form and Design
A blown sugar pump is used to pump air into sugar to make delicate, three-dimensional designs, including clear bubbles. Pumps come in different styles but basically consist of a rubber bulb that is squeezed by hand, from which a flexible short tube protrudes; the tube ends in a short, rigid, copper or stainless-steel tube section. The pump slightly resembles a poultry baster.
Gum paste tools, sometimes called molding tools, are used for a variety of designing and sculpting work with gum paste (a mixture of egg whites, confectioner’s sugar, and tylose powder) and marzipan. See tragacanth. Usually purchased in a kit, they resemble handheld dental tools with a tool head on both ends and are normally made out of rigid plastic.
Molds come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, including many seasonal, holiday, and special designs. Flexible plastic, silicone, and metal molds are used for solid filled and hollowed candies and confections including chocolate. Often several molds are contained on one sheet. Special molds for single objects are usually made of metal with two hinged sides. Molds called presses are used to shape gum paste, marzipan, rolled fondant, and modeling chocolate into leaf shapes and other designs.
Stamps, which create a design impression on candies and confections, are often custom-made. They come in a variety of materials, including wood, plastic, and metal.
A stencil is placed over or on a finished candy or confection to produce a design. A large variety of designs and sizes is available.
Specialized Equipment
A chocolate tempering machine melts and tempers chocolate to the correct temperature so that it will dry quickly and maintain its sheen when truffles and candies are dipped in it. A variety of sizes is available, ranging from a tabletop version that holds 1 pound to large, industrial machines that hold hundreds of pounds of chocolate.
A pulled sugar light is a special lamp that keeps a sugar mixture warm and pliable while it is being shaped (pulled). Although not necessary, a warming box that includes a light can also be used when doing pulled sugar work.
Thermometers that read from 100° to 400°F (38° to 204°C) are used to indicate the stages of cooked sugar that correspond to a temperature range, such as soft-ball, hard-ball, and so on. See stages of sugar syrup. Electronic digital probe-type gauges as well as infrared laser-sight thermometers are also used.
See also cake decorating; cookie molds and stamps; pans; and pastry tools.
confectionery manuals are centered on the techniques used to manipulate sugar. They may also contain recipes for cakes and biscuits, ices, flavored drinks, alcoholic beverages, preserved fruit, medicines, cosmetics, and purely ornamental table decorations. These manuals are a subset of the comprehensive European cookbook. Their greatest utility lies in the preservation of foods for use in winter. They require specialized equipment and skills. More than most other culinary crafts, confectionery offers opportunities for ornamentation that range from the beautiful to the absurd.
The earliest published collections of confectionery recipes appeared in the small sixteenth-century European medical books and “books of secrets” published in Italy, France, England, and Germany. They contained medical and cosmetic receipts and in some cases instructions for preserving fruit, making pastilles, and concocting healing beverages. See fruit preserves and medicinal uses of sugar. As Ken Albala explains in Eating Right in the Renaissance (2002), the conjunction of medical advice and confectionery was in accordance with the accepted doctrine of humors that had governed medical teachings since the first century c.e. Heat and cold, wetness and dryness, were attributes possessed by individuals and by the food and drink they consumed. When bodily humors needed to be tempered, that is, brought to a balanced center, the cold, dry melancholy person sought healing with warm, moist sugar. The sugared remedies were probably the least unpleasant ones available.
As early as 1555, The Secrets of Master Alexis of Piedmont described how to make plates with powdered sugar and gum tragacanth, which could be used to eat off of, and which could then be broken and themselves eaten. See tragacanth. It would have been an attractive conceit in an age when fragile ceramic plates were beginning to replace wooden, metal, and bread trenchers. Marzipan confections were already present in the Middle Ages; in the sixteenth century, they were joined by fruit jams and pastes, sugar-coated seeds, and flavored pastilles. See comfit; lozenge; marzipan; sugar; and sugar sculpture.
The control of heat in sugar boiling was the core technique. See stages of sugar syrup. Since the confectioner’s options change with every few degrees of heat, it is not surprising that these stages had been named and described in French, German, and English. Other techniques in the confectionery books include freezing ices, making fresh cheeses, working with foams (egg whites and creams), and elaborately decorating cakes. See cake decorating and cheese, fresh. In addition, jellies, custards, and salads are mentioned. See custard. Pierre de Lune’s Confiturier de la Cour (1659) offered a recipe for a Salade couronnée that took up four pages and required carving a multitude of lemon-rind crowns. It served the same role as a pièce montée, dominating the table and causing wonder among the diners, as did the chocolate and ices in François Massialot’s Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures (1692).
The typical seventeenth- or eighteenth-century manual contained recipes for a wide range of sweets, most of them sugar-based. These included nut-based sweets such as marzipan, Jordan almonds, and pralines, as well as boiled sugar candy, wafers, jellies, sweet biscuits, and other small baked goods, and, by the end of the seventeenth century, candied flowers, ices, and ice creams. Instructions might also be given for distillation and brewing. See candied flowers; hard candy; ice cream; praline; and wafers.
Confectionery books addressed to women appeared in the seventeenth century. Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies (1608) promised the reader “beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters”; Hannah Wooley’s Ladies Directory (1662) advertised preserving in jellies, candying fruits and flowers, cakes, comfits, and perfumes, as well as a suppositious cure for the plague. One of the handsomest confectionery books may be Maria Schellhammer’s Wohl-unterwiesenen Kochin zufallige Confect-Tafel (Berlin, 1723) with its frontispiece illustrating the required equipment. Mary Eales (1718) was the first Englishwoman to publish a confectionery book, but it is to be hoped that none of her readers followed her advice to color pastilles with powdered cobalt blue glass.
The earliest confectionery recipes appeared in small sixteenth-century books containing instructions for medicinal and cosmetic preparations. By the late nineteenth century, confectionery manuals had become an important resource for professionals. Here, Thomas Mills & Brother show off the latest equipment in United States Confectioners’ Tool Works, Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of Goods, 1886. william l. clements library, university of michigan
Eighteenth-century France offered notable confectionery manuals: an expanded version of Massialot’s Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures was followed by Menon’s Science du Maître d’hôtel confiseur (1750). The most remarkable French books in this field were Emy’s Art de bien faire les glaces (1768) with its charming rococo frontispiece of cupids making ice cream, and the superb Cannemelist français (1751) by Joseph Gilliers with engravings showing how to set up complicated geometrically perfect tables, as well as how to form pastillage flowers. Juan de la Mata’s Arte de repostería (1755) illustrated that Spain, too, had a distinguished craft tradition. See emy, m.; gilliers, joseph; and pastillage.
The highly influential architectural fantasies in Marie-Antoine Carême’s Pâtissier pittoresque (1815) ranged from the charming to the ungainly. Jules Gouffé divided his confectionery knowledge between his Livre de conserves (1869) and his Livre de pâtisserie (1873), which used chromolithography to show off pièces montées, pulled sugar work and petits fours to remarkable effect. See carême, marie-antoine.
Apart from The Complete Confectioner (1844), which acknowledged its debt to the English confectionery book by George Read, the American confectionery scene was quiet. Most contemporary candy-making books are addressed to the home cook, for hobbyists and people looking to make a little extra money. Candy manufacture became an industrial process, but pastilles (known in New England as NECCO Wafers) and cough drops (still made with boiled sugar) live on. See necco. Despite this competition, confectionery books continue to appear: books on candy making at home, especially for holidays, are popular; and professional confectioners share their secret techniques for new approaches with marzipan, chocolate, and, yes, boiled sugar.
See also jarrin, william alexis; publications, trade; and weber, johannese martin erich.
confetti refers to both sugarcoated almonds presented to wedding guests in dainty tulle bags and the tiny bits of colored paper tossed into the air as the happy couple departs. Both trace their name back to the Latin conficere, meaning to “confect, compose, make.” In England, as far back as the fourteenth century, the word “comfit” was used to describe nuts and seeds that were coated in sugar. See comfit. In French, the word is comfit or confit. Italians use confetto for the singular, confetti for the plural. Confection, confectionery, confectioner, comfit, and confetti—all are related.
The first sugarcoated nuts and seeds were made by apothecaries and used medicinally. They were the original sugarcoated pills. Depending on the seed, nut, or fruit in their center, comfits were believed to have various benefits. Some were eaten after a rich banquet to aid digestion. Those made with caraway or fennel seeds sweetened breath, hence Shakespeare’s “kissing-comfits.” Such comfits are still found in India, where they are known as sweet saunf or valiary.
At weddings, confetti were tossed over the heads of the bride and groom to ensure fertility. The tradition may have had its origins in ancient Rome, where wheat cakes were crumbled over the bride’s head. Confetti were tossed at weddings in England, France, and other countries but were especially popular in Italy. In fact, the phrase mangiare i confetti is an idiom meaning “to attend a wedding,” although the literal translation is simply “to eat confetti.”
Confetti originally referred to the sugarcoated nuts and seeds tossed at weddings to ensure fertility. In 1894 the London stationery company J. & E. Bella commissioned the French Postimpressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to design this advertising poster, which depicts a happy young woman being showered with a new type of confetti, made of colorful paper.
Since they were expensive, comfits or confetti were status symbols and were served at christenings, birthdays, banquets, and other celebrations in addition to weddings. Desirable gifts, they were often presented in elegant silver or porcelain boxes, or in edible marzipan containers.
The skill and equipment needed to make confetti meant that most often professionals like apothecaries and, later, confectioners made them. But some household cooks produced them as well, judging by the recipe in Hannah Woolley’s 1670 edition of The Queen-Like Closet. The equipment has changed dramatically over time and machines have replaced the hanging basin of the seventeenth century, but the basic process remains the same. The seeds or nuts are dried over heat, then sugar syrup is poured over them as they are swirled around to keep the syrup coating even and to keep the nuts separate. After each layer of syrup is applied and dried, another is added. The process is repeated until the desired coating is achieved.
Woolley’s description made the difficulty clear:
Move the Seeds in the hanging Bason so fast as you can or may, and with one Hand, cast on half a Ladle full at a time of the hot Sugar, and rub the Seeds with your other hand a pretty while, for that will make them take the Sugar the better; And dry them well after every Coat.
Later improvements obviated the need to put one’s hands in the hot sugar syrup. But even in the nineteenth century when sugar was more affordable, the labor-intensive preparation meant that confetti remained expensive. Thus, some confectioners began to cut corners. To lessen expense and save time, they covered the almonds or seeds with flour before coating them with sugar syrup. That allowed them to build up the layers faster and use less sugar. It was a cheaper, quicker way to make edible confetti.
Another solution was to make ersatz comfits that were not intended to be eaten at all. They were created to be tossed. Made of plaster in the shape and size of the candied almonds, they were sold by the basketful and hurled at friends, lovers, and even strangers at celebrations. Tossing confetti was a way to flirt, to attract the attention of a prospective belle or beau.
