M&M’s, with their shiny, colored candy coating protecting the chocolate inside, are the perfect embodiment of childhood. Each pellet-sized piece is like a special present just waiting to be opened and enjoyed. But the candy was never intended as a child’s treat. Ironically, it was born out of war, made specifically for the soldiers of World War II who were stationed in tropical climates where chocolate bars would melt. The man who developed the M&M brand, Forrest E. Mars Sr., first saw confections like these on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s. According to legend, Mars was traveling through Spain with a member of the Rowntree family, famous British confectioners whose business rivaled Mars’s own. Both men were intrigued by the lentil-shaped chocolates the soldiers kept tucked away for a quick pick-me-up. Upon discovering the candy, they supposedly entered into a gentleman’s agreement whereby Rowntree would take the idea back to the United Kingdom, introducing it as a product called Smarties, and Mars would bring the candy to the United States—where it became M&M’s.
The truth of that tale is unknown. Forrest Mars had been kicked out of the family’s American business, which had been producing Milky Way, Snickers, and Three Musketeers candy bars since the early 1920s; and he did depart from Britain before World War II, leaving his candy business, the third largest in the United Kingdom and best known for the Mars bar, in the hands of his top managers. See mars. Because of his time abroad, when Forrest Mars returned to the United States in 1939, he knew better than most Americans that world tensions were high and that the country was likely headed toward war. If he planned to launch a new business, it was critical to secure a steady supply of chocolate, and that meant a visit to Hershey, Pennsylvania, home to the largest American chocolate manufacturer, the Hershey Chocolate Company. See hershey’s. Mars’s father, Frank Mars, was Hershey’s biggest customer, using the firm’s product to cover his company’s popular candy bars. Several times a week, trainloads of chocolate left Hershey, Pennsylvania, bound for the Mars plant on Chicago’s West Side. But on his return to the United States, Forrest Mars had to start from scratch. In a brilliant business move, he invited the eldest son of Hershey president William R. Murrie to partner in his new venture, asserting he would treat Bruce Murrie like family and even putting his name on the product, calling it M&M’s for “Mars and Murrie.”
Bruce Murrie was working on Wall Street at the time. At the urging of his father, he quit his job and joined in a limited partnership with Forrest Mars in the spring of 1940. Murrie put up 20 percent of the capital, and Mars contributed the rest. Murrie was named the company’s executive vice president. He and Forrest Mars set up shop in Newark, New Jersey, with equipment imported from Italy that could candy-coat the chocolate. Manufacturing began almost immediately. With a steady supply of Hershey chocolate and 10 panning drums to apply the thin candy shell, the original M&M’s were not stamped with a letter but did come in a variety of colors: brown, yellow, green, red, and occasionally violet. They were packaged in a cardboard tube that first hit store shelves in 1941. Sales were brisk from the beginning, and fearing encroachment from a competitor—like Rowntree’s Smarties—Forrest Mars patented the M&M’s manufacturing process that spring.
His partnership with Murrie paid off handsomely. In 1942, when the government ordered severe rationing, M&M did not suffer; Murrie’s father made certain the firm got all the supplies it needed. The War Department was initially M&M’s biggest customer, and millions of M&M’s went to bomber pilots stationed in North Africa and the Pacific Theater. See military. The Army also bought the candies for C-rations it distributed to soldiers in the Philippines, Guam, and other tropical climates. After the war the popularity of the brand followed the soldiers back home, although it took a few years for sales to regain their wartime peak. Forrest Mars blamed the dip on Bruce Murrie’s poor sales efforts, and the two had a falling out in 1949. Eventually, Mars bought out Murrie’s minority stake for $1 million.
In 1950 Forrest Mars began printing the letter m on the candy using black ink, yet another move designed to discourage copycats. Four years later, the peanut version of the candy was introduced, and the ink changed to the now familiar white. Oddly, the original peanut M&M’s were all tan-colored; they were changed to match the hues of plain M&M’s in 1960. With the peanut variety, Mars introduced its famous advertising slogan, “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand,” which lasted for decades. In recent years the company has become more creative with the brand, toying with its colors and candy fillings. Today, M&M’s varieties include peanut butter, almond, raspberry, mint, and pretzel, in addition to the original plain and peanut. The company markets special color collections at holiday times and even sells special colors at its M&M World stores in iconic locations like Times Square and the Las Vegas strip. Consumers can also order specially printed M&M’s online.
The candy has developed a cult-like following. A check of the Internet reveals all manner of myth and legend surrounding the taste of different flavors and the special powers attributed to the green M&M in particular. Musicians seem to have a penchant for M&M’s, with many famous rock-and-roll bands requesting them backstage at rock concerts. Even the White House has specially packaged M&M’s in red, white, and blue with the U.S. presidential seal. A multibillion-dollar brand, M&M’s are sold around the world, and are just as popular in places like Japan and Israel as they are in the United States.
See also candy; children’s candy; and panning.
macarons (spelled with a single o) are colorful, filled cookies made from ground almonds, sugar, and egg whites that have become popular worldwide since the early 2000s. Any discussion of macarons must begin with the essential distinction between this French confection and the American macaroon, which refers most often to cookies made with sweetened coconut flakes. Macarons have a very simple ingredient list: almond flour, confectioner’s sugar, sugar, and egg whites. Flavoring and coloring agents can be added to the shells, as long as they don’t prevent the cookies from rising and obtaining their distinctive “foot,” a narrow, delicate edge that indicates a macaron’s overall quality. Macaron shells are thin and slightly crunchy, with a soft and moist interior. Achieving that perfect balance is where making macarons gets complicated, because the amount of air incorporated, the length of beating, and a temperamental oven can all affect the final result, which is why macarons are mainly made by professional pastry chefs, even though single-subject cookbooks on the topic for the home kitchen have recently proliferated.
Filled macarons were invented in the early twentieth century at the famed Parisian tea salon and pastry shop Ladurée. See salon de thé. Pierre Desfontaines, the second cousin of Louis Ernest Ladurée, had the idea of piping ganache on an almond-based shell and topping it with another shell. Although sweet macarons are standard, savory fillings, such as tomato jam or foie gras, are now also encountered, especially at restaurants where tasting menus offer a savory macaron as an amuse-bouche.
Macarons are believed to have appeared in Venetian monasteries in the eighth century, after the Arabs had brought almonds to Italy. Some sources state that in 791 a French abbey in Cormery began making ring-shaped almond cookies said to evoke a monk’s belly button, though this version more likely emerged only in the nineteenth century. In any case, by the Middle Ages, almond-based foodstuffs were already popular throughout Europe. Legend has it that the macaron arrived in France with Catherine de Medici in 1533, when she married King Henry II, though like many similar food genealogies, this story is likely inaccurate. See médici, catherine de. In any case, a cookie made from almonds and sugar became popular in France, where various cities, such as Paris, Reims, Montmorillon, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Amiens developed their own distinct version. Nuns were often the driving force behind macarons, which they made for both nutritional and commercial purposes (baked goods, honey, and other food products were a source of revenue for most religious orders). See convent sweets. Such was the case in Nancy, another French city famous for its macarons. In the late eighteenth century the nuns of Les Dames du Saint Sacrement’s convent, who were forbidden to eat meat, began making macarons because they were nutritious. After the closing of the convent at the time of the French Revolution, two sisters began selling the macarons in order to make a living. They became legendary as “les Soeurs Macarons,” to the point that a street now bears that name in Nancy. Nancy-style macarons are flatter than Parisian ones and don’t have a smooth surface.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, recipes for macarons had begun appearing in French cookbooks. François Pierre de la Varenne’s Le Pâtissier François, published in 1653, mentions macarons several times as elements of other recipes, seemingly to give those dishes body. The 1692 Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs, et les fruits states that macarons are a combination of sweet almonds, sugar, and egg white, and offers instructions that include flavoring the batter with orange blossom water and icing them once baked, if desired. See flower waters and icing. From that point on, similar recipes for macarons appear regularly in cookbooks.
Nineteenth-century French confectionery cookbooks offer recipes for almond cookies that are made into a paste with egg whites and sugar (lemon zest is sometimes added), then combined with whipped egg whites, shaped into small mounds, and baked. Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière’s 1839 Néo-physiologie du gout par ordre alphabétique, ou Dictionnaire générale de la cuisine française, ancient et moderne lists no fewer than eight macaron recipes, including two for macarons soufflés, which could be closer to the light, meringue-based macarons we most often think of today. See meringue.
If nineteenth-century books about Paris are to be believed, the city was teeming with macaron street vendors. Those vendors did not look like the elegant Ladurée, to be sure, but they testify to the lasting power of the combination of almonds, sugar, and egg whites. Today, cities large and small around the world have shops devoted to macarons, while pastry shops and supermarkets offer their own versions.
See also france.
madeleine is a small sponge cake in the shape of a shell that occupies a hallowed place in French patisserie. Madeleines have long been associated with the town of Commercy in Lorraine, whose bakers claim that the cake originated during the eighteenth century in the kitchens of the nearby chateau of Stanisław Leszczyński, father-in-law of Louis XV of France. The name of the cake is attributed to an elderly cook named Madeleine Paulmier (according to Bescherelle).