When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited Rome in the late eighteenth century, he called the pre-Lenten carnival “a kind of small war, mostly playful.” He described black coats spotted with white under a barrage of plaster confetti. By the time Charles Dickens visited in 1844–1845, the small war had escalated. Dickens said confetti turned carnival goers as “white as millers.” To protect their clothes, they donned dusters; to shield their eyes, they wore wire masks.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a new type of confetti made its debut. In 1894 an advertising poster by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec depicted a happy, smiling young woman being showered with colorful—and harmless—confetti made from paper. The poster was commissioned by J & E Bella, a London stationery company. Initial newspaper reports were nearly delirious about the new product. On 26 March 1894 The New York Times described a new carpet on the boulevards of Paris. “The confetti made a velvet soft to the feet, picturesque to the eye, and novel even to the most advanced taste,” the newspaper reported.
Today, paper confetti explode from guns at carnivals, Wall Street parades, and weddings. Sugarcoated almond confetti are prized wedding favors. Happily, plaster confetti have disappeared.
convent sweets have been prepared in Roman Catholic female religious houses since the sixteenth century. The tradition began in Italy, Portugal, and Spain, where there had been ready exposure to Islamic confectionery and sugar. With the establishment of Portuguese and Spanish empires in the Americas and Asia, convent sweets spread around the globe and beyond the convent walls. Although the whimsical or sexual names of many of the sweets, such as tits, nun’s farts, bacon of heaven, and little hams, suggest that they were frivolities, confectionery was a business, a metaphor for the spiritual life, a tool for diplomats and missionaries, and, like Baroque churches, an expression of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Convent kitchens were also the first area where Western women made a mark on high cuisine.
Although convent sweets overlapped with the confectionery prepared by male guilds, the convent tradition achieved a particularly high standard that still persists. The most innovative and archetypal of these sweets, probably developed in Portugal in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were made from beaten egg yolks and syrup. See egg yolk sweets; and portugal. Ovos moles (soft eggs), sometimes called yemas (yolks), are beaten egg yolks stirred in hot syrup to form a thick yellow mass, which is then used as a custard, as a pastry filler, or rolled into yolk-sized confections. Soft (like the yolks from which they were made), glowing, and golden, and thus redolent of divinity, sweetness, and grace, they remained edible for months. The process of making them was seen as analogous to the progress of raw, unrefined novices to full members of the spiritual community. Other versions of the technique yielded huevos reales (royal eggs), beaten egg yolks baked and then soaked in syrup, and huevos hilados (egg threads), beaten egg yolks trickled through a tiny orifice into hot syrup to form a tangled mass of threads.
A second category of sweets, those using fruits (in syrups, jams, jellies, and pastes, or candied and crystallized) and nuts (brittles, marzipans, and nougats), derived from Islamic practice. These confections, long known on the northern Mediterranean borderlands of Islam and Christianity, were familiar to the Moorish servants and slaves who worked in the convents, and were described in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century confectionery books. See confectionery manuals; and islam. Flour-based sweets, whose connection to the Islamic tradition is not entirely clear, make up a third category. Wafers, prepared for use in the Mass, were also eaten in secular contexts, sometimes with a sweet filling. See wafers. Flour-and-fat cookies (shortbread), light sponge cakes of eggs, flour, and sugar that appear to date from the fifteenth century, and pastries were also prepared. See sponge cake.
A final group of confections common in New World convents (though not in European ones) were made by boiling down milk, often with added sugar, to make syrup, variously known as cajeta or dulce de leche, and, with further reduction, fudge, frequently referred to as little ham (jamoncillo). See dulce de leche and fudge. It is tempting to speculate that the technique was introduced by Indians who made similar sweets and who, voluntarily or not, made the Pacific crossing from the Philippines to New Spain (Mexico) on the galleons that sailed annually from 1565 to 1815.
Across Europe, female religious orders paired with their male counterparts had been established from the Middle Ages on. Substantial convents housing as many as a hundred nuns, their servants, and lay helpers were built in cities, a reflection of and contribution to the level of culture and sophistication in these locales. The nuns, from elite families, were educated, forceful, and often without a religious calling. They sought diversions, ways to turn the products of the convent lands into income, and ways to honor their patrons. Elaborate confectionery was added to the singing, the embroidery, and the schooling of girls in the late sixteenth century, a time of reaction against the spread of Protestantism now known as the Counter-Reformation.
Simultaneously, Spain and Portugal were establishing empires in the Americas and Asia. See portugal’s influence in asia. Mexico (New Spain), which prior to 1585 had 4 convents, saw 7 more founded in the following 16 years, and by 1747 boasted 45. In Goa, the Portuguese trading post on the western coast of India, the Convent of Santa Monica was built in 1606. No order was more important in spreading the network of convents, and incidentally their sweets, than the Franciscan order of Saint Clare, created in the fourteenth century and now known in English as the Poor Clares. They set up convents in Madeira in 1496; Santo Domingo in 1551; Mexico City, La Paz, Osorno, and Tunia in the 1570s; Quito, Havana, Panama, and Chile in the 1590s; and in Puebla and Queretaro in 1606. In 1621 Sister Jeronima of the Assumption established one in Manila in the Philippines, having left Madrid 18 months earlier with two junior nuns, sailed for Veracruz, crossed New Spain, and then made the dangerous journey across the Pacific. In 1633 a sister convent was founded in Macao. By this time, it is estimated, there was a global network of 16,000 nuns.
Portuguese and Spanish nuns, in their home countries and in the New World, had access to the newly available fine sugar from plantations beyond the Mediterranean. See plantations, sugar. They had fruits and nuts from convent orchards. Their egg yolks reportedly were leftovers—the whites had been used for starching clothes, for refining wine or sugar, and for applying gold and silver leaf to church altars.
Convent kitchens were large, set up for feeding the sisters and their staff, for preparing fine meals for visiting dignitaries, and for making sweets. Walls might be lined with tile; bench stoves and ovens were fired with charcoal or wood, depending on the temperature required. The kitchens were well equipped with balances, graters, skimmers, sieves, bowls, clay and metal pots and pans, spoons, knives, and molds. Servants and slaves grated sugar loaves, ground nuts, and stirred pots. The sisters monitored sugar temperatures by checking tactile and visual signs, and annotated instructions in fine manuscript cookbooks. See stages of sugar syrup.
The resulting confections were offered as gifts to patrons, served at the festivities for the convents’ patron saints, and sold to eager buyers. Convents and guilds together sold 400 pounds of confectionery in 1619 to the Mexico City government for the anniversary of the city’s conquest on the Feast of San Hipólito. They helped prepare the confections that required 200 pounds of sugar and 100 dozen eggs when the viceroy visited Puebla in 1696.
Nuns rarely ventured beyond the convent walls, but their sweets were not restricted in the same way. Portuguese voyagers bound for Goa or Macao took as many as a hundred kegs of ovos moles to give as gifts on arrival (and as an appealing, digestible treat for the dangerous passage). Vasco da Gama, for example, presented sweets to the Zamorin of Calicut. Jesuit missionaries in Japan used confectionery as an enticement to conversion from 1543 until their expulsion in 1639. An unknown Japanese author penned The Southern Barbarian Cookbook sometime in the early seventeenth century. Although they are not identified with the Catholic faith, perhaps in view of the Jesuits’ increasingly precarious situation, half of the book’s 45 recipes are for the kinds of sweets associated with the convent tradition.
To this day, traces of convent sweets persist in Japanese cookery. See japan. Egg threads are still made in Thailand and in Afghanistan, the latter perhaps a trace of the Portuguese envoy’s visit to the court of Tamerlane. See thailand. In Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, the tradition is very much alive, updated in many cases with more recent sweet dishes such as cakes. Convent sweets of high quality, enjoyed by local constituencies and sought out by tourists, can still be bought at convent windows, from a chain of shops run by the Poor Clares in Spain, and from commercial operations preparing “traditional sweets.” In the decades around 2000, commercial publishers in Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, and doubtless other parts of the former Hispanic empires produced confectionery cookbooks. An Argentinian nun, Sister Bernarda, has a television show and includes a sweets cookbook in her line of publications; Sister Lucia Caram, also from Argentina, shares recipes on the Spanish cooking channel. While the reputation of convent confectionery remains high, it is unclear whether the dwindling number of nuns, who rarely have the support staff of the past, will be able to maintain the tradition.
See also brittle; candied fruit; custard; fruit preserves; guilds; india; latin america; marzipan; mexico; nougat; and nuts.
cookie cutters are the modern descendants of ancient bread stamps and medieval cookie molds that were made of wood, stone, ceramics, wax, and other materials. These stamps and molds had incised motifs for imprinting bas-relief designs on top of the dough before baking. The figures included people, plants, animals, religious symbols, coats of arms, and scenes of daily life. Although these molds embossed the tops of the cookie dough, often with intricate designs, most of them did not also cut the dough into the shape of the cookie itself, which had to be done by hand with a knife or jagging iron, a small pastry wheel with a fluted edge for cutting a scalloped line through the dough. Bakers also pressed inverted metal, wooden, or glass drinking vessels onto the dough to cut out uniformly round shapes. See cookie molds and stamps.
By the late seventeenth century in England, bakers were using templates to guide the knife or wheeled cutter. By the early eighteenth century, English cooks were using shaped tin cutters for cutting cookie forms more quickly, whether from smooth, flat sheets of rolled-out dough or from dough that had been imprinted with a design from a mold. These included inverted metal cake pans as well as cutters made specifically for cookies. They were most likely crafted by tinsmiths who formed leftover strips of tin into simple shapes such as circles, squares, rectangles, and hearts. Eventually, these cookie cutters came to be less expensive substitutes for the intricately carved wooden molds used by professional bakers in Europe since the Middle Ages. Instead of embossed designs on top of the cookies, the simple shapes made by these cutters were decorated with icing, raisins, nuts, pieces of candied fruit, colored sugar, and even printed paper cutouts.
In the mid-nineteenth century, metal cookie cutters began to be mass-produced in Europe and North America for professional and home cooks alike. Popular shapes included men and women in traditional costumes, flowers, animals, Christmas trees, stars, and other holiday symbols. Some were also made in sets of graduated sizes, in a series of three, five, or more of the same shape that nested together for storage.
Since cookie cutters are designed to cut only the outline of a particular shape, the thin strips of pliable metal can be bent easily out of form, especially with repeated use. So some cookie cutters, especially those for use by professional bakers, have been made sturdier by attaching the cutter to a flat metal backing that has a C-shaped metal handle or a wooden or plastic knob on the back. This backing also makes it easier to press the cutter into the dough and lift it off without accidentally altering the shape of the cookie’s outline. Since the late nineteenth century, multiple cutters, such as five interlocked stars or ten adjoined hearts, have also enabled bakers to cut several shapes at once, more quickly and without wasting as much dough. Another type of multiple cutter looks like a metal or wooden rolling pin covered with a series of adjoined metal cutters attached to the roller, which is pushed across the dough to cut a repeated series of adjacent shapes.