Nineteenth-century cookery books (those by Audot and Brisse, for instance) give recipes for madeleines as a modified pound cake or quatre-quarts mixture, a type of sponge cake with a sufficiently firm crumb to prevent its breaking apart when dipped into a cup of hot tea or a tisane. See pound cake and sponge cake. A madeleine batter is made by beating together softened butter, fine white sugar, egg yolks, and wheat flour. The mixture is aerated with whisked egg whites and flavored with zest of lemon and orange flower water or brandy. Spoonfuls of the mixture are baked in special embossed madeleine tins that resemble small scallop shells. When baked and cooled, madeleine cakes are either left plain or dusted with confectioner’s sugar. See sugar. Alternatively, a sugar glaze is brushed over the freshly baked cakes, which are replaced in the oven for a few minutes to dry.
Madeleine cakes are more attractive served upside down to display their distinctive shape, described by the writer Marcel Proust as “a little shell of a cake, so generously sensual beneath the piety of its stern pleating.” Tasting a madeleine, dipped in linden tea, revived hidden memories that profoundly influenced Proust when writing his celebrated novel A la recherche du temps perdu.
The madeleine is considered so emblematic that it represented France in the European Union’s Europe Day in 2006. The popularity of the cake remains undiminished, so in addition to the classic plain kind, many other versions are produced. Even Carême (1784–1833) listed half a dozen variations that include chopped pistachios, or currants, or candied peel. See carême, marie-antoine. Carême’s madeleines en surprise are covered with a meringue mixture and replaced in the hot oven until lightly toasted. Today’s madeleines may be filled with jam or fruit purée, or iced or frosted with chocolate. Yet all retain the characteristic indentations of the legendary little cake.
See also meringue and small cakes.
See north africa.
Maillard, Henri (1816–1900), was America’s preeminent nineteenth-century confectioner. Celebrated in his adopted country for his Frenchness, he was sometimes considered too American in his native land. “Only a Yankee could have conceived the idea of creating an edible Venus de Milo,” sniffed the French critic Eric Monod, echoing the sentiments of others in response to the 400-pound chocolate sculpture Maillard showed at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition.
This split identity characterized the career of Maillard, who immigrated to New York in 1848. At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, he included sugar models of such uniquely American figures as the Pilgrims and founding fathers, General Custer and Sitting Bull in one enormous exhibit, while flying the flags of both the United States and France above another. This latter exhibit demonstrated how cacao beans were turned into chocolate using French machinery available in the Machinery Hall’s France section. Yet Maillard used “Henry,” not “Henri,” on the exhibit’s signage and achieved great American success with the grand presidential party he catered at the White House on 5 February 1862. Hosted by First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln to unveil her renovation of the presidential mansion, the gala boasted as its centerpiece a Maillard-made confectionery steamship flying the Stars and Stripes, along with sugar models of Fort Sumter and the Goddess of Liberty.
Maillard’s first chocolate factory-cum-shop and catering facility were in downtown Manhattan. By the 1870s the factory had moved up to West 25th Street, while the shop and a restaurant occupied part of the swank Fifth Avenue Hotel at 23rd Street. Photographs of the shop, circa 1900, show an Edwardian fantasy of mirrored walls, crystal chandeliers, mahogany display cases, and a cherub-painted ceiling. Surrounding the staff are tables of beautiful baskets and boxes of chocolates, as well as candy novelties like a life-size bust of a woman that could be mistaken for a customer. Chairs and tables along one wall reinforced Maillard’s claim that his was “An Ideal Luncheon Restaurant for Ladies.”
After Maillard’s death, his son Henry Maillard Jr. moved the business slightly uptown, setting up first at Fifth Avenue and 35th Street in 1908, then at Madison Avenue and 47th Street in 1922. Hoping to expand beyond its reputation as a magnet for women, Maillard’s added a men’s-only restaurant with a separate entrance in the later location, which was visited by none other than James Beard. Maillard’s also opened a branch in Chicago, on upscale Michigan Avenue.
Although Maillard’s catering and restaurants attracted high society, its cocoa was marketed to a broader public. Free instruction in the art of preparing “Maillard’s Chocolate for Breakfast, Lunch & Travelers” was given at Maillard’s New York Chocolate School in the 1890s. The company’s chocolate candies were popular well into the 1960s, long after the Depression had driven Maillard’s other divisions into bankruptcy.
The Chicago restaurant was absorbed by the Fred Harvey chain, but Maillard’s new owner ruined the New York locations, the last of which closed in 1942—a sad fate for the memory of the immigrant who had won World’s Fair renown for his 200-pound chocolate vases and 3,000 kinds of filled chocolates.
See also chocolates, filled; chocolate, luxury; cocoa; and sugar sculpture.
malt syrup is an unrefined sweetener derived from germinated (sprouted) cereal grains, typically barley, in combination with other cooked grains. If malted barley alone is used, the resulting syrup may be called “barley malt extract,” or just “malt extract,” and the malt aroma will be more intense. Malt syrup is used in bread and other baked goods, jams, breakfast cereals, confectionery, and in brewing beer.
The first step in malting grains is to put them in a dark room and soak them in water. The germinating grains produce enzymes that convert starches into sugar to fuel growth. (Barley produces unusually active and abundant malt enzymes.) The maltster then halts enzymatic activity by quickly drying the sprouting seeds, which kills the seed embryo and preserves its nutrients. The malted grains are crushed, steeped in hot water, and mixed with cooked grains (unless it is a malt extract, in which case cooked grains are not added). Malt enzymes digest the starch present in the cooked grains, forming a slurry that is concentrated and evaporated by boiling off the water, or, in modern food-grade malt plants, by using a vacuum evaporator. The sticky dark brown syrup that is left is about half as sweet as table sugar, with a distinct flavor some have described as biscuity, honeyed, or, depending on the kilning technique, roasted, with chocolate and coffee-like flavors.
Unlike corn syrup, the predominant grain-derived sweetener used today, malt syrup has been around for several millennia. See corn syrup. According to the food writer Harold McGee, malt syrup and honey were the primary sweeteners in China from around 1000 b.c.e. to 1000 c.e. Table sugar was too expensive for the peasantry, but malt syrup could be made from common household grains, such as rice, sorghum, and wheat. The classic sixth-century Chinese text Qímín Yàoshù (Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People) includes chapters on how to prepare sprouted grains and how to extract malt sugar, or maltose. Malt syrup and maltose remain important ingredients in traditional Chinese confections such as Ding Ding Tong and Dragon’s Beard Candy. See china.
Malt syrup was not produced on a commercial scale in the United States until around 1920, when persistent sugar shortages led to greater interest in alternative sweeteners. See sugar rationing. Malt syrup was particularly attractive because it offered breweries devastated by Prohibition a potential new revenue stream. Instead of using malted barley as one of the four main ingredients in beer (along with hops, yeast, and water), some breweries simply canned malt syrup and sold it to consumers for use in cooking and baking. This “liquid malt extract” had good culinary uses, but it was also sold with a wink, since consumers could use the cans to illegally brew beer in their homes. Indeed, the LA Brewing Co. sold a malt extract that included a “Bohemian” hop flavoring, obviating the need for consumers to procure hops.
Malt extracts remain popular with home brewers today, but a greater volume of malt syrup worldwide goes into baking, confectionery, and even breakfast cereals. All malt products can be classified as diastatic (containing active enzymes) or nondiastatic (with enzymes inactivated by high processing temperatures). When diastatic malt products are used in baking, the enzymes can increase fermentation activity, helping to condition the dough. Care must be taken not to overuse diastatic malt or the finished product will come out “over-proofed,” smelling of alcohol. Malt syrup also aids in the caramelization, or browning, of bread and pizza crusts, and dark malt extracts do the same in hearth breads. Of course, malt flavor is delicious in its own right, regardless of malt’s functional attributes, and barley malt syrup is an essential ingredient in New York–style bagel recipes. In the United Kingdom, malt is the key ingredient in malt loaf, a sweet, dense, chewy loaf of bread. Light malt extracts lend many breakfast cereals sweetness and color. See breakfast cereal.
Barley malt extract also appears on the ingredient lists of numerous popular confections and malt-based beverages. In the United Kingdom, Mars makes Maltesers, round milk chocolates with malt honeycomb centers; their United States counterpart, Whoppers, are malted milk balls produced by the Hershey Company. See hershey’s and mars. Both contain malted milk, a powdered blend of whole milk, malt extract, and wheat flour that was invented by William and James Horlick and trademarked under the “malted milk” name in 1887. Malted milk became a mainstay of soda fountains in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with soda jerks adding malted milk powder to milkshakes to form “malts.” See milkshakes and soda fountain. When light malt extract is incorporated into ice cream recipes, it helps control crystallization and imparts a rich toasted flavor.
As a sugar substitute, malt syrup has generally enjoyed a healthful reputation. In 1889 the Scotsman John Montgomerie filed an application for a U.S. patent on digestive biscuits, claiming his “malted bread” would make “nourishing food for people of weak digestion.” Today, over 71 million packs of Digestives are sold every year in the United Kingdom. Ovaltine, a powdered malt mix invented in the late nineteenth century by a Swiss chemist, was a nutritional supplement believed to be especially good for infants, and by the early twentieth century it had become a popular children’s drink in the United States and United Kingdom, often replacing hot chocolate. In the twentieth century, malt extracts often included cod liver oil to boost its value as a dietary supplement and to protect against rickets. Today, as fructose has fallen out of favor, malt syrup advocates may point to the absence of fructose in maltose. Maltose is a disaccharide, a combination of two glucose molecules, while sucrose (table sugar) is a combination of glucose and fructose. Malt syrup also contains some minerals and vitamins not present, or only minimally present, in other sweeteners. The recent rise of gluten-free dieting has made malt syrup a somewhat less desirable sweetener for many manufacturers. General Mills replaced malt syrup with molasses in their flagship Chex cereal and now advertises all but the Wheat Chex flavor as gluten-free.
See cassava.
manjū, a traditional Japanese sweet, are steamed, stuffed buns made from wheat, rice, or buckwheat flour. Sweetened azuki paste (an) is the most common filling for manjū today, but the earliest manjū were vegetarian versions of meat buns. See azuki beans. According to one of many stories about their origin, Zen monks brought the recipe for manjū to Japan from China in the Kamakura era (1185–1333). The monks ate manjū stuffed with vegetables as snacks, sometimes in a broth. During the Muromachi period (1336–1573), peddlers dressed as monks sold savory manjū in medieval cities. By the late 1600s, “sugar manjū” stuffed with azuki paste became more prevalent than the savory type. The elite adopted manjū for use in the tea ceremony but commoners also enjoyed them, and the sweet remains one of the most popular of traditional confections in Japan, where there are many varieties. The flour to make Sake Manjū is kneaded with amazake (a rice beverage made from rice, water, and kōji—the mold Aspergillus oryzae), which imparts a tangy taste. Chestnut Manjū contain pieces of chestnut mixed with the sweetened azuki paste. Rikyū Manjū, alleged to be a favorite of tea master Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591), have brown sugar mixed into the flour. Tea Manjū are made with powdered green tea. Hot-spring resorts sell Hot Spring Manjū cooked by the steam of the hot spring. Savory versions of manjū survive as buns stuffed with meat (nikuman) or curry (karēman).
manna is the magical biblical substance provided by God to sustain the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness of Sinai for 40 years after the exodus from Egypt until they arrived in the land of Canaan. The name of the food itself evokes wonder and mystery. When the Israelites first saw it, they asked one another, “What is it?” (Hebrew, mān hû’ [Exodus 16:15]), which yielded the name of the substance (in Hebrew, mān). The earliest Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible associated the sound of the word with Greek manna (meaning “morsel” or “crumb”), which became the standard term in English and other European languages.
The Israelites’ question has confounded biblical readers since antiquity. The collection of disparate properties ascribed to manna cannot be reconciled perfectly with any known natural substance, a situation that underscores manna’s inherent malleability as a symbol. It is first described as “bread from the heavens,” which appeared daily with the morning dew as something “fine, flaky; as fine as frost on the ground,” and which would melt when the sun grew hot (Exodus 16:4–21). It is said to look “like coriander seed” and its color is either “white” or “like the color of bdellium,” a yellowish gum resin. Its taste was like “wafers in honey” or “the cream of oil” (Exodus 16:33; Numbers 11:7–8).
The Israelites were permitted to gather only enough manna each morning for a single day, since it would spoil rapidly and breed worms, except on the Sabbath, when the double portion collected the day before was miraculously preserved (Exodus 16:19–30). Manna could be boiled or baked, and in one detailed account the Israelites are said to “gather it and grind it between millstones or pound it in a mortar, and boil it in a pot and make it into cakes” (Exodus 16:23; Numbers 11:8). As is often the case with sweets, an all-manna diet eventually sickened the Israelites and drove them to violent complaint against God, who responded by forcing them to eat only quail meat until it came out of their noses (Numbers 11:4–20). Both the crime and the punishment highlight the principle that too much of a good thing can lead to dissatisfaction.
The manna stopped appearing as miraculously as it had begun once the Israelites reached their Promised Land. Its sustaining power was commemorated by the eternal preservation of one portion in a jar placed in front of the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 16:34–35; see Hebrews 9:4), as well as by later references to its demonstration of God’s nourishing spirit (Deuteronomy 8:3; Nehemiah 9:20; see John 6:31). Early postbiblical Jewish texts emphasized this aspect of manna by calling it “food of the angels” and a manifestation of God’s “sweetness toward children” (Wisdom of Solomon 16:20–21), and further claimed that in the messianic kingdom God would feed the righteous with manna (2 Baruch 29:8).
Since antiquity attempts have been made to associate the biblical manna with natural phenomena in the Sinai Desert. Building on a tradition that goes back to the Hellenistic Jewish historian Josephus, many modern scholars have identified manna with a secretion produced by insects on the tamarisk tree (Tamarix mannifera), which shares several properties with honeydew produced by plant lice in the region. See insects. Others have argued for a connection with a species of lichen (Lecanora esculenta) often spread by the wind in large quantities through the Central Asian steppes, although this species is not found in the Sinai region. Nevertheless, the symbolic demands of the biblical narrative prevent any perfect identification.
Ancient rabbinic tradition preferred to emphasize the wondrous nature of manna. It was thought to be one of 10 things produced at twilight on the sixth day of creation for the eventual preservation of humanity, alongside such items as Moses’s rod, the rainbow, and the tablets of the law. It fell from the sky every day together with gemstones and pearls. It was used as perfume and cosmetics by the Israelite women. It was called the “food of the angels” because, like the angels, those who ate it did not have to relieve themselves since the manna was absorbed entirely into their bodies. Some sources claimed that manna could assume the taste of whatever food a person desired. Others argued that its taste differed according to the condition or age of the person eating it: to little children it tasted like milk, to youths like bread, to the elderly like honey, and to the sick like barley soaked in oil and honey.
Whether or not a scientific explanation can be offered, the various descriptions of manna associate it with another important symbolic food for the Israelites: honey. See honey. The country promised throughout their manna-eating journey is called a “land flowing with milk and honey” (e.g., Exodus 3:8), and manna shares both its sweetness and preservative qualities with honey. Likewise, the dual sustenance provided by manna and water in the desert suggests a parallel to the divine food and beverage of the ancient Greeks, ambrosia and nectar, which are also closely connected with honey.
See also christianity; judaism; and symbolic meanings.
maple sugaring is the practice of making maple syrup from the sweet sap that flows from sugar maple trees in late winter–early spring. Owning a sugar bush—a stand of sugar maple trees—and a sugar house, and annually harvesting sap to make maple syrup, persists as a rural family tradition throughout New England, the Upper Midwest, and southeastern Canada. Only in these regions are there forests of trees full of running sweet sap, and this sap runs for only one or two months a year. Each spring, thousands of people go into the woods to tap the maple trees, harvest the sap, and move the sap into the many small sugar houses (or, in Canada, sugar shacks) that dot the region’s heavily wooded landscape. Now a practice known to many, sugaring has long been a visible part of communities and landscapes in the northern forests of North America.
Sugaring is a communal practice. Maple trees grow interspersed with many other tree species (pine, birch, oak) in the forested landscape, and sugaring season draws many people into the woods to help with the harvest. There is only a small window of time when this can happen, which requires warm days and cool nights that permit the tree temperatures to hover between 40 and 45°F (4 to 7°C). People have to collect sap and boil it into syrup nonstop, day and night, an activity that leads to much conviviality: in Vermont, the tradition is boiling hot dogs in the evaporating sap for dinner; in Quebec, eggs are boiled in it for breakfast. In How America Eats (1960) food writer Clementine Paddleford described her foray into sugar making and tasting sap: “We drank sap fresh from the pail, a clear white liquid, like sweetish rainwater. It tasted of sun, of the earth and the weather.” Maple sugaring is a social and sensory experience.
This 1940 photograph shows a young woman, Julia Fletcher, gathering sap from sugar maples on Frank H. Shurtleff’s farm in North Bridgewater, Vermont. Sugaring remains a social event that draws people into the woods to help with the harvest. photograph by marion post wolcott (1910–1990) / library of congress
Sugar Houses or Cabanes à Sucre
Sugar houses are the descendants of earlier open sheds that provided some protection for the large iron kettles used before the nineteenth-century invention of stainless-steel evaporators. Sugar houses vary in size and appearance but generally consist of one main room with a side room or two for wood, propane, and other materials needed to help the sap evaporate into syrup. Almost exclusively made of wood, sugar houses tend to have a steeply pitched roof to prevent pileups of snow, as well as a few windows to help let out the steam generated from the evaporator. Spending time in the sugar house with friends and family is commonplace, a rite of spring.
Unlike other functional buildings populating the region’s still primarily agrarian and wild landscape, sugar houses are seen to be centers of both instrumental and social activity. Many, if not most, sugar makers sell their maple syrup. But when it is time to boil, the sugar house is transformed by the people who have come to talk, share food and drink, and help with the sugaring. The allure of maple sugaring may lie in being able to be with friends and family, warm in the middle of the snowbound landscape of late winter when sap is most often boiled. Sugaring stories often evoke an idealized view. As John Elder writes: “The sugarhouse was a beautiful sight when we arrived in the dusk. Steam was billowing out of the louvers we had so laboriously built, and a golden light from the Coleman lantern within was shining out of the open door … illuminating both the steam and the smoke from our chimney” (2001, p. 92). It is in the sugar house that all the new season’s maple syrup is first tasted and crucial decisions are made: the grade of each run, the possibilities for blending, the markets for selling, and the gifts to give to friends.