Cookie cutters today are made in a wide range of sizes and shapes, from traditional holiday symbols to contemporary comic-book characters and movie action-figures. A few are even fashioned to impress a design on top, such as the veins of a leaf or the spaces within a snowflake. Materials vary, too. For more than two centuries, tin has been the least expensive and most commonly used metal, but it rusts easily. Copper cutters are much sturdier and more attractive aesthetically but are costly and need to be polished periodically. Aluminum cutters with Bakelite handles were popular during the first half of the twentieth century, but they have been supplanted by stainless steel, especially for cutters used by professional bakers and industrial producers of cookies. Modern plastics are the least expensive materials, used for cookie cutters in the United States since the 1940s, but the cutting edge of a plastic cutter is less sharp than a metal one. However, plastic cutters are favored for use by children because these cutters come in many bright colors, are easy to clean, and do not have dangerously sharp edges.
The homey, often nostalgic, emotional appeal of cookie cutters has also been used as a marketing tool by makers of other products, who would attach a “free” cookie cutter to their package of cooking fats, cookie mixes, and recipe card sets. Some cutters, marked with a company’s name or logo, are given away free in advertising promotions. Modern home cooks can purchase custom-made cookie cutters, too, shaped like their pet cat or dog, their house or boat, the logo of the college they attended, or their favorite sports team. In the history of cookie cutter production, these contemporary custom-made cutters have come full circle back to the original, handmade, individual cookie cutters of centuries past, before mass production began to dominate the cookie cutter industry.
See also anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sweets; christmas; gingerbread; speculaas; and springerle.
cookie jars are, simply put, storage containers for cookies or biscuits. However, they are more likely to be delightfully decorative than plain.
The term “cookie jar” or “cookie tin” reflects American usage; the English say “biscuit jar” or tin. That is because the Americans took the word cookie from the Dutch koekjes, the diminutive of koek or cake, whereas the English use the word “biscuit,” derived from the Latin panis bicoctus, twice-cooked bread. Whether the containers hold twice-cooked biscotti, macarons, oatmeal cookies, or even commercial animal crackers, they are often as appealing as their contents. See biscuits, british.
In the seventeenth century a tightly lidded metal box was sufficient for biscuit storage. But in 1861, when the Licensed Grocer’s Act allowed British groceries to be individually packaged and sold, specialized biscuit tins came into being. A few years later, offset lithography made it possible to print designs on the tins, and the creativity of the English tin maker burst forth. Reusable biscuit tins were made in the shape of castles, sets of books, grandfather clocks, and coronation coaches. They were decorated with colorful scenes of nature, tea parties, and holiday celebrations and, of course, prominently featured the brand name of the biscuit maker.
The process of press-molding glass was perfected in the United States in the early nineteenth century, and by the latter part of the century inexpensive glass cookie jars were being sold in both England and the United States. They were often made of pink or green glass and formed in the shape of a barrel, recalling the old general-store cracker barrel. By the late nineteenth century elegant biscuit tins, sans advertising, were also being made from lavishly decorated electroplated silver.
Round and barrel-shaped cookie jars made of stoneware became popular in the United States during the Depression of the 1930s. By the 1940s they were being created with great imagination. Rather than simple barrels, cookie jars were shaped to resemble overall-clad pigs, locomotives, rocking horses, smiling hippos, and teddy bears. Nursery rhyme characters like Little Miss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty, and Little Boy Blue were transmogrified into cookie jars.
During the 1950s TV and cartoon characters, including Davy Crockett, the Flintstones, Popeye, and Casper the Friendly Ghost, made their cookie-jar debuts. Disney characters, including Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Dumbo, and Goofy, likewise became cookie jars. Naturally, multiple versions of Santa Claus were also popular, as were corporate characters like Aunt Jemima, Mr. Peanut, and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. In the 1970s, fittingly enough, Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster became a cookie jar.
Even today, cookbooks and magazine features often headline cookie recipe sections with titles like “From the Cookie Jar,” “From Grandma’s Cookie Jar,” or “A Cookie Jar Raider’s Dream Come True.” The accompanying illustration often portrays a homey kitchen scene with mom or grandma and children making cookies. However, today’s cookie jars are as likely to contain cookies bought at a supermarket or baked with store-bought cookie dough as homemade-from-scratch cookies.
During the 1970s cookie jars became valued collectibles. Some collectors specialize in jars made by a particular manufacturer, others in themes like patriotism, sports, Disney characters, or TV shows. Some collect only from a particular time frame, especially the 1940s, which is thought of as the golden era of cookie jars.
Andy Warhol famously collected cookie jars from the 1930s and 1940s. After his death, the 25 April 1988 edition of the New York Times reported that his collection of 175 pottery cookie jars sold at auction for $247,830. The collection included pottery pigs, a chef’s head, goats, Humpty Dumpty, and a panda. No doubt Warhol’s celebrity inflated the price, which Sotheby’s originally had estimated at about $7,000.
Today, illustrated guidebooks help collectors differentiate between reproductions and originals and offer price guidelines. Depending on their quality and desirability, the jars sell for as little as $30 to well over $1,000.
The term “cookie jar” can be heard in areas far from the kitchen. Cookie jar accounting describes a misleading practice in which a company understates its assets when doing well in order to overstate them when doing poorly. A thief is often said to have been caught with a “hand in the cookie jar.” Cookie jars are associated with savings, much like a piggy bank, and advice columns recommend putting spare change in a “cookie jar fund.” In fact, the second definition of “cookie jar” in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language is “a container used for storing money.”
See also animal crackers; aunt jemima; biscotti; and macarons.
cookie molds and stamps are used by cooks in many parts of the world to imprint designs—religious, secular, traditional, modern—on cookie dough, usually before it is baked. Sometimes the dough is baked in the mold or deep-fried on the mold. Descendants of the bread stamps used by ancient cultures, these baking utensils have a long history and encompass a wide variety of materials, forms, designs, and uses.
Historically, cookie molds have been made of wood, stone, ceramic (earthenware, stoneware, porcelain), metal, plaster, wax, and even thick pieces of leather. Some are now also made of glass, plastic, silicone, or resin. The mold has a concave design (a negative image, or reverse image) carved or otherwise shaped into it. With some types of molds, a piece of dough is first pressed into the mold, then the excess dough is cut away, and the dough is removed from the mold before being baked on a baking sheet or baking stone. Other types of molds are pressed, face down, onto a rolled-out sheet of dough, then removed from the dough, which is cut or trimmed into shapes before baking. These can be flat molds, known as boards, or rolling pins with designs incised in them. In all cases, a reverse imprint of the mold’s design is embossed on the dough’s surface. Examples of cookies molded in these ways include European springerle, speculaas, gingerbreads, and some shortbreads; Middle Eastern maʾamoul; Malaysian kuih bangkit; and Chinese and Japanese mooncakes.
Some metal, ceramic, and silicone molds function as baking pans. The dough or batter is baked in the mold, then turned out of the mold to cool, with the mold’s shape imprinted on the cookie. French madeleines, Norwegian sandbakelse, some Scottish shortbreads, and some American holiday cookies are baked in molds that have single or multiple concave designs that are open at the top. Two-sided molds, usually made of iron, are used for making thin waffle- or wafer-like cookies imprinted on one or both sides. The dough or batter is enclosed and baked within the two sides of the mold. Examples include Norwegian krumkake and goro, Czech oplatky, Italian pizzele, and Indonesian kue semprong.
Rosette irons are a special type of cookie mold, resembling a branding iron, with a long handle perpendicular to a metal mold shaped like a flower, star, snowflake, Christmas tree, or other symbol. The metal part is first heated in hot oil, then dipped in batter, and quickly returned to the hot oil. After the bottom of the batter has been fried on the mold, the partially cooked batter is detached from the mold, turned over, and fried on the other side, producing a light, crisp cookie shaped like the mold. These kinds of fried, molded cookies, often garnished with sugar or honey, include northern European rosettes, Turkish demir tatlısi, Iranian bamiyeh, and Sri Lankan kokis.
Cookie molds and stamps allow bakers to turn out decorative cookies in shapes reflecting religious, secular, traditional, and modern motifs. Elaborately carved antique molds are now collectors’ items.
Cookie stamps are usually made of carved wood or a ceramic material with a design molded into it; some are made from metal, glass, resin, or plastic. All have a handle on one side and a single design on the other. Most cookie stamps are round, although a few are square or made in other shapes. They are used for imprinting designs, one at a time, on a rolled-out sheet of dough that is then cut into individual shapes with a knife or cookie cutter. The stamp can also be firmly pressed onto a single small ball of dough, to flatten it out and form a roughly shaped round cookie with the design embossed on it.
European molded cookies are thought to be modern manifestations of sacrificial dough effigies made by pre-Christian people who practiced animal sacrifice to their gods. In those ceremonies, poor people who had no animals, or who could not afford to sacrifice one, substituted pieces of baked dough shaped like animals. Centuries later, in Europe, elaborately molded cookies became popular gifts, religious and secular celebration artifacts, decorations, teaching aids, and methods of spreading information visually, from biblical stories to political propaganda to the latest fashions. Intricately carved wooden molds were used to mass-produce honey-spice and egg-sugar cookies in thousands of different designs, from a few inches to 3 feet in size. Many museums in northern Europe now display collections of these historic hand-carved molds made between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Handmade cookie molds were popular baking tools in Europe, initially among the medieval bakers’ guilds and later among home bakers, until simpler, mass-produced, less expensive metal cookie cutters began to replace them in the nineteenth century. Interest in making molded cookies at home was revived in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, and artisans began making carved cookie molds with traditional designs, as well as ceramic molds with newer designs, to meet the demand. Some companies also began producing high-quality resin replicas of historic cookie molds from European museums and private collections. However, by the 1990s, less expensive, less well-made copies of traditional European cookie molds also arrived on the market, imported from China and Taiwan. Simple cookie stamps, handmade by artisans or mass-produced by baking-supply companies, have also gained popularity with home bakers in North America since the 1980s, because they are easier to use and less costly than more elaborate cookie molds.
See also cookie cutters; gingerbread; madeleine; mooncake; shortbread; speculaas; and springerle.
See rolled cookies; bar cookies; drop cookies; and pressed cookies.
cooking irons for waffles, wafers, and rosettes are used to shape the batter or dough (sweet, savory, or unseasoned) that is cooked in or on them. They have, so to speak, a long, waffling trail through culinary history in terms of their form, purpose, and regional variations.
Waffle and wafer irons are similarly shaped and work the same way. Patterns (not necessarily identical) are impressed or incised in two facing metal plates of matching dimensions. The plates are joined at one side by a hinge or hinges. The irons are heated, then opened to fill with batter or dough and immediately closed for cooking. As the filling cooks or dough cooks (literally bakes) between the heated plates, it takes on the pattern of the plates, and often the form of the plates themselves. Some irons are large enough to make multiple wafers at a time; the size of each wafer is determined by the amount of batter or dough used with each portion.
These tools originally were called irons because they were made of cast iron and weighty. The handles were long for cooking over coals or fires on open hearths, often supported by a stand of some sort; or they were used on counters heated from beneath by hot coals. Wooden handles for insulation came later. See pastry tools. As stoves evolved, so did the irons. For stovetop use, many irons have a cradle or frame for support so that the irons do not have to be held while cooking. A socket, in which the hinge rests, makes it possible to rotate the iron for even browning.