As a centuries-old tradition, sugaring involves many rituals. One is the annual sugar-on-snow party. These parties are held in small sugar houses but also at large maple festivals. There are many unconfirmed stories as to the origin of sugar-on-snow events, but what needs to happen is confirmed. Hot, thickened syrup is poured onto snow, creating a lacy pattern. By cooking the syrup to 234°F (112°C), it becomes thicker and develops a caramel flavor. When the syrup is poured onto the snow, the syrup hardens and contracts, creating a maple taffy of sorts. This taffy can either be eaten straight off the snow or twirled around a wooden stick. In some locales, the taffy is named “leather aprons” (in French Canadian, it is called tire d’érable). The resulting confection is served with a pickle and an unsweetened doughnut. See doughnuts and taffy. Sugar-on-snow is simultaneously hot and cold, sweet and sour, and making this dish remains part of the vibrant celebration of the North American sugaring tradition.
See also maple syrup.
maple syrup is a sweetener made from intensive evaporation of the sap of maple trees. Most maple syrup is made by harvesting sap from the species Acer saccharum, the sugar maple. Sap can also be harvested from Acer nigrum (black maple), Acer rubrum (red maple), and Acer saccharinum (silver maple), but none have sap as sweet as the sugar maple. Sugar maple trees grow almost exclusively in the northeast region of Canada and the United States. Some stands may be found as far south as Georgia, but the larger tracts needed for sugaring are found primarily in the northern forest. Most of the commercially produced maple syrup comes from the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec and the American states of Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine.
Sap is the lifeblood of any tree, bringing nourishment (water, sugar, nutrients) from the soil up to the branches, leaves, and fruit. See sap. The uniqueness of the species Acer saccharum lies in its high percentage of sugar. Maple syrup is primarily sucrose, although some syrups, usually the darker ones, can also contain fructose and glucose. See fructose and glucose. There are certain times of year when the sap flows the sweetest, generally as late winter turns to early spring. When the wood of the tree reaches the right temperature, between 40 and 45°F (4 to 7°C), the starches turn to sugars, and sweet sap begins to flow. The sap is harvested by “tapping” the trees. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup because what comes from the trees is primarily water. Making maple syrup is a major exercise in evaporation. See maple sugaring.
Maple sugaring long predates the establishment of strong national borders between the United States and Canada; fur trappers and traders were aware of and possibly trading syrup by the early 1700s. As early as 1672, a French Catholic missionary, during a journey on the northern side of Lake Huron, wrote of a baptism where “maple water” was used. In Vermont evidence exists that the Abenaki people taught the colonists how to gouge the sugar maple tree with an axe and then use bark buckets to collect the sap; settlers called maple syrup “Indian molasses.” See native american. By 1749 other settlers were writing about harvesting sap and boiling it down to maple syrup in large ironware kettles. In northern New England and southeastern Canada, most rural families owned lands with a “sugar bush,” a stand of sugar maple trees. For most early settlers in the region, maple syrup was the only available sweetener, and more often than not the syrup was cooked down until it crystallized into maple sugar because it was easier to store. People would hack pieces from tubs or blocks of sugar to use either whole or heated back into liquid form.
Technologies of Production
The methods of procuring sap and making syrup used by the Native Americans and early settlers relied completely on natural conditions. Reed, bark, or wood spouts were used to draw off the sap into clay or bark vessels. The sap was boiled into syrup in large kettles, usually suspended by a metal rope hanging from a pole, over a constantly stoked wood fire. The pole was held up by two forked stakes. By the mid-1800s much of the process was brought indoors, initially in an open shed where the kettles were placed underneath the roof but still hung over an open fire. Later, enclosed structures and more efficient means of moving the sap from the trees to a holding tank and then to an evaporator were developed. By the late nineteenth century metal evaporators had been introduced. They were invented by David Ingalls in Dunham, Quebec, and soon updated and adopted by New England sugar makers. This technological innovation, along with others, allowed for the development of commercial maple syrup production. By the twentieth century the making of maple syrup had moved beyond the backyard woodlot.
Maple sugaring is an old-fashioned practice open to new technologies. One of the first was the invention of metal taps that could be inserted into trees to direct the flowing sap into metal buckets, which were then transferred into larger containers and transported by horse and wagon to the sugar house. Images of this process are still found on many jugs of maple syrup. Although taps are still central to the process of harvesting sap, today most maple sap is transported from the sugar bush by means of plastic tubing, with gravity or vacuum extractors pushing down the sap directly into the sugar house. There, machines perform reverse osmosis to remove much of the water from the sap. All this occurs before the sap is ever funneled into the flat metal evaporators that a century earlier had transformed the production of maple syrup and created new markets for this wild food.
Maple syrup is now an agricultural commodity, accounted for and supervised by state and provincial agencies and trade associations. Canada and the United States are the only two maple syrup–producing countries in the world. In 2009 worldwide production of maple syrup was estimated at 13,320,000 gallons, with Canada accounting for 82 percent of that production. Quebec is by far the largest maple syrup producer in Canada, and in the world, with 75 percent of all maple syrup worldwide coming from this province. The central and eastern part of the province is responsible for most of this maple syrup. In the United States, Vermont is consistently the leading producer of maple syrup (40 percent of total production in 2013), followed by Maine and New York. Other states making maple syrup include New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In 2013 U.S. domestic production of maple syrup was 3.2 million gallons.
Quebec now sells maple syrup solely under the auspices of the Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers. About 85 percent of production is sold to packers or bulk buyers and exporters who redistribute bulk or prepackaged maple products. These products can be sold to food stores, supermarkets, and gift shops in both domestic and international markets. Producers can sell maple products of only 5 liters or less directly to the consumer. In the United States, by contrast, maple syrup remains primarily a small-scale enterprise for individual sugar makers. In Vermont, it is estimated that over 3,000 people actively tap trees to make and sell maple syrup, with some tapping 100 trees and others tapping thousands. Making maple syrup has become a new growth area in Vermont agriculture. In 2000, 1 million taps were installed; by 2012 there were over 3 million.
Grading and Tasting Syrup
Anyone who wants to sell syrup, whether from the farmstead, to the general store or to major blender/packers, must adhere to state or provincial regulations. The primary regulations seek to ensure that all maple syrup sold is pure (not adulterated) and consistent according to grade. See adulteration. In the United States, grade was usually defined as a combination of appearance by color and density. There have been different names for these grades, but until recently the four grades were Fancy, Medium Amber, Dark Amber, and Grade B. Sitting in a sugar shack, watching the sap evaporate into syrup in the large stainless-steel evaporator, the sugar maker looks for the moment when the density and color are uniform. Density is determined when a small bit of syrup is poured into a hydrometer and measured; the goal is 66 percent or 67 percent Brix (a scale indicating sugar content). See brix. All grades of maple syrup have the same density. As of 2014, all maple syrup produced in the United States and Canada began to use a unified grading system that relies on taste as well as appearance. All maple syrups for consumption are now called Grade A. The four different categories are Golden, Delicate Taste; Amber, Rich Taste; Dark, Robust Taste; and Very Dark, Strong Taste.
The sweet yet earthy complexity of maple syrup means that this wild food is still in demand even though new technologies have created simple and inexpensive sweeteners. In the United States, maple sugar candy remains a popular treat found in shops all over New England. The syrup is cooked at high heat long enough to reach a crystalline stage; it is then poured into molds, often in the shape of a sugar maple leaf, where it cools into a fudge-like candy. Maple butter is made by heating the syrup to the soft-ball stage at 235°F (113°C) and then chilling it quickly and stirring until it reaches a creamy consistency. See stages of sugar syrup. “Sugar-on-snow” is an old-fashioned treat for the sugaring season. Thickly boiled sap is poured in lacy patterns onto snow, where it immediately hardens into a taffy-like confection. Pouring maple syrup over pancakes and waffles for breakfast is a national American tradition, even if many Americans use Aunt Jemima or other “faux” syrups instead of the real thing. See aunt jemima. In Quebec, several desserts made with maple syrup are central to the region’s culinary repertoire, especially pouding de chomeur (poor man’s pudding). This simple dish involves pressing biscuit dough into individual cups or a baking dish, pouring a mixture of maple syrup and cream over the dough, and then baking it in the oven. Tarte au sirop d’érable (maple syrup pie) is like a sugary pecan pie without the nuts.
Maple syrup is a long-lived sweetener with a bright future. Consumers of all types increasingly desire maple syrup, as other sweeteners, such as high-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar seem fraught with problems. See corn syrup. Maple syrup is a flavorful natural product. More demand exists for maple syrup in the United States now than since before World War II, and sugar makers cannot keep up with it. In addition, the syrup is regularly shipped to countries around the globe, including Japan, Thailand, and Australia. Maple syrup is thus not an artifact of a rural agrarian past, but a vital part of everyday life.
marmalade generally refers to a chunky, sweet-sharp, semi-liquid jelly laced with chopped Seville (bitter) orange peels. Although the word “marmalade” may be applied to other fruits or vegetables suspended in jelly, according to a 2001 law, products labeled as marmalade in the European Union must be made with citrus fruit only. A mainstay of British breakfasts, marmalade is typically eaten on buttered toast. It has been extolled by writers and poets from T. S. Eliot to Ian Fleming (James Bond enjoyed Frank Cooper’s marmalade at breakfast every day).
The Portuguese marmelada, from which the English “marmalade” derives, comes from marmelo, or quince. The origins of today’s preserve date back over 2,000 years to a solid cooked quince and honey paste similar to contemporary membrillo, the Spanish quince paste. See fruit pastes. Used as a preserve and reputed remedy for stomach disorders in ancient Greece and Rome, quince marmalade was eagerly taken up by the Spanish and Portuguese during medieval times after they learned about it from the Moors, who had settled the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. In the late Middle Ages, marmalades began to be sweetened by sugar rather than honey, a transition that continued into the sixteenth century.
The first shipments of marmelada, packed in wooden boxes, arrived in London in 1495. Expensive and imbued with purported medical and aphrodisiac powers, it was a popular food among noble families, who served it after feasts as a digestive sweetmeat. Around this time, northern Europeans also prepared cooked quince and sugar preserves called alternately chardequince, condoignac, cotignac, or quiddony.
The Scots pioneered marmalade’s switchover from quince to bitter orange in the eighteenth century. The preserve’s texture was now thinner, and it was served as a breakfast and teatime spread rather than as an after-dinner digestive. By the late nineteenth century, orange marmalade was being mass-produced by venerable British firms, including Frank Cooper and Keiller’s.
As the British Empire expanded, orange marmalade traveled to British colonies around the globe. It was never embraced as a spread as enthusiastically in the United States as in Britain but was used more often as a flavoring for baked goods. Because Seville oranges are available for only a few weeks in January and February, contemporary home cooks view marmalade making as a seasonal ritual.
See also fruit and fruit preserves.
Mars, Inc. is the largest candy company in the United States, boasting such venerable brands as M&M’s, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, Snickers, Skittles, Starburst Fruit Chews, and Twix. With its purchase in 2008 of the chewing gum giant Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., it added brands like Life Savers, Altoids, Doublemint, and Orbit to this iconic lineup, becoming a confectionery behemoth with global sales estimated at more than $30 billion. It is one of the largest privately held firms in the United States, being wholly owned by the Mars family of northern Virginia. The company operates a pet food division and owns Uncle Ben’s Rice and other food brands, but the majority of its sales derives from candy brands that are household names worldwide.
Mars’s beginnings are twofold, stretching back to the turn of the twentieth century when Frank C. Mars watched his mother cooking. Frank was a sickly child, struck by polio, and spent practically all of his youth indoors. He soon found he had a knack for making confections. At age nineteen, he struck out on his own, selling his candies door-to-door to small shopkeepers in and around Minneapolis-St. Paul. In 1902, the same year he opened his firm, he married Ethel G. Kissack; their only son Forrest was born two years later. But the business was not successful, and in 1910 Ethel filed for divorce, sending Forrest to live with her parents in Canada. Soon afterward, Frank remarried (another Ethel, coincidentally) and moved west to Seattle, where he tried his hand at a new business, but it, too, failed. Returning to Minneapolis-St. Paul, with no available credit, he and Ethel set up shop in a modest room above a kitchen, and Frank began making small batches of candy that Ethel took to sell on the trolley cars each morning. The biggest seller was a butter-cream concoction that eventually made its way into Woolworth and a dozen or so smaller retailers. By 1923 Frank Mars had finally found success. But what happened next is where the story gets sticky. To hear Frank Mars’s son Forrest tell it, Forrest is the one who gave Frank the idea that turned the business into a million-dollar enterprise.
Father and son had not seen each other since the divorce, but they happened to meet when Forrest was working one summer as a traveling salesman while attending college at Yale. During lunch at a five-and-dime, while they were drinking malteds, Forrest claims he came up with the idea to put the flavor of a malted milk shake in a candy that could be sold nationwide, not just locally. Based on that advice, Frank Mars invented the Milky Way in 1924, a combination of caramel and fluffy nougat surrounded by a solid coating of chocolate. The Milky Way was strikingly different from competing bars. First, the chocolate covering kept it fresh, so it could be sold coast to coast. Second, because malt-flavored nougat—made of egg whites and corn syrup—was the bar’s main ingredient, the Milky Way appeared larger but tasted just as chocolaty and cost less to produce. The Milky Way brought in sales of nearly $800,000 its first year on the market.
Seeing Eye to Eye
When Forrest Mars graduated from college and joined his father’s business, he expected to be rewarded handsomely for his contribution. But the two men did not see eye to eye. Forrest wanted to expand the business rapidly, into Canada and beyond. However, Frank Mars had failed many times before striking it rich with the Milky Way, and he did not share his son’s enthusiasm. After Forrest threatened and insulted him, Frank decided he had no choice but to buy his son out of the business, giving him $50,000 if he would disappear and never contact his father again.
Undaunted, Forrest Mars set out for Europe to seek his fortune. He traveled to Switzerland first to learn the fine art of making chocolate and then settled in England. In the small industrial town of Slough outside London, he set up shop in a tiny factory with some second-hand equipment and began making a version of his father’s Milky Way bars, which he egotistically dubbed the Mars bar. Unable to afford to manufacture his own chocolate, he purchased his chocolate covering from Cadbury and sweetened the bar slightly to appeal to British taste. See cadbury. He traveled to London to sell the bars to shopkeepers himself and soon acquired a loyal following. By the end of 1933, the Mars bar’s popularity had grown to the point where Forrest could enlarge the factory and automate it, and soon sales expanded into other European countries. The success of the Mars bar abroad soon rivaled the success of its American cousin and became the foundation for an empire that quickly eclipsed Frank Mars’s U.S. firm.
Brand Confusion
Forrest nevertheless was not satisfied until he regained control of his father’s Chicago-based business in 1960, finally reuniting his firm with its American counterpart. In the meantime, Forrest had founded M&M’s in the United States, which went on to lead the American candy conglomerate, now renamed Mars, Inc., with headquarters just outside of Washington, D.C.—a fact that surprises many Europeans who have always considered Mars a British-based company. Mars, Inc.’s two-pronged beginning has also resulted in continued confusion over the Mars and Milky Way brands. In the United States the company sells a Mars bar, but it is not the same as the British Mars bar, which is really an anglicized version of the Milky Way. Instead, the American Mars bar has caramel, nougat, and whole almonds buried inside, and it is covered in a thick milk chocolate coating.
The firm’s global beginnings have given it an unprecedented advantage in the modern age, for Mars, Inc. was a global powerhouse long before the idea of global brands became necessary in the age of the internet. The firm operates on six continents and in more than 180 countries. The Mars family has always understood that the world is, in fact, a very interconnected place, and their business reflects that global pursuit. From the beginning, Forrest Mars said he wanted to build a global empire, and that is exactly what he did. He died in 1999 at the age of 95.
See also candy bar; chewing gum; life savers; and m&m’s.
Marshall, Agnes Bertha (1855–1905), was among the foremost Victorian cookbook writers. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, she was one of the daughters of John Smith, a clerk, and his wife Susan. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. Sadly, little is currently known of her education or where she learned to cook. The only clue to where she trained may be found in an 1886 interview of her husband in the Pall Mall Gazette: “I should tell you that Mrs. Marshall has made a thorough study of cookery since she was a child, and has practiced in Paris and Vienna with celebrated chefs.”
Agnes Marshall (1855–1905) was one of the foremost Victorian cooks and an extraordinary businesswoman who founded a cookery school, wrote cookbooks, sold hand-cranked ice cream machines and ice cream molds, and started a weekly magazine called The Table. This print is of unknown origin.
Following her marriage to Alfred William Marshall at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square, in 1878, the path of Agnes Marshall’s career becomes clearer. If she were alive today, Mrs. Marshall would be judged a formidable force in business; for a Victorian woman, she was truly extraordinary. In 1883, following her purchase of property on Mortimer Street in London (a very unusual transaction, since women had earned the legal right to purchase property, particularly with their own money, only in 1870), Mrs. Marshall opened a cookery school. She started with no pupils on the first day, but a year later she was demonstrating to classes of up to 40 people, five or six days a week.
In 1885 The Book of Ices was published, followed by Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Book of Cookery in 1888, Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Larger Cookery Book of Extra Recipes in 1890, and, finally, Fancy Ices in 1894. See ice cream.
Prompt to respond to commercial opportunities, Mrs. Marshall offered a range of hand-cranked ice cream machines, which even today prove to be faster and more reliable when pitted against modern electric machines. See ice cream makers. Once the ice cream was made, Mrs. Marshall was there to offer a huge range of splendid molds in which to form the ice cream, and ice caves to freeze it solid. See molds, jelly and ice cream. Fancy Ices took her ices to a more elaborate and embellished level, and this book includes the earliest reference in English to putting ice cream in a cone. See ice cream cones.