Wafer irons probably predate the waffle iron and were used in the Middle Ages (some references suggest even much earlier) to make plain wafers for religious Communion. Wafer irons produce thin, crisp wafers or cookies impressed with greatly varied designs incised in the plates from religious to geometric: scrolls, flowers, family crests, initials, and more. When wafers are warm, most are flexible enough to roll quickly into cones, tubes, tight cylinders, or drape over forms; they hold these shapes when cool. See wafers.
In the early twentieth century, waffle irons or bakers were electrified, and waffles enjoyed great popularity. The waffle maker could be used right on the dining table, and the waffles did not have to be turned. Further refinements for both waffle and wafer irons (which were also electrified) included lighter-weight grids of aluminum, nonstick finishes, heat controls, timers, and exteriors that appealed to the design fashion of the day. Today, these tools are often called bakers, since they are no longer made of iron or used over direct heat.
A standard waffle iron or baker is distinguished by deep indentations or grids. The depth of the grids and the shape of the overall unit vary: they can be round (sometimes in a series of hearts), rectangular, or square, and they are usually segmented so that the waffle can break apart easily. The indentations may be square, oval, or honeycomb in shape; some feature Mickey Mouse or religious saints. Scandinavian waffle irons make break-apart hearts, whereas Belgian waffle irons have much deeper impressions to yield thicker waffles.
Machines to make ice cream cones are also called waffle bakers, but the wafer they yield is thinner than a waffle, and they usually come with a cone form for shaping the warm cookie. See ice cream cones. Recipes vary to make the kind of waffle desired, from tender to crisp, sweet to savory, thick or thin.
Wafer irons are often named for the cookie they yield. In France, oublies and galettes are cookies with irons similarly named. Scandinavian cookbooks abound with recipes for krumkake from krumkake irons, as well as strull and avlette. Norway gets credit for goro baked in rectangular goro irons. Italian pizzelle cook in pizzelle irons (flat or wavy in shape), cialde in larger round cialde irons, and ostie in ostie irons. The Dutch make stroopwafel in the stroopwafelijzer. Although any wafer cookie batter or dough can, in principle, be baked in any of these specialized irons or bakers, many of the iron tools have slipped into the realm of antiquers as electric bakers have taken over their tasks.
The rosette iron (timbale iron or waffelbackerei) works differently. A patterned iron, attached to a metal rod with a heatproof handle, is heated in hot oil, dipped into a thin batter, and then returned to the oil to fry the batter crisp and golden. This pastry is eased off the iron to serve, often dusted with confectioner’s or cinnamon sugar. The rosette is a common pattern for the iron, hence its name. Other forms include snowflakes, stars, interlocking rings, and butterflies. A solid iron (timbale iron) can be round, oval, rectangular, or square. It makes a crisp pastry to fill. Contemporary rosette irons usually screw off the rod, and some handles support two rods. Tools similar to the rosette iron are used for fried pastries in Asia.
See also belgium; cookie molds and stamps; france; italy; scandinavia; and netherlands.
Cool Whip is an artificial product intended to mimic whipped cream, composed mainly of water, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and high-fructose corn syrup. The flavor is bland and sweet, not really tasting much like a dairy product, with a texture somewhat denser than whipped cream. Cool Whip was invented sometime prior to 1966, when it was first introduced to the market, by Dr. William A. Mitchell, a food chemist in General Foods’ Birds Eye division from 1941 to 1976. In that capacity he also formulated such other products and precursors as powdered egg whites, quick-setting Jell-O, Pop Rocks, and Tang. Within two years of its introduction, Cool Whip became the highest-grossing Birds Eye product. The whip has historically been marketed in 8-ounce plastic tubs in supermarket freezer cases, but aerosol versions are sometimes available. They are intended to compete directly with Reddi-wip, an aerosol whip made from dairy products by ConAgra. Cool Whip sold in the United States and Canada is manufactured in a factory in Avon, New York. It is now a flagship brand of Kraft Foods, which acquired the product through a series of mergers and divestments.
A commercial dating to the late 1960s advertised, “Cool Whip has all the good old-fashioned taste with lots less calories than whipped cream you have to make,” implying that making fresh real cream was too much trouble. See cream. The product was shown being used on fresh fruit and strawberry shortcake. By 1992 a TV commercial featured the jingle “Cool Whip’s the one, with the whip-creamy taste,” and the product was shown in pudding parfaits and as a topping for waffles.
The nutritional panel on a package of Cool Whip lists the calories per cup as 381, of which 71 percent come from fat. Sixty-two percent of the fat, totaling 30.4 grams per cup, is saturated fat. From a shifting roster of fats, Cool Whip often uses hydrogenated palm kernel oil and hydrogenated coconut oil. Flavored Cool Whips and “free” Cool Whips are now part of the marketing strategy, including Original, Extra Creamy, French Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, Cinnamon, Light, Reduced Fat, Free (fat-free), and Sugar-Free. Cinnamon and Strawberry have been only seasonally available at Christmas. Other chemicals in the recipe for Cool Whip include polysorbate 60, sodium caseinate, sorbitan monostearate, and xanthan and guar gums. Cool Whip was probably marketed by Birds Eye to compete with Kraft’s Dream Whip Topping Mix, which had been introduced in 1957, nearly a decade earlier than Cool Whip.
In a product diversification strategy, Cool Whip rolled out a line of frozen frostings in 2012. The flavors were chocolate, vanilla, and cream cheese. According to Kraft Cool Whip Brand Manager Marjani Coffey, in an interview with Marketing Daily, “Consumers said that shelf-stable frostings were too sweet, too thick and too hard to apply without damaging the cakes or other baked goods in the process.” The marketing tagline for the product, which is placed right next to Cool Whip in freezer cases, is “So good, you’ll look for reasons to celebrate.”
See also corn syrup; icing; and shortening.
See liqueur.
corn syrup, or glucose syrup, is a clear, colorless sweetening liquid made from cornstarch. During the early nineteenth century, researchers in countries without easy access to cane sugar experimented with making sweeteners from other agricultural products, such as white or sweet potatoes. Beginning in 1836, American scientists tried to make sugar from cornstarch. They eventually succeeded, and by the end of the century, corn syrup was marketed under a variety of brand names. Corn syrup is not as sweet as cane sugar, but it is widely used in the commercial production of candy, preserved fruits, jellies, fruit drinks, and beer.
The Glucose Sugar Refining Corporation, formed in 1897, consolidated a portion of the corn syrup industry. In 1902 it merged with its largest competitor, the New York Glucose Corporation, to create the Corn Products Refining Corporation (CPRC). The company launched a major advertising campaign for its newly named premier product, Karo Syrup, which was promoted as a table syrup for pancakes and waffles and as an ingredient in recipes for homemade cakes, candies, beverages, sauces, and pies (such as pecan pie).
In 1957 Earl Marshal and Earl Kooi, scientists working for Corn Products, figured out how to make high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) by refining corn starch into glucose and then adding enzymes to convert it into fructose (the predominant natural sugar found in fruit), which is about 2.3 times sweeter than glucose and 1.7 times sweeter than sucrose (common table sugar). It took another 10 years to perfect the formula, but at the time, HFCS was relatively expensive and cane sugar was cheap, so there was not much demand for it.
The 1973 U.S. Farm Bill created a system of price supports—direct payments to farmers based on target prices set by the government. Under this new system the government gave farmers “deficiency payments” to ensure that target prices were met. Corn growers, for instance, could grow all the corn they wanted, sell it at any price, and be assured of a profit through the government subsidy. Consequently, farmers planted more corn, which caused its market price to drop, making HFCS financially viable. In 1978 a new discovery made it possible to manufacture 90 percent fructose, which was much sweeter than cane sugar, and the HFCS industry took off. In 1980 Coca-Cola began to replace cane sugar with HFCS. By 1993 Americans were consuming 79 pounds of HFCS annually, and by 2004, 175 pounds per person—about 20 percent of that amount in soda. See soda and sugar and health.
Since the 1970s, HFCS used in processed foods and beverages has included both fructose and glucose, the proportions depending on its intended use. The HFCS used in baking is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose. When used to sweeten soda, it is generally 55 percent fructose, although in some sodas fructose may be as high as 65 percent.
At the urging of sugar-beet growers in the United States, President Ronald Reagan, in May 1982, slashed the quotas placed on the importation of cane sugar, increasing its price to double what it cost in other countries. HFCS, therefore, became more attractive to food and beverage manufacturers. By 1984 Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and most other soda manufacturers had completely shifted to HFCS to sweeten their beverages. HFCS was also incorporated into a wide variety of other processed products, such as ketchup, cookies, pies, cakes, and candies.
Since 1973 the consumption of HFCS has soared 4,000 percent; it represents approximately 50 percent of the sweetener consumed in the United States. Americans down an average of 55 pounds of HFCS per year, and high-fructose corn syrup is also used in commercial foods and beverages produced in other countries. Although HFCS is chemically similar to table sugar (which has 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose), critics worry about its potentially deleterious health effects. A 2009 review of the literature on research into HFCS in the Journal of Nutrition concluded that HFCS may raise “insulin sensitivity, triglyceride and lipoprotein levels, and glycated protein levels” (Murphy, 2009). Another study, published in 2010 in Cancer Research, suggested an association between the consumption of fructose and pancreatic cancer. A study published in 2012 indicated that consuming HFCS may result in health consequences more serious than those arising from excessive amounts of natural sugar (Goran et al., 2012). To date, however, studies are insufficient to prove that HFCS is any less healthful than other types of sweeteners.
Due to the sweetener’s poor image, however, several companies have removed HFCS from their products, or are at least considering such action. Many soft-drink companies, including PepsiCo, Dr Pepper, and the Coca-Cola Co., have reformulated their beverages, substituting sucrose for HFCS, and cane sugar soda is available in many countries.
See also fructose; glucose; starch; sugar beet; and sugarcane.
See starch.
cosmetics, sugar in, falls into three broad categories: exfoliation, depilatory, and luster.
Exfoliation refers to the removal of dead skin cells, using abrasive particles suspended in oil or fat or stuck to the surface of a glove. The supposed benefits include a “younger, glowing appearance,” although excessive exfoliation can lead to substantial skin damage. For those who nevertheless wish to abrade dead skin cells rather than wait for them to slough off naturally, sugar is a reasonable choice. Sharp-edged sugar crystals are suspended in olive oil or trapped in a bar of soap (either in commercial or domestic preparations). The crystals cut away the dry cells, but because they are soluble in water, they do not retain their edge long enough to cause serious damage to the skin.
The use of sugar in depilation makes a lot more sense. In the normal wax-based processes, hot wax can burn the skin; it can also adhere to the skin and cause damage when peeled off. Sugar depilation avoids this injury, since the depilatory material is used at or slightly above room temperature. The material, which can be made at home or purchased ready-made, is a paste prepared from eight parts sugar, one part water, and one part lemon juice (which helps to prevent the sugar from crystallizing as the mixture cools). The mixture is heated to around 248°F (120°C) and then left to cool, forming a thick paste or gel. To use it, the skin is first dusted with a light sprinkling of cornstarch or other powder so that the material will adhere only to the protruding hairs. The paste or gel is then applied. A strip of porous cloth is pressed onto the paste and then pulled off in the direction opposite to the hair growth, bringing hairs and paste along with it. The technique works well, although the removal process is purportedly still painful.