In 1886, no doubt using the facilities of the cookery school, Mrs. Marshall launched a weekly magazine called The Table, and in 1888 she was the first person to suggest, in the magazine, using liquefied gas for ice cream making at the table. In 1892 she undertook an extensive lecturing tour of major cities in England, taking the stage with a team of helpers to cook an entire meal in front of audiences of up to 600 people.
The staggering scale of Mrs. Marshall’s achievements is arguably unequalled. She was a unique one-woman industry, and her recipes were always concise, accurate, detailed, and successful. She deserves much more credit than she has been given by history.
Marshmallow Fluff is an iconic brand of marshmallow cream manufactured by the Durkee-Mower company of Lynn, Massachusetts, since 1920. See marshmallows. The sticky sweet spread is a staple comfort food in New England, where it is best known as an essential layer of the fluffernutter—a Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter sandwich.
The sugary spread known as Marshmallow Fluff is so beloved in its home state that legislation is pending to make the fluffernutter—a combination of Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter—the official state sandwich of Massachusetts. © durkee mower inc.
Fluff is also a versatile baking ingredient. It can substitute for marshmallows as a topping on hot cocoa or sweet potatoes, or serve as a sweet adhesive in whoopee pies, frostings, fudge, Rice Krispies treats, meringues, salads, candies, fillings, chiffon pies, sorbets, shakes, and cheesecakes. Diluted, it becomes a dessert sauce.
Durkee-Mower whips Fluff’s four ingredients—dried egg whites, corn syrup, sugar syrup, and vanillin—batch by batch to ensure consistency. The surface of Fluff is smooth like a melted marshmallow, but once breached, reveals a light, stiff porous interior that turns glassy smooth again upon standing. The confection spreads and sticks, but does not drip. It expands and contracts with temperature, requires no refrigeration, and apparently holds up in zero gravity. Sunita Williams, an astronaut and Massachusetts native, squirreled away her own jar of Fluff onboard the International Space Station. For New Englanders like Williams, Marshmallow Fluff is the stuff of home. Generations of northeasterners will argue that Fluff is quintessential to their childhood, be it the wholesome 1950s or the far-out 1970s.
Marshmallow Fluff was invented in 1917 by Archibald Query, a French-Canadian immigrant and candy maker living in Somerville. Query sold the recipe to returning World War I veterans H. Allen Durkee and Fred L. Mower, who founded Durkee-Mower and began selling the concoction door to door. By the 1920s Fluff was being advertised in Boston newspapers. In 1930 the company debuted the “Flufferettes,” a female vocal trio who sang dreamy odes to Fluff on the Yankee Radio Network. In 1961 Durkee-Mower developed the “Fluffernutter” trademark. Around this time, Fluff packaging adopted its signature look—a blue-and-white label sketched in classic “Dick, Jane, and Spot” style and a ruby-red lid. The iconic jar has remained unchanged since, inspiring powerful Pavlovian responses among the long-initiated.
Apart from strawberry and raspberry varieties, released in 1953 and 1994, respectively, Marshmallow Fluff has remained its simple self. The Lynn factory, built in 1950, remains Fluff’s sole locus of production and uses the same basic methods and machinery from that era. The company has not changed its jar design since 1947 and rarely advertises. Although Fluff can be found in 28 states and 10 countries, the vast majority is sold in upstate New York and New England. In these regions’ grocery stores, Fluff can be found in its familiar place alongside the peanut butter, no mere third wheel to jelly.
Marshmallow Fluff is not the only commercially available brand of marshmallow cream. Kraft has marketed Jet-Puffed Marshmallow Crème since 1961, and Limpert Brothers, Inc., of Vineland, New Jersey, has sold a more syrupy marshmallow cream as an ice cream topping since 1913. Paradoxically, Limpert Brothers also markets its product under the name Marshmallow Fluff. In one of the stranger deals in American business, Limpert Brothers and Durkee-Mower agreed to share trademark rights in 1939, provided that Limpert Brothers sold wholesale and Durkee-Mower sold for individual use only, except in New England. The two Fluffs are, in a sense, nonoverlapping magisteria.
In 2006 Marshmallow Fluff’s retro reputation found itself in the crosshairs of the twenty-first-century fight against childhood obesity. Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett Barrios proposed limiting servings of Marshmallow Fluff in public school lunches to one per week. Indignant, Massachusetts State Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein counterclaimed that the fluffernutter ought to be crowned as the state sandwich.
Barrios, who was not raised in Massachusetts, did not anticipate the public outcry he encountered. He quickly rescinded his proposal and promised to support Reinstein’s instead. His spokesman assured the Associated Press that Barrios loved Fluff as much as the next legislator.
That same year, the annual “What the Fluff” festival debuted in Archibald Query’s hometown of Somerville. Billed as an “ironic tribute,” the recurring festival has featured Fluff cook-offs, Fluff-inspired games, Fluff-sculpted hair-dos, Fluff science experiments, and impersonations of Query and the Flufferettes. The outpouring of love has proven anything but ironic—the festival draws several thousand people every year.
marshmallows are light, spongy confections made of sugar or corn syrup, water, and a gelling agent that have been whipped and set to capture an airy density. The modern marshmallow is also typically coated in cornstarch, sugar, or chocolate, as naked marshmallow is pertinaciously sticky to the touch.
The marshmallow takes its name from the marsh mallow (Althaea officinalis), a wetland weed native to Europe. A spitting image of its cousin the hollyhock, the marsh mallow sports a tall, sturdy stalk and pale pink flowers. Mucilage (similar to sap) is found throughout the plant’s body but especially in its thick, fibrous root. Physicians of the ancient world recommended extracting the mucilage by boiling the root and consuming it with milk, honey, or wine to cure a variety of ailments. The Greek naturalist Theophrastus noted that meats cooked with marsh mallow cleaved together—a dramatic exhibition of the plant’s supposed flesh-healing powers! In fact, he was witnessing the stickiness that would make the mucilage the first gelling agent of the marshmallow.
Over the centuries, marshmallow mucilage proved most effective as an antidote to cough and sore throat. (Modern medical studies have verified that marshmallow root does indeed soothe inflammation in mucous membranes.) In the nineteenth century European physicians prescribed boiling down the mucilage with sugar to create a palatable cough syrup. In France, the mucilage was whipped with sugar and egg whites to create lozenges. See lozenge and medicinal uses of sugar. By century’s end, French confectioners had dropped the medicinal mucilage for more readily available gelatin. The French also traditionally used rosewater to flavor their marshmallows, which emerged a delicate pink. Although marshmallows may have lost their eponymous ingredient, in France today they can still be found blushing a similar hue as the mallow’s blossoms.
This advertising card, produced by The Campfire Co. sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, encouraged consumers to use marshmallows in their dessert recipes. For centuries confectioners had made marshmallows in individual batches, but by the early twentieth century, automation meant that these treats could be mass produced. boston public library
In the nineteenth century marshmallows immigrated to the United States, where their next major innovation awaited. At the time, confectioners made marshmallows by whipping the necessary ingredients and letting the foam set in individual cornstarch molds. By the early twentieth century, however, marshmallows could be produced in large batches. In 1954 Alex Doumakes, of the American marshmallow company Doumak, invented an extrusion process by which marshmallows were forced through a chute and cut to their desired size. The innovation reduced the time required to make a marshmallow from 24 hours to 1 hour.
Today, marshmallows are mass-produced and sold throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Although they can be eaten plain, they are often gussied up in various candy iterations. Peeps and Circus Peanuts, for example, cast marshmallows into whimsical shapes. See peeps. In Japanese Tenkei candies, marshmallows are filled with jam or cream. Mallomars and MoonPies pair chocolate-coated marshmallows with graham cracker. See moonpies. Chocolate-covered marshmallows are popular the world over, but the French are especially attached to their chocolate-coated marshmallow bears, an iconic childhood treat.
Marshmallows are also a versatile ingredient, lending their fluffy sweetness to fruit salads, cookies, Rice Krispie treats, and rocky road ice cream. In 1917 Angelus Marshmallows (once made by Cracker Jack) commissioned a recipe booklet to popularize novel uses of marshmallows. Thanks to the booklet, they became a favorite topping for hot cocoa and for sweet potatoes, especially at Thanksgiving.
These seasonal uses hint at another fateful property of the marshmallow: thermoreversibility. That is to say, marshmallows can revert to their original viscous state when heated. Quick to note the gooey lusciousness of a toasted marshmallow, the Imperial Candy Company launched the Campfire Marshmallows brand in 1917, explicitly promoting the candy as a camping staple. Before long, campers were sandwiching toasted marshmallows between graham cracker and chocolate, and the s’more was born. See s’mores.
The most recent development in marshmallows has been toward batch-made boutique brands. Countering the homogeneity of mass-produced marshmallows, independent confectioners experiment with different densities, flavors (by adding fruit syrups, herbs, or spices), and textures (by coating with cookie crumbs, bacon bits, or the like). A British company has fully realized the marshmallow as a blank canvas by custom-printing marshmallows with clients’ personal photographs. Marshmallows can also be modified by replacing the usual gelatin with fish gelatin (for kosher marshmallows) or agar (for vegan ones).
Culinary developments may aim to sophisticate the humble marshmallow, but the confection’s lasting cultural impact seems tied to childhood. Some American cities celebrate Easter with “marshmallow drops,” events in which helicopters rain marshmallows on earthbound children. Popular toy blow-guns made of PVC pipe shoot miniature marshmallows as ammunition. In the movie Ghostbusters (1984), marshmallows are forever personified by the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a cartoonish villain of bloated, springy step. In the world of psychology, Stanford researcher Walter Mischel’s famed “marshmallow test” of 1970 presented children with a feat of forbearance—eat one marshmallow now or wait 15 minutes to be rewarded with two—and immortalized the marshmallow as the supreme symbol of temptation.
See also ancient world; children’s candy; gelatin; japan; and marshmallow fluff.
marzipan is a firm paste of finely ground nuts, almost always almonds, and sugar, sometimes bound with either whole eggs or egg whites. It may be scented with rosewater or orange flower water, but the main flavor and aroma come from the nuts. As a result of its fine flavor and versatile texture, marzipan has many uses in confectionery, baking, and dessert making, working equally well in baked and unbaked goods. It can be modeled or molded into shapes, used as a covering for celebratory cakes, rolled thinly as a layer in pastries, or baked into biscuits and petits fours. It has been a prime component in fancy baking and decorative sugar craft over many centuries, and remains an important celebratory confection, particularly for a wide range of festival and holiday sweetmeats. See holiday sweets.
Mixtures of honey and nuts, which have been known for thousands of years, are the precursors of many sweet nut confections, marzipan among them. However, it is the cultivation and refinement of sugar in sixth-century c.e. Persia that we have to thank for the development of the fine, long-keeping sugar–nut paste we know as marzipan today. See sugar and sugar refining. In English, we use the German name marzipan, and that nation is still renowned for its very fine product. Debate persists over the origin of the word, but it seems to have come initially to southern France and Italy from the Persian and Armenian marzuban, applied to jewel boxes and both the wooden box and marzipan it contained, only later evolving to focus on the contents. The French (massepain), Spanish (mazapán), and Italian (marzapane) words may also refer to either the month of March or to pastries and bread, hinting at a connection with a time of year or simply to confectionery in general. In England, the earliest marzipan cakes were similarly called “marchpane,” and these flamboyantly iced, gilded, and decorated sweetmeats certainly sound like festive jewels for the dessert table.
How to Make Marzipan
There are several techniques for making marzipan, depending on the desired consistency. Whereas homemade marzipan is generally raw, confectioner’s marzipan is gently cooked to 356–392°F (180–200°C) to both sterilize and manage the moisture content, which according to European Union rules should be no higher than 8.5 percent. Great care must be taken to ensure that the nuts are not overworked to the extent that they become oily. Bitter almonds may be added in small proportions to enhance the almond flavor, which may be more or less desirable depending on the intended use of the marzipan.
Homemade Marzipan
Most domestic recipes call for 2 parts ground blanched almonds and 1 or 1 ½ parts fine confectioner’s sugar. These ingredients are kneaded together with either egg white or egg yolk, the latter often specified in recipes for celebratory cakes, where the whites are used for the icing.
Raw Marzipan
This is the basic professional-grade marzipan, consisting of 2 parts almonds to 1 part sugar. The almonds are blanched and skinned, and left to soak in cold water until use. The nuts are ground with the sugar in fine granite rollers, using water to reduce oiling. The mass is then gently cooked in a double-walled pan, to sterilize it and reduce the water content, until almost dry to the touch.
French Marzipan
To make a whiter French marzipan, the almonds are ground before sugar syrup or glucose is added. See glucose. The mixture is cooked to a smooth paste, which is then turned out onto a slab and spread thinly to cool quickly.
Macaron Paste
For this version, blanched almonds and sugar are milled along with egg white. More egg white is added depending on the final desired consistency, in a proportion of up to one-tenth of the weight of the nuts. See macaron.
Variations
Although true marzipan is made with almonds in a 2 to 1 proportion of nuts to sugar, a number of variations exist:
Uses of Marzipan
Marzipan is a crucial ingredient in numerous cakes and breads, from German stollen to Danish Kransekage, as well as being a filling for pastries. See stollen. It is also formed into quite specific sweets and cakes, many of which are traditional for special occasions or festive times of year.
Modeling and Molding
Marzipan’s firm yet pliable texture allows it to be formed into intricate models of every imaginable shape and size. Colorful marzipan fruits and animals for Christmas and for Easter eggs and lambs are produced all over Europe. Many of the forms are traditional, such as German breads (Marzipanbrot) and potatoes (Marzipankartoffeln) for Christmas, or Martorana fruits, also known as pasta or frutta reale, made for All Saint’s Day in Sicily. Forms may be modeled by hand, and either painted, sprayed, or rolled in edible dyes or powders to enhance a realistic finish. Others are shaped in metal or plastic molds. Wooden molding boards are used for making evenly sized and shaped pieces—round, oval, or pear-shaped—for enrobing in chocolate. All kinds of marzipan sweets may be finished using special tools such as cutters, nippers for edge crimping, and decorative rollers for making uniform patterns on marzipan sheets. See confectionery equipment.
Cakes
A thick layer of marzipan between the fruitcake and icing is a critical element in many large celebratory cakes, such as British Christmas or wedding cakes. See fruitcake and wedding cake. Simnel cake, for Easter, includes a layer of marzipan in its center, and a baked and glazed top layer of marzipan decorated with 11 marzipan balls to represent the 12 disciples minus Judas.
Confections
There are numerous special small marzipan cakes or sweets made in Germany that come from two distinctive schools, those of Lübeck and Königsberg (today’s Russian Kaliningrad). See niederegger. The latter traditionally tastes a little less sweet and comes in the form of petits fours cut with special crimped cutters. The result can resemble a vol-au-vent and be partially filled with boiled apricot jam or liqueur fondant, topped with a firmer fondant and decorated. See fondant. The overall characteristic, though, is to let the pieces set for 24 hours before browning them in a hot oven.
See also cake decorating; flower waters; germany; and nuts.
mastic is the crystallized sap of the mastic tree (Pistachia lentiscus var. Chia), a kind of wild pistachio shrub or small tree. Lentiscus (or Schinus) shrubs grow wild all over the eastern Mediterranean shores, but only on the southern part of the island of Chios do the plants produce mastic. Pink peppercorns (Schinus molle) and sumac (Rhus coriaria) are two other flavorings from plants of the same family that grow in different parts of the world. The word “mastic” derives from the ancient Greek verb mastichao (to gnash the teeth); “masticate” has the same origin.
Mastic crystals were the most glamorous of the various ancient resins, certainly more so than gum arabic or tragacanth. See tragacanth. Chios mastic (masticha) has a subtle, fruity flavor and a distinct sweet aroma that other natural gums lack. These characteristics made it a precious commodity beginning in Roman times. Its crystals were used as chewing gum and breath freshener, as well as medicine. See chewing gum. Recent studies have proven that mastic oil, extracted from the crystals, does indeed possess antibacterial properties that may be beneficial against stomach ulcers.
Since early Byzantine times, mastic crystals have been used as flavoring for mastichato, a most sought-after aperitif mentioned by Alexander Trallianus (ca. 525–ca. 605 c.e.). This drink, along with mastic crystals, used to be Chios’s main export. A similar smooth, mastic-flavored drink is still produced on Chios and is frequently referred to as the “ladies’ ouzo.”
Today, ground mastic is used to flavor breads and cookies in Greece and throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It should be added sparingly, as large quantities yield a bitter and turpentine-like taste. Lokum (Turkish Delight) is flavored with mastic, as is dondurma—the famous Turkish eggless ice cream. See lokum. The enviable, strand-like texture of dondurma is sometimes mistakenly attributed to mastic; however, it is salep, the powerful ancient thickener extracted from the starchy bulb of the orchid Orchis mascula, that gives the frozen dessert its texture. A similar mastic-scented ice cream is called kaimaki in Greece. Ypovrichio (submarine) refers to a spoonful of sugar paste scented with mastic, served submerged in a glass of cold water—hence the name. The anointing oil used by the Greek Orthodox Church includes mastic along with other aromatics.
Mastic production has remained unchanged for centuries. The whole family tends and carefully prunes the trees in winter. In summer, skilled workers make slits on the trunk and lower branches to collect the mastic “tears” throughout the fall. Picking over and sorting the crystals is a long and tedious process. The medieval mastichochoria, the mastic-producing villages of southern Chios, were built by Genoese rulers between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Unlike other villages of the island, they are constructed around central towers, with tall external walls that offered protection from pirates and thieves who coveted the valuable produce. During the more than four centuries of Ottoman rule that followed, mastic production was directly overseen by the sultan.
In recent years, after a period of steady decline, mastic sales have surged worldwide, thanks to research and promotion. In 1997 Chios mastic was named a European Union Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) product. It is now sold as not only a flavoring but also the key ingredient in various health products and cosmetics.
See also greece and cyprus; ice cream; middle east; and north africa.
mead, made from honey, water, and yeast, may be mankind’s earliest crafted alcoholic drink. Honey mixed with water ferments by means of yeasts, both in the air and within the honey itself, which feed on its sugars. See honey. This process would occur naturally if rain chanced to fall into a bowl of honeycomb. Early observers likely took note of the resulting drink’s intoxicating powers and were spurred on to make more.