Finally, the presence of sugar in some cosmetics has been claimed to help produce surface luster; adding sugar to lipstick can make it appear more shiny. There may also be indirect effects, as in La Mer’s Face and Body Gradual Tan, about which product innovator Loretta Miraglia has been quoted as saying, “The secret in this sauce is sugar. It creates a much redder color development—versus yellow—which is more natural and appealing.” It is likely, in fact, that the dissolved sugar changes the refractive index of the water, which in turn affects the color balance of light scattered from the suspended droplets and particles (this trick has also been used by beverage manufacturers to enhance the color of drinks containing beta carotene). The sugar in and of itself is unlikely to produce such colors unless it is heated to unacceptably high temperatures, as in the final scene of the 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, where a human body is coated with what appears to be a sugar glaze. But that, really, would be going too far in the use of sugar to promote beauty.
cotton candy, a confection made from melted sugar that has been flavored and finely spun into soft, pillowy threads, is a popular novelty dessert at festivals and fairs. Although production of the sweet was not mechanized until 1897, versions of spun sugar threads are recorded as early as the sixteenth century.
Cotton candy is made by melting flavored, dyed sugar until it turns liquid and then spinning it by machine into fine threads. Here, two girls in Copenhagen, Denmark, eat large, sticky swirls of cotton candy. gilbert m. grosvenor / national geographic creative
A recipe for a “silver web” made from spun sugar, intended to adorn sweetmeats, appears in the 1769 edition of Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper. Recipes for a “gold web” and a dessert of spun sugar are also included. The late-nineteenth-century Skuse’s Complete Confectioner suggests using spun sugar as a window dressing in shops. Charles Henry King’s Cakes, Cake Decorations and Desserts: A Manual for Housewives, Simple and Up-to-date (1896) includes instructions for making large spun-sugar ornaments, as well as using the threads to decorate charlotte russes and tarts, and as handles for meringue baskets. See meringue and tart.
Machine-spun sugar was invented in 1897 by Nashville, Tennessee, dentist William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton. They introduced their invention nationally at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, calling the spun sugar it produced “fairy floss.” Although at 25 cents per box, the cost of the dainty confection was half the admission to the fair itself, the floss was a wild success, and the duo sold 68,655 boxes.
In 1921 another dentist, Joseph Lascaux from New Orleans, engineered a similar machine, patenting the spun sugar it produced under the name “cotton candy” (a term that had first appeared in print only a year earlier). This name stuck in the United States, although spun sugar is still referred to as “fairy floss” in other parts of the world.
Gold Medal Products Co. debuted its model of a cotton-candy machine in 1949. It featured a spring base that made it more functional than earlier versions. Today, most cotton candy is still made using a Gold Medal machine, although subsequent models have been automated and streamlined. While much of the cotton candy produced in the United States is sold at festival and fairs, the newer machinery has made the candy more accessible, and it may now be found at shopping malls and stores. See fairs. Some high-end restaurants are now offering miniature versions of cotton candy for dessert, bringing what started out as carnival fare into the realm of haute cuisine.
To make the confection, sugar—often dyed and flavored—is melted until it becomes liquid. It is then spun in the machine, which forces the liquid through tiny holes that shape and cool the sugar. Once cooled, the sugar becomes a fine solid thread. These threads are collected and spun around a paper cone or stick to be served as a fluffy, giant mound. Although cotton candy is usually artificially flavored and colored in pink or blue hues, a regional variation is Vermont’s maple cotton candy, flavored with pure maple sugar and boasting a natural off-white color. Because it is composed largely of air, a typical serving of cotton candy weighs only 1 ounce and contains about 105 calories.
court confectioners were an indispensable part of noble European households from the Renaissance right through the nineteenth century. Depending on the time and place, they created preserved fruit, candy, ice cream, and sugar sculptures, as well as numerous other sweet delights. Because they worked in private households, their raw materials were not subject to guild restrictions that defined what a confectioner was permitted to make. Since their role was expressly to turn expensive sugar into objects of conspicuous consumption, they were also not limited by the more mundane monetary considerations of artisans working for a broader market.
As the requirements of noble kitchens expanded in the Italian Renaissance, food preparation was increasingly divided into hot and cold, into kitchen and pantry (cucina and credenza in Italian). For both practical reasons (the ambient temperature of the work space was a factor, and the equipment differed) and as a matter of style, courses alternated between the two departments. Much like the musicians, painters, and other artisans in the pay of the nobleman, the role of the confectioner was to decorate the table and amuse the guests, often with impressively crafted sugar sculptures. See sugar sculpture. Most of the Italian confectioners remain anonymous, but Luigi Fedele, who first worked at the court of Ferrara in the second half of the seventeenth century and later created sugar sculptures for Pope Innocent X, was so renowned that he had a madrigal composed in his honor.
The role of culinary display, if anything, only increased in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as courtiers tried to outdo each other at table. Here the confectioners had to keep an eye on the latest fashion. In La science du maitre d’hotel confiseur (The Techniques of the Steward-Confectioner, 1750) the prolific Menon explains, “The art of the office (pantry), the same as every other, has been improved through gradual changes; in so much as the earlier work is almost useless to today’s pantry.” Perhaps the best known of the eighteenth-century confectioners was Joseph Gilliers, the author of Le Cannameliste français (The French Sugar-Worker, 1751) who worked for a time as chief confectioner to the expatriate Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński. See gilliers, joseph.
Elsewhere in Europe, noble courts first imitated Italy, and then France. Few, however, had the resources of Versailles. In Vienna, the Habsburg court depended on confectioners in town to supply many of its needs. The cost of purpose-made sugar sculptures gradually led to porcelain substitutes, most notably from Meissen. In Dresden, Munich, and Vienna, the court confectioner’s job was increasingly to provide treats to display on ornate porcelain centerpieces rather than to make the centerpieces themselves.
As the style of service changed from the buffet-like service à la française to the sequential service à la russe subsequent to the French Revolution, the visual display requirements of confectionery became more modest. See dessert. Society changed too. At the beginning of his career, the great pastry chef Antonin Carême (1783–1833) created massive table ornaments, pièces montées, for the imperial court of Napoleon; at the end of his career, he created confections for the tables of the Rothschilds. See carême, marie-antoine.
Cracker Jack, a confection made of popcorn, roasted peanuts, and molasses, was among the culinary wonders introduced at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, alongside Pabst beer and Juicy Fruit gum. By 1896 Frederick and Louis Rueckheim, brothers and German immigrants who had started a local popcorn and candy business in 1872, had perfected the recipe and called it Cracker Jack—slang for “excellent” or “first-rate.” They applied for a trademark on 17 February of that year, and it was issued 36 days later.
The brothers’ marketing acumen was evident from the beginning, when the firm rolled out a national promotional campaign with the simple, alluring slogan, “The More You Eat, The More You Want.” Cracker Jack was originally sold in large wooden tubs to retailers, but its wax-sealed package, which was developed in 1899, allowed consistent portion size and, more important, kept the contents crisp and fresh. That innovation, followed by moisture-proofing three years later, was suggested by Henry Eckstein, a friend and former general superintendent of the soap and lard manufacturer N. K. Fairbank Company. He did not actually invent the packaging, but paid a German scientist $500 to teach him how to make wax paper—and then improved on the process. The change (and subsequent advertising push) caused sales to skyrocket; the company was rechristened Rueckheim Brothers & Eckstein in 1903.
The new name coincided with expansion into a factory that covered an entire Chicago city block. By 1912 the company employed about 450 women and girls and 250 men and boys. See child labor. That same year, redeemable coupons for adult clothing and goods such as watches and sewing machines, which had been given away with each box of Cracker Jack, were replaced by tiny trinkets and other prizes for children. With the success of this marketing ploy, the firm, which also made marshmallows and candies, became the Cracker Jack Company in 1922.
A vintage Cracker Jack box. This roasted peanut, popcorn, and molasses confection was first introduced in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The “Sailor Jack” logo, introduced in Cracker Jack advertisements in 1916, was modeled after Frederick Rueckheim’s grandson, Robert. In 1918 the logo was added to a red, white, and blue box, a symbol of an immigrant family’s patriotism in a city that had become a hotbed of anti-German sentiment. Company ads exhorted consumers to save sugar and wheat and promoted Cracker Jack as “ideal war-time food,” whether as breakfast cereal or an afternoon energizer. Men were advised to enlist in the Navy, just like Sailor Jack.
Cracker Jack was a moneymaker for concessionaires at theaters, parks, carnival midways, circuses, and, most famously, baseball parks. The earliest known connection between the game and the confection is an advertisement on an 1896 scorecard (in the digital collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum) for a game played at Atlantic City, New Jersey, between the Atlantic City Base Ball Club and the Cuban Giants.
Cracker Jack was first sold at a Major League ballpark in 1907, and the two became inextricably linked in consumers’ minds with the publication of the 1908 song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” During a trip on the New York City elevated subway, vaudeville songwriter Jack Norworth (who authored “Shine On, Harvest Moon” among other popular standards) was inspired by the sight of a game advertised on the marquee at the Polo Grounds and penned the lyrics, which include “Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack / I don’t care if I never get back.” Tin Pan Alley composer Albert Von Tilzer wrote the jaunty melody. Neither man attended a Major League game until decades after the song was written. That the song is sung at every professional ballpark dates from the 1970s, when Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck encouraged broadcaster Harry Caray to serenade the fans during the seventh-inning stretch.
Early Cracker Jack baseball cards are greatly prized by collectors for their beauty and rarity. Printed in color, they feature players including Joe Jackson and Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson, set against a red background. The 144 cards from the first series, printed in 1914, were available only inside boxes of Cracker Jack. They are scarcer than the cards of the following year, which could be ordered all at once, by mail; a very fine complete 1914 set commanded $502,775 at auction in 2010.
With the Rueckheims’ savvy idea of placing a toy surprise inside each box of Cracker Jack, they parlayed a fun snack into a new form of entertainment—and created an American childhood ritual that gave great joy. Countless games, miniature books, spinning tops, rocking horses (as well as monkeys, bears, ducks, etc.), paper snap toys, acrobats on toothpicks, and optical illusion “Twirlies” remain treasured by collectors to this day. See children’s candy.
The man who invented the little contrivances in their heyday, from 1938 to 1965, and had them manufactured in tin, paper, or plastic from his hand-carved wooden models, was C. Carey Cloud, a former cartoonist, illustrator, adman, and art director. In a 1979 “On the Road” interview with Charles Kuralt for CBS Evening News, he explained that he got started in the depths of the Depression when a friend said, “You’re an artist, you can probably make a living designing Cracker Jack prizes.” Cloud replied, “So I designed some little tin nodding-head animals. And took them out and got prices from die stampers and such … went to Cracker Jack, and they bought six million. And I thought, Where have I been all this time?” According to the inventor’s best estimate, he created more than 700 million Cracker Jack toys, including the first all-plastic whistle.