Many different styles of mead evolved and are still made today. The drink can be dry or sweet, with an alcohol content generally ranging from around 8 to more than 16 percent. Mead can be sparkling, distilled, or spiced. When flavored with herbs and spices, mead is called metheglin, a drink considered to have healthful properties. Cornwall and Wales were known for their mead, and the Celtic words meddyg (healing) and llyn (liquor) provide the etymological root for this drink. Fruit meads, made with honey and fruit juice, are called melomel and have many variations. Pyment is made with grape juice, cyser from apples, black mead from black currants, red mead from red currants, morat from mulberries, and myritis from bilberries.
The ancient Greeks and Romans made many kinds of honeyed drinks. Pliny’s recipe for mead in the first century c.e. was to mix honey and rainwater in a proportion of 1 to 3 and to keep it in the sun for 40 days. A spiced combination of mead and wine called mulsum cheered the chilly Roman troops occupying northern Europe and is thought to be the origin of mulled wine. See mulled wine.
While wine took over in southern countries, honey drinks remained prominent in the north, both as mead and as honey beers. In 300 b.c.e. Pytheas, a Greek mariner, sailed north of Britain for six days and reached a land of barbarians who “from grain and honey made a fermented drink.” Pliny commented on how the people of the British Isles consumed great quantities of the honey brew. In Wales, freemen could pay dues to the king in the form of mead, and a free township had to supply “the worth of a vat of mead to the King, which ought to be capacious enough for the King and his adult companion to bathe in it.”
Like honey, mead is much linked to love and virility. The term “honeymoon” is thought to come from the month-long celebrations of nuptials when mead was drunk. See honeymoon. In the Indian Rigveda, Vishnu created a mead-spring from one of his footprints, and all who drank from it became highly fertile. Chaucer writes in “The Miller’s Tale” of the carpenter’s beautiful wife having breath honeyed by meeth (mead) and braggot, a honeyed ale: “Her mouth was swete as braggot or the meeth.”
The drink is also associated with both fighting and the camaraderie among fighters. A Scottish saying claims that mead drinkers have the strength of meat eaters. The epic poem Beowulf, set in Denmark around 700 c.e., includes warriors taking “joy in their mead,” and Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes, is described as a “wrecker of mead-benches.” In Teutonic mythology, warriors getting to Valhalla quaffed sparkling mead offered by divine maidens. Wooden bowls called mazers, some elaborately ornamented with silver, were used for the communal drinking of mead.
Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) collected recipes, including 108 for mead and other honey drinks, which were published posthumously in The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened. The book reveals the wide culture of this tradition and includes a recipe for Elizabeth I’s metheglin, flavored with thyme, rosemary, and bay leaves.
By this stage, however, mead was on the wane in Europe. Imported drinks such as wine were growing in popularity, and the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry Vlll in the mid-sixteenth century had eliminated an important source of honey, since monks kept bees to produce wax for pure and sweet altar candles.
Mead remained the preferred drink in Russia until the early eighteenth century. It is still popular in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where it is called tej. Elsewhere, honey drinks continue to be made as a country craft. Brother Adam (1898–1996), the Devon-based beekeeping monk who traveled the world in an effort to breed the best bees, would offer guests his famous heather-honey mead, sometimes cooled first in a stream near his apiary on Dartmoor. He recommended that mead be kept in oak casks for at least seven years to mature. Contemporary mead makers agree that the drink improves with age.
Some mead is made commercially, although too often the drink’s name has been tarnished by the mixing of poor-quality wine with poor-quality honey. But good mead is undergoing a revival. Its sweet form goes well with desserts, cheese, nuts, and pâtés, as a bottle of Sauternes would. Connoisseurs praise distilled mead for its floral, honeyed bouquet and rounded finish. Mead is still part of country fairs and honey shows, and meads of many styles from all over the world compete in the Mazer Cup International, held annually in Boulder, Colorado.
See also hippocras and sweet wine.
measurement is essential to cooking. We measure time and temperature, amounts and ingredients, with greater or lesser precision, according to need and the tools (personal experience, measuring cups and spoons, scales, thermometers) available to us. Baking especially demands measurements that are close and standardized, in part because certain chemical reactions require precision, and in part to ensure replicability. Nevertheless, what, why, and how we measure are determined more by culture, history, economics, philosophy, and law (France established the metric system by law in 1790, Britain in 1824, and the United States settled on the uniform standards in 1836) than by science. This is particularly true of the late nineteenth century in North American culinary history, a period characterized by far-reaching changes in dietary practice and culinary science precipitated by industrialization, urbanization, gender, class, and social stratification, as well as by equally significant improvements in the technologies of measurement.
The manufacture and sale of standardized tools, advocated in the United States by Fannie Farmer, occurred in fits and starts. This 1943 photograph promotes a new type of glass measuring cup with easy-to-read markings, useful for preparing infant formula or for following recipes precisely. library of congress
The move to standardization, especially in the United States, is often attributed to the Boston Cooking School, and two of its directors, Mary J. Lincoln and Fannie Farmer. See farmer, fannie. Farmer’s canonical Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was among the first to insist on accurate measurements, and it is widely said to be the first to utilize level measurements as standard practice. Farmer’s insistence on level measurements was important for another reason. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book assisted the move away from scale (weight) measurements, which persisted in the United States well into the nineteenth century, to volume (cups and spoons).
Before Farmer and the rise of home economics and scientific cookery, recipes utilized a variety of methods of measurements. Common units of measurement included “alum the size of a cherry,” “knobs” of butter, or “butter the size of a walnut.” Historians have demonstrated that widespread disagreement existed about how to measure butter, sugar, flour, and other kitchen staples. Even references to seemingly standard measures, such as a “cup” of flour or a “teaspoon” of sugar, could mask substantial variations, since terms like cup and spoon did not reference a uniform amount or standardized implement or tool. The manufacturing and retail of standardized tools occurred over several years, and in fits and starts—first to appear in the 1880s were measuring cups, followed by measuring spoons.
The move to standardization occurred in an era in American culinary history preoccupied with the development of a progressive and scientific approach to domestic work in general, and to cooking in particular. Farmer referenced this change, writing that she hoped The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book “may awaken an interest through its condensed scientific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.” These changes in domestic life mirrored changing understandings about the role of women in the household and in society. Standardization was also facilitated by urbanization and an increasing degree of culinary cosmopolitism in urban social life.
Efforts to standardize culinary measurements continue to influence kitchen work. Recipe developers and cooks must choose between the U.S. Customary System (the inch-pound system) and the International System of Units (the metric system). Perhaps more significantly, there are differences in how we measure liquids and dry ingredients, and especially between measurements based on weight and volume. Most home cooks use uniform measuring cups and spoons, but even these standardized tools allow for significant variation—a cup of any ingredient (flour is especially troublesome) may vary in amount depending on several factors, including how densely the food is packed. See flour. Culinary professionals, and especially pastry chefs, rely extensively on weight measurements and scales when the need for precision is critical to taste, presentation, and replicability. Other metrics include “ratio cooking,” which uses weight rather than volume measurements and “parts,” or ratios of critical ingredients to one another. Bread bakers, in particular, base successful formulas on such ratios.
Oven temperatures are notoriously inexact. Before the advent of calibrated thermometers, cooks might gauge an oven as slow, moderate, or fast by one of several mechanisms, including the “hand test,” or by sprinkling flour on the oven floor and timing how long it took to turn golden or dark brown. (A similar test used instead a strip of white paper.) The need for precision in pastry and confectionery kitchens has similarly prompted the development of increasingly sophisticated tools of measurement. There are specialized thermometers, for example, for dough (to determine the thermal death point, or the temperature at which yeast dies), as well for candy, chocolate (important for tempering), and especially sugar. There are several different thermometers for measuring the stages of boiled sugar, including Baumé hydrometers, which measure the concentration of sugar in a liquid in degrees, and Brix hydrometers, which measure sugar in liquids by decimals. See brix.
Although standard measurements are essential in baking and confectionery, there may also be a soft tyranny in the drive for precision, hinted at by the nearly simultaneous appearance of standardized measurements and the rise of socially ambitious cookery in the late nineteenth century. In the process, other social values and manners often associated with the middle class, including an aversion to excess, may have helped to undermine our sense of cooking and eating as gustatory pleasures. Hence, one of the casualties of scientific standardization may be taste, not only in its gustatory sense, but also in the aesthetic sense of taste as a skilled practice. Another unintended side effect of greater standardization may be a loss of culinary skill and creativity of the home cook. Uniformity in measurement practices should therefore be counted as sometimes an aid and sometimes an impediment to good cooking.
See also confectionery equipment; pastry tools; saccharimeter; stages of sugar syrup; and pastry tools.
Médici, Catherine de (1519–1589), the sometime queen, queen mother, and regent of France, never had it easy. In her own day, she was vilified for exerting too great an influence on the affairs of France, and excoriated for surrounding herself with Italians. Writers over the last two centuries have attributed to her the introduction to France of everything from artichokes to ice cream, some even claiming that she brought the very idea of haute cuisine to her adopted homeland. More recently, food historians have dismissed