The Cracker Jack Company remained in the Rueckheim family until 1964. It was sold to Borden, which, in turn, sold it in 1997 to the Frito-Lay division of food-and-beverage giant PepsiCo. In addition to increasing the peanuts in the “original” recipe (the peanut-to-popcorn ratio had become increasingly skewed in popcorn’s favor), Frito-Lay rolled out Kettle Corn and Butter Toffee flavors in 2013. That year also brought Cracker Jack prizes with digital components, a Cracker Jack app that can be used to play “nostalgic” games (baseball, pinball) on smartphones and iPads; and a new brand called Cracker Jack’D with more intense flavors (some laced with caffeine), developed to appeal specifically to young male millennials.
See also united states.
cream is the thick, fat-rich part of milk that rises to the top when fresh milk is left to stand. It can then be skimmed off for use as an enormously versatile substance in sweet dishes, where it provides a voluptuous contrast to crisp pastry, soft fruit, and jellied textures. There is no substitute for the distinctive flavor, smooth consistency, and pleasing mouthfeel of fresh cream—qualities it contributes to many desserts, especially silky custard-type dishes and ice creams. It is also frequently used in baking. Liquid or whipped cream is often served as an accompaniment to fruit or chocolate desserts.
Higher-fat cream, whipped until it holds its shape, is used for decorative piping; it also garnishes many desserts and features strongly in Central European cake and coffee traditions. Once whipped, cream can be folded into other mixtures; it lightens cheesecake fillings, makes mousses and fools airy, fills crisp pastries and brittle meringues, and serves as the basis for frothy syllabub. Combined with melted chocolate, cream makes a rich ganache mixture for layering in tortes. See torte.
The finest cream comes from cows that are humanely treated and carefully fed. Holstein cattle are the most common dairy breed worldwide because of their tremendous daily milk yield, but the Guernsey and Jersey breeds are considered the finest for the flavor, high butterfat content, and quality of their cream.
All cream, unless ultra-pasteurized, is highly perishable and should be stored in a closed container in the refrigerator, at the normal setting of 38° to 40°F (3° to 4°C). Regular cream lasts about ten days, but ultra-pasteurized can be kept for three to four weeks. Once opened, it should be handled like pasteurized cream.
Importance of Fat Content
The fat content determines the type of cream. Heavy cream has a butterfat content between 36 and 40 percent. High butterfat adds tenderness and moisture to baked goods. Many scones are called cream scones because they are made with cream. It is possible to substitute some other type of milk for the cream in these recipes and still have an acceptable result, but the scones will not be nearly as tender or moist as those made with heavy cream. Heavy cream is also used to make whipping cream. The fat is what helps stabilize cream after it is whipped, creating a more stable foam base that is easier to fold into a mousse or curd. The fat also prevents the cream from freezing too hard when it is used in ice cream, leading to a creamier finished product.
This 1954 advertisement promoting the consumption of dairy products in Sweden uses the country’s beloved summer berries to suggest that everything tastes “Twice as good with cream!”
Both the amount of fat in the cream and its temperature influence how well it will whip. Heavy whipping cream increases more in volume than light whipping cream, so a cream with a high fat content should be used for best results. For successful whipping, the cream, bowl, and beaters should be well chilled. Other ingredients, such as sugar or vanilla, should be added near the end of the whipping. Overwhipping can cause the cream to turn to butter. Lightly overwhipped cream can be corrected by gently folding in additional cold cream by hand.
There are three stages of whipped cream, each with a different use. The first, a light whip, is used as a topping for fruit dessert such as pies, crisp, or tarts. The cream should be whipped only until just thickened and semifluid like stirred yogurt. This more fluid state has a softer and lighter finish than a stiff cream. It can be lightly sweetened with sugar and flavored with pure vanilla extract or other complementary flavors. For folding into other ingredients, the cream should be whipped further to soft peaks. Stiff peaks are best for decorating and piping with a pastry bag, or for forming a quenelle of cream for plated desserts or for decorating a torte or tart.
Grades and Types of Cream
Several grades of cream are available in the United States. Some are available in other countries, but even in the English-speaking world they may be known by different names; for instance, heavy cream is called double cream in British English.
Half-and-half is a mixture of whole milk and cream that contains at least 10.5 percent but no more than 18 percent butterfat. It does not whip, but it can be used in many recipes instead of heavy cream for lower-fat cooking.
Light cream or coffee cream contains at least 18 percent but no more than 30 percent butterfat; it usually contains 20 percent butterfat. If it has 30 percent butterfat, it will whip, but the foam and structure will be weak.
Light whipping cream, the form most commonly available, contains at least 30 percent but no more than 36 percent butterfat. Cream must contain at least 30 percent butterfat in order to whip. Whipping cream will double in volume and is generally used as a topping.
Heavy or whipping cream must contain at least 36 percent butterfat. It can be readily whipped and will retain its whipped state longer than light whipping cream. Ultra-heavy cream or manufacturer’s cream contains 36 to 40 percent butterfat. Avoid heavy creams that contain glycerides, which are added as emulsifiers, as is carrageenan for thickening and consistency.
Ultra-pasteurized cream has been briefly heated to temperatures up to 300°F (149°C) to kill microorganisms. It has a longer shelf life than regular cream but does not whip as well. It can contain additives and stabilizers, which impart a bitter flavor that must be masked by additional sugar and vanilla extract. See vanilla.
Sour cream results from the addition of lactic acid bacteria to pasteurized cream with at least 18 percent butterfat to sour and thicken the cream. See sour cream.
Crème fraîche is heavy cream that has been slightly soured with bacterial cultures; it is neither as sour nor as thick as sour cream. It is a traditional product of Normandy in northern France.
Clotted cream is made by gently heating rich, unpasteurized milk until a semisolid layer of cream forms on the surface. After cooling, the thickened cream is removed. In the United Kingdom, clotted cream is strongly associated with the southwestern part of England, where it is eaten with scones and jam for a traditional cream tea. A similar product, called kaymak, is found in parts of Southwest Asia, where it is eaten with fruit preserves and sweet dishes, and used in pastries.
See also cake decorating and milk.
cream pie is a single-crust pie with a rich, sweet, custard-like filling, commonly thickened with flour or cornstarch and/or eggs, and in modern times also often having a whipped cream topping. Pies with a custard-type filling have been known since medieval times in Britain and Europe. The Forme of Cury, a cookery manuscript compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of King Richard II, contains a recipe for “daryols,” which comprised “coffyns” (pie shells) filled with a mixture of cream, almond milk, sugar, and saffron and baked in an oven. See dariole.
A huge range of flavorings and additional ingredients may be included in a cream pie, and recipes show much overlap with other sweet pies such as cheesecakes, sugar pies, and chiffon pies. See cheesecake and chiffon pie.
The first American recipe found to date that is called Cream Pie appears in The Improved Housewife (1844) by Mrs. A. L. Webster. It is filled with a thick egg custard “made very sweet,” with raisins added and flavored with nutmeg, mace, and citron. A very simple recipe in The Young Housekeeper’s Friend (1855) by Mrs. Cornelius instructs only to “boil and sweeten the cream, flavor it with grated lemon, and bake in a paste, about as long as pumpkin pie.”
Several well-known regional variations have special status in the United States. Hoosier Sugar Cream Pie is the official state pie of Indiana, and Chess Pie is an intriguingly named popular treat in the southern states. The name and form of the latter most likely derived from the seventeenth-century English “cheesecakes” made without cheese, but having a similar texture and consistency. A strange but famous anomaly is Boston Cream Pie, which is not a pie at all, but a cake with a custard filling; it has been known since 1855. See boston cream pie.
See also pie.
See pastry, choux.
See crème brûlée.
See custard.
crème brûlée is a sweet egg-yolk custard made with cream. The cream, egg yolk, and sugar mixture is cooked, poured into individual ramekins, poached in a bain-marie (hot water bath), and then chilled. When the custard is firm, the top is covered with a layer of sugar that is browned by means of a salamander, broiler or butane torch (brûlé means “burnt” in French), forming a hard, caramelized crust on the surface.
The dessert is ubiquitous on restaurant menus today in the United States and in Europe, but its history is anything but straightforward. The English, French, and Catalonians all lay claim to the origin of the dessert. Many have attributed the creation of crème brûlée to the kitchens of Trinity College, Cambridge University in the nineteenth century, but this cannot be true. Although custards topped with caramelized sugar appeared in eighteenth-century English cookbooks, notably John Nott’s Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary (1723), the origin of the recipe in print appears to be French. The British food writer Elizabeth David traced Nott’s recipe for “Burnt Cream” to François Massialot’s Crème Brûlée in Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1691). The English translation of Massialot’s book, The Court and Country Cook (1702), includes the crème brûlée recipe as “Burnt Cream.” Unless a seventeenth-century precedent is found, Massialot seems to have been first in English as well as in French. This early recipe calls for milk, not cream, and the custard bakes in an oven, not a bain-marie. Massialot neglects to tell the cook to add sugar in the cooking stage, but refers to the sugar in the custard later in the recipe. If the omission was a mistake, it was never corrected.
Somewhat confusingly, Massialot has a similar recipe called Crême à l’Angloise in his Nouvelle Instructions pour les Confitures (1740 edition), which, like the modern crème brûlée, does call for the sugar to be cooked with the egg yolks. Elizabeth Raffald’s recipe for “Burnt Cream” in The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) is similar to Massialot’s Crême à l’Angloise, except that she adds beaten egg whites to the custard mixture. The apparent name change for the same dessert prompted the editors of Petits Propos Culinaires to question whether French cooks got the idea to credit the English for the dish. However, Massialot’s crème brûlée seems to disappear from French cookbooks only after the three-volume 1750 edition of Le cuisinier royal, not before; French cooks did not abandon the name crème brûlée. Although François Menon’s Soupers de la cour (1755) contains a recipe titled Crème brûlée, it calls for cream, egg yolks, “a little sugar,” and egg whites (producing a thinner custard), and when it is finished it resembles a warm crème caramel. After Menon, crème brûlée as a dessert name pops up in a few French cookbooks, but the recipes do not resemble either eighteenth-century version.
Crème brûlée is conspicuously absent from the major nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French cookbooks, including Montagné’s Larousse Gastronomique (1938). Nor is burnt cream common in nineteenth-century British cookbooks. Crème brûlée surfaces in Eleanor L. Jenkinson’s Ocklye Cookery Book (1909), closely following Massialot’s original recipe. The Ocklye Cookery Book is at least one source of the Trinity College origins story. Dione Lucas’s Cordon Bleu Cookbook (1947) includes crème brûlée among the recipes she learned at the École du Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and later taught at the London École du Cordon Bleu, which she cofounded. However, the dessert was not particularly common, judging from prominent English-language cookbooks of the time. Crème brûlée reappears in a few English-language French cookbooks in the 1960s and 1970s, notably Gourmet’s Menu Cookbook (1963) and Samuel and Narcissa Chamberlain’s Flavor of France (2nd edition, 1969). Henri-Paul Pellaprat, codirector of the Paris École du Cordon Bleu and a prolific cookbook author, includes it in his Everyday French Cooking for the American Home (1978). Several twentieth-century southern cookbooks include the dessert, a few noting that it is a New Orleans specialty. By the time Patricia Wells published Bistro Cooking in 1989, she included a crème brûlée recipe, noting that it “seems to be one of the world’s favorite desserts, at least in our time.”
One plausible account of the late twentieth-century surge in the popularity of this dessert goes as follows: In 1975 Sirio Maccioni opened New York’s Le Cirque restaurant and hired pastry chef Dieter Schorner. In his memoir, Maccioni recalls that “the most important dessert of the Schorner period was crème brûlée” (2004, p. 216). Maccioni takes credit “for reintroducing the dessert … and making it the most famous and by far the most popular dessert in restaurants from Paris to Peoria” (p. 216). The Catalonian dessert crema catalana is made the same way as today’s crème brûlée. Maccioni claims it was crema catalana, which he tasted on a trip to Barcelona, that inspired him to return to New York and experiment with recipes. From there, he and Schorner created “Crème Brûlée Le Cirque.”
See also custard.
See flan (pudím).
See pancakes.
crescent is the English term applied to baked goods whose form resembles a waxing moon. This use of the word first entered the language in the late nineteenth century as a loan translation of the French croissant and occurs alongside the French word, which was directly borrowed into English at roughly the same time. See croissant. “Crescent” is also applied to the many similarly shaped baked goods of Central Europe that predate and presumably gave rise to the French croissant. Textual and linguistic evidence points to the origin of this family in the Bavarian dialect area of southern Germany and Austria, where Kipfel (sing. and pl.) and Kipferl (pl. Kipferln) are traditional crescent-shaped items; the former is attested in a text by the late thirteenth century. In Switzerland one finds the closely related Gipfeli. The names of these crescent-shaped items are derived from the word meaning “wagon stanchion”; such stanchions were typically curved and ended in a point (as can be seen in the heraldic use of the term Kipfel), thus resembling a horn.
The baked good itself expanded in two directions, with different approaches to naming. To the east and south of the South German/Austrian core area, especially in regions formerly linked politically to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the name Kipfel was generally borrowed. Thus, we find Hungarian kiflik, Slovenian kiflin, Serbo-Croatian kiflice, and northern and northeastern Italian forms (chiffel, chifeleti, etc. in Friuli, Trieste, and Trentino; chiffel in Lombardy; chifferi in Liguria). It is even the name of a crescent-shaped pasta (chifferi). To the north and northeast of the core area, one finds instead native words that are derivatives—especially diminutives—of the word for “horn”: in German Hörnchen, Czech rohlíky/rohlíčky, Slovak rožky, Polish rogale and rogaliki; the Yiddish name for crescents, rugelach, is borrowed from Polish. Interestingly, Serbo-Croatian includes, alongside the borrowed kiflice, the diminutive of “horn” in this application, rošćići. The Italian word cornetto/cornetti (diminutive of “horn”) may belong here too, though today it is essentially a regional name for the French-style croissant.
Central European crescents are typically made by cutting a triangular piece of dough that is then rolled and curved. Both sweet and savory varieties are widespread, and a range of dough types are employed: bread dough, short pastry dough, brioche dough, even potato dough. Sweet versions are often filled with nuts (especially walnuts), poppy seeds, fruit preserves, or sweetened cheese and can also be topped with powdered sugar and/or seeds or crushed nuts; savory versions are sometimes topped with salt, caraway, and the like, and used as sandwich rolls.
See also cheese, fresh; fruit preserves; nuts; and poppy seed.
See shortening.
croissant, in its classic formulation, derives from a pâte feuilletee dough that also includes yeast and a larger portion of butter. Traditionally, it has a crescent shape (croissant being French for crescent), although with the popularization of industrially produced versions, the pure butter croissant has recently lost its curve. See crescent.
Few foods have such potent emblematic power. Although produced internationally, croissants evoke France, bringing to mind visions of beret-wearing Frenchmen dipping their morning pastry into a steaming bowl of café au lait. Fewer foods still have histories as murky and steeped in erroneous culinary “fakelore.” The most frequently repeated legend attributes the invention of the croissant to Viennese bakers, who during the 1683 siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks purportedly created a pastry inspired by the crescent of their enemy’s flag. Alternatively, this same tale is recast during the Ottoman siege of Budapest of 1686.
The Vienna story has always held greater sway because it implicitly explains the origin of the word “viennoiserie,” which the French use to refer to all croissant-related breakfast pastries. For this same reason, popular legend attributes the croissant’s introduction in France to Marie Antoinette because she was Viennese. No evidence supports any of these tales, although crescent-shaped pastries had long existed across Europe, some dating back to the ancient world. The Austrian Kipferl can be documented to the thirteenth century, and the 1549 coronation banquet given to Catherine de’ Medici by the Bishops of Paris included forty “gateaux en croissants.” However, the croissant’s pâte feuilletée dough dates only to the later seventeenth century.
The croissant appears to have been launched in Paris between 1837 and 1839 by the Viennese baker August Zang, whose Boulangerie Viennoise on the rue Richelieu also popularized the term “viennoiserie.” Although the fashion for these pastries spread quickly, the first recognizable recipe for a croissant did not appear until the beginning of the twentieth century.
See also austria-hungary and vienna.
croquembouche (also croque-en-bouche) is a French dessert made by sticking together cream puffs with caramel. In the nineteenth century the pastry was formed using a cylindrical or other mold, though today it is more common to stack the puffs into a tall, pointed tower. Croquembouche literally means “crack (or crunch) in the mouth”—due to the consistency of the hardened caramel.
A pastry bearing this name became popular in the early nineteenth century, its invention being—like so many others—attributed to Antonin Carême. The great pastry chef does indeed give extensive instructions as well as several illustrations for very elaborate pièces montées called croquembouche in several of his cookbooks. See carême, marie-antoine.
In the nineteenth century the confections were not necessarily made with cream puffs. Alexandre Dumas, in his Petit dictionnaire de cuisine (1882), defines croquembouches as “pièces montées made with croquignolles [a crunchy cookie], gimblettes [jumbles, i.e., ring-shaped cookies], macarons, nougats and other crunchy pastries, which are combined with caramelized sugar and arranged on a base of puff pastry in the form of a large vessel [coupe]; this preparation is only used in the decoration of a ceremonial buffet table or as a buffet ornament for a grand ball.” Glazed chestnuts and orange slices were also popular additions. The definition given by Larousse Gastronomique in the 1960s was not substantially different, even if the authors mention that the cream puff variant was the most common.
Today, the dessert is invariably made with cream puffs, though its ceremonial role persists. A croquembouche is commonly served at weddings, baptisms, and other occasions when an impressive presentation is required. Other than the tower form, confectioners advertise the pastry made in the form of churches, baby carriages, and even the hand of Fatima.
See also france and pastry, choux.
See galette.
cupcakes are small, round, individual, iced snack cakes. Like muffins, they are sold with the fluted paper liners in which they are baked. The name “cupcake” was likely suggested by the cake called “cup cake,” which emerged in the early nineteenth century as a quick and frugal alternative to pound cake, the best-loved company cake of the day. See pound cake. In its original form, cup cake was a clever novelty in two different senses, both having to do with “cup.” First, so it would be quick and easy to make, its ingredients were measured by the cup rather than weighed—then the usual practice when making cake—and, in most recipes, the measures followed some easily remembered formula, such as the favorite: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, and 4 eggs. Second, to permit the cake to be made cheaply, with a minimum of butter and eggs, it was baked in individual molds, most often teacups or coffee cups, in which this rather dense, floury cake rose higher and lighter than if baked in a single large pan. The only alternative to cup baking would have been to leaven the cake with soda, but in the thinking of the day, soda was unacceptable in “nice” cakes meant for company, even quick, frugal cakes like cup cake. By the end of the nineteenth century, that thinking had changed, and cup cake, at least commonly, had acquired both soda and milk and had come to be baked in large pans, becoming the cake Americans still know today as the 1-2-3-4 yellow cake. See cake.
Some women, however, sometimes baked cup cake in individual molds simply because they liked the look of small cakes—and this is where the story of modern cupcakes begins. From the seventeenth century on, American women baked all sorts of fancy cakes in individual molds—not the teacups and coffee cups common for cup cake, but in individual tins made in a variety of clever shapes, including rounds, squares, oblongs, or hearts (which were particular favorites, especially for the popular “queen cakes”). When the modern individual cakes called “cup cakes” first emerged, at the end of the nineteenth century, they, too, were baked in such tins, as in Fannie Merritt Farmer’s recipe in the original edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published in 1896. Her recipe for Cup Cake (not yet Cupcake) does not hew to the measures of the classic 1-2-3-4 cup cake, which is to say, her “Cup Cake” is not actually cup cake. (Additionally, Farmer’s recipe included an ingredient not traditionally found in cup cake recipes—mace—which connects her cup cake recipe back to the much earlier tradition of “spice cakes.”) Farmer likely chose to title her recipe as she did because the cakes were baked individually, as cup cake once was and, in some quarters, continued to be. See farmer, fannie. Within about 20 years, joined tins for the baking of cupcakes (as they were coming to be known) appeared on the market. (Joined muffin tins of a sort had debuted in the United States shortly after the Civil War.) See pans.
Perhaps because of their small size, cupcakes began to be associated with children in the early decades of the twentieth century, whether they were made at home for birthday parties or purchased from a bakery. Ruth Wakefield’s Toll House Cook Book (ca. 1936) includes a photo of cupcakes decorated with clown faces, and the many Betty Crocker cooking pamphlets from the 1940s aimed cupcakes at children. The 1967 edition of Betty Crocker’s Hostess Cookbook offered the following advice: “Send leftover cookies or cupcakes home to your guests’ children. You might even bake some extras with the children in mind.” See betty crocker. A popular children’s television show from the 1950s, Howdy Doody, featured a Hostess Cupcake ad, and Hostess created the character of Captain Cupcake in the 1970s to help advertise the tempting little snack cakes on television. (An anthropomorphic cupcake cop or sea captain, the cartoon character was sometimes seen with Hostess’s first mascot, Twinkie the Kid.) Some elementary-school teachers even baked cupcakes for their students on special occasions. The growing embrace of muffin and cake mixes during the post–World War II period further spurred the cupcake’s popularity, as did the burgeoning snack cake industry. The Taggart Baking Company of Indianapolis began making chocolate cupcakes in 1919. When the company was acquired by Continental Baking in 1925, the Hostess snack cake line was launched. Today, over 600 million Hostess cupcakes are sold annually across the United States. See hostess.
The culture of the cupcake today has seen a shift away from cupcakes as a cheap snack food for kids to cupcakes as a trendy treat for adults. In fact, the global ascendancy of the cupcake appears to be tied to one adult cable-television series, Sex and the City, and one Greenwich Village bakery, Magnolia, which opened in 1996. In an episode from 2000, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw enjoyed a cupcake from Magnolia bakery. Since the airing of that segment, Bleecker Street, where the original bakery is located, has never been the same. Year-round, it is congested with tourists from all over the world. In a conciliatory gesture to the community, however, Magnolia stopped allowing buses to regularly disgorge hordes of visitors in search of the cupcake that Carrie Bradshaw ate.
It is hard to believe that the world’s most famous cupcakes were, in fact, a complete accident. Seeking a use for the leftover cake batter from her signature coconut layer cakes, Alyssa Torry, Magnolia’s original co-owner, began to bake cupcakes. Her customers loved them so much that she had no choice but to continue. Following the success of outposts in Chicago and Los Angeles, Magnolia opened its first non-U.S. store in Dubai in 2010. Cupcakeries hold particular appeal in countries where sweets are an important part of the culture, and where alcohol consumption is low or forbidden. Outside of the United States, besides offering a novelty, cupcake cafés tend to serve tea and coffee, avoiding the alcohol issue entirely. European capitals are now dotted with cupcake bakeries, and a similar trend is emerging in the Middle and Far East. Unlike ice cream, which appears to be equally popular among men and women, a higher percentage of cupcake customers tend to be women. The cakes’ dainty, decorated nature may be the reason.
Like layer cakes, today’s standard cupcakes are usually white, yellow, chocolate, or red velvet. The icing to cake ratio varies greatly, however. In some instances, the frosting is just a thin layer spread across the surface of the cupcake, but in others, icing is dexterously applied to a height of more than one inch. See icing. Those who enjoy cupcakes frequently sample the icing before biting into the cake. The most popular icings are French buttercream and French meringue, but cream cheese and ganache frostings are gaining in popularity because they tend to be less sweet. Often a bakery will have a signature manner in which the frosting is applied, as well as signature colors, such as the pastel hues found at Magnolia Bakery.
While most cupcakes weigh in at approximately 3 ounces, some supersized cupcakes top the scales at six ounces and pack a whopping 900 calories per serving. Other bakeries opt for miniaturization and offer up one-bite, walnut-sized cupcakes containing fewer than 50 calories apiece. Mini cupcakes are not new. The culinary historian Meryle Evans fondly recalls the miniature cupcakes sold at Mrs. Holmes bakery in Asbury Park, New Jersey, before the outbreak of World War II.
The cupcake revolution may be an outgrowth of the 1970s food revolution that rejected the standardized, industrial version of bread and other baked goods. Many artisanal cupcake bakeries today use only high-quality, frequently locally sourced ingredients, and so, to a certain degree, the cupcake has come full circle, regaining its lost status as a fine cake. Cupcakeries can now be found in the chicest parts of cities both in the United States and abroad, and some brides and grooms are even rejecting traditional wedding cakes in favor of elaborately decorated cupcakes.
From Beverly Hills to Moscow, the humble cupcake has earned its place at the world’s table due to its approachable, appealing nature.
See also buttermilk; cake mix; meringue; and wedding cake.
custard is a mixture of whole milk, sugar, and eggs, generally flavored with vanilla and heated gently until thickened. Pale yellow to golden in color, it can be cooked in a saucepan, constantly stirred to make a sweet sauce that is sometimes known as custard sauce, boiled custard, or crème anglaise. See sauce. Alternatively, the raw mix can be poured into a dish or pastry crust to make a baked custard with a soft, set texture.
The name “custard” is also applied to a simpler, more convenient, and cheaper alternative made from packaged “custard powder” popular in the British Isles and Australia. These mixes contain no egg at all and are based on corn flour (cornstarch), flavorings, and colors, ready to mix with sugar and milk. Extremely popular in Britain, where they have come to be what most British people think of as custard, they are used mainly as sauces, substituting for egg-based custards. See united kingdom.
The Science of Custards
Custard sauces that use egg as a thickener are notoriously tricky. Their texture relies on the coagulation of egg proteins as the mixture is heated. These proteins unfold to form a network that traps liquid, thereby yielding the velvety smoothness characteristic of custards. Beaten egg coagulates at about 156°F (69°C), although the presence of milk and sugar raises the coagulation temperature, so the mixture thickens at a temperature approaching 176°F (80°C). If heated beyond this point, the mixture will curdle and become spoiled. Heating the mixture in the top of a double boiler removes much of the risk from the process, and scalding the milk before adding it to the whisked mixture of sugar and eggs speeds up the process somewhat. Flour is sometimes added to stabilize the proteins, which allows the mixture to be heated to the boiling point (essential for cooking the flour).
Bird’s Custard Powder is an eggless imitation custard powder developed in England in the 1840s by the pharmacist Alfred Bird, apparently because his wife, though fond of custard, was allergic to eggs. This advertisement appeared in the June 1901 issue of The King magazine. private collection / bridgeman images
Baking the mixture is a gentler, less risky process, although precautions such as using a bain-marie are still advised for custards that do not involve pastry cases; these are usually removed from the oven while still soft in the middle. Caution is nevertheless needed, as they develop bubbles in the mix and lose their smooth texture if overcooked. The richness and texture of custards can be varied by increasing the number of eggs, using egg yolks only, or substituting cream for some or all of the milk. Such variations are seen most clearly in recipes that require baking.
Custard powder relies on starch as a thickener and must be cooked to the boiling point to gelatinize it; otherwise, the mix will not thicken and remains unpleasantly thin, grainy, and opaque. Mixes based on modified starches that gelatinize without heating are also available. When kept for any length of time, custard-powder custards are prone to weeping, or synerisis, as the starch stales. See gelatin and starch.
Custard-Based Dishes
Egg-based custards are important both as sweet sauces and components in other dishes. For sauces, they are generally milk-based, or use small proportions of cream, and may be made with egg yolks rather than whole eggs. They can be added to fools and form an essential layer in trifle. See fools and trifle. The custard powder variety is often substituted; it also provides the base for banana custard, with slices of that fruit added. The notion of custard as a sauce runs deep in British food traditions, served alongside the numerous baked or steamed puddings traditional to dinner. Confusingly, the British would regard American packaged “pudding” mixes, which are also popular in parts of Europe and eastern Asia, as a form of custard.
The French name for a rich custard based on eggs, milk, and sugar is crème anglaise, presumably because of a perceived English fondness for this preparation. Used as a sauce for desserts based on fruit or cake, it has traveled the world as part of high-status restaurant cookery. Crème anglaise is also a component of the French dessert île flottante (floating island), for which the eggs are separated and the whites made into a poached meringue that floats as a praline- or caramel-decorated “island” on a custard made with the yolks. See meringue. A rich custard with added flour to thicken and stabilize the mixture, used as a filling for pastries such as vanilla slices (Napoleons), is known in French cookery as crème patissière (pastry cream). Vanilla is by far the most popular flavor for all these custards, although almond, lemon, orange, coffee, chocolate, butterscotch, and alcoholic drinks such as rum may be added. Egg custard mixtures are also used as bases for ice creams and in cold dishes such as bavarois or “Bavarian cream,” a molded, gelatin-set dessert. See desserts, chilled and ice cream.
Plain egg custard mixes can also be simply poured into a dish or a pie crust and baked until set. In British tradition, the latter are often made as individual “custards” using shortcrust pastry in small, deep, flowerpot-shaped molds. They can also be made as large custard tarts, known in North American cookery as custard pies, and cut into slices for serving. In this case the flavoring is usually a dusting of grated nutmeg over the top just before baking. Individual custard tarts, pastéis de nata, are a Portuguese specialty. See portugal. Made with egg yolks, butter, milk, and sugar syrup in puff pastry cases, they have a characteristic golden yellow surface speckled with dark spots. Cinnamon is a preferred spice for custards in Iberian traditions.
Baked custards have many variations. Cooked in individual caramel-lined molds, they form the crème caramel of French cookery and flan of Spanish-speaking countries. See flan (pudím) and latin america. For crème brûlée, the custard, rich with cream and egg yolks, is baked alone and then finished with a caramelized layer of sugar to give contrast in both flavor and texture. See crème brûlée.
The egg yolk and cream formula is the basis for many other sweet items and desserts. It is poured over apricots or other fruit and baked in tarts. Combined with chocolate and baked in ramekins, it becomes petits pots au chocolat; made with large amounts of lemon zest and juice, it becomes the filling for tarte au citron. Some other pie fillings, such as that for pumpkin pie, might be seen as special forms of custard, as might lemon curd (also known as lemon cheese), a popular preserve in British food traditions. See fruit preserves. The curd is made with lemon zest and juice, eggs, sugar, and butter, yielding a translucent soft-set mixture that is used as a tart filling or spread. In Southeast Asia, coconut milk is used instead of cow’s milk, as in the Thai khanom krok, little coconut custards, which, although sweet, are sometimes flavored with green onions or corn kernels.
History of Custards
The word “custard” derives from the French crustade, or pastry case, in which late medieval cooks baked egg and milk or cream-based mixtures with other ingredients, including sugar, spices, fruit, nuts, and meat (savory custards survive as quiche Lorraine). See pie. A similar process occurred with the word “flan” in Spanish. “Dariole,” another French word originally indicating an egg mixture in a case, came to mean a small custard tart in seventeenth-century English and now refers to the molds used to make them. See dariole.
The seventeenth-century cookbook writer Robert May illustrated ornamental shapes made by cutting out pastry bases and adhering vertical walls to them to create elaborate little trough-like cases that were baked blind before being filled with custard. These treats were sometimes dredged with tiny comfits before serving and were eaten by spooning the mixture out of the (inedible) case.
By virtue of the egg, milk or cream, sweetener, and spice combination, other dishes in the early modern period can be thought of as types of custard. English cookery texts describe rich puddings made with eggs, cream, butter, sugar, almonds, pistachios, lemon, or other flavors that were originally boiled in skins and baked (they were later poured into pastry-lined dishes). Possets, ancestors of eggnog, also involved egg and cream mixtures that were thickened by allowing them to stand next to the fire. See egg drinks. Custards could also be poured into dishes and steamed, or tied up in cloths and boiled. Little cold custards were served in porcelain cups as part of the dessert course. See dessert. Eighteenth-century cooks made numerous “creams” of eggs, cream, sugar and flower waters, spices, or nuts, all of which must have influenced the notion of custard, and which seem to have been extremely popular.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the word “custard” had come to mean more or less the same as it does today, and it was technology, not fashion, that led to a major change. Custard powder was developed in England in the 1840s by a pharmacist named Alfred Bird because, as the story goes, his wife, though fond of custard, was allergic to eggs. It is not clear which starch his original formula depended on, but cornstarch was first extracted in New Jersey in 1842. Initially used in laundries, a food grade of the starch soon followed, and custard powder quickly became popular in Britain and some British colonies, especially Australia. It never seems to have achieved widespread recognition in the United States, although pudding mixes, developed in the 1920s, are based on the same principle. Finally, custard pies, deliberately made with messy fillings, became important in early movies, though as ammunition, rather than food.
See also cream; eggs; extracts and flavorings; flower waters; milk; and vanilla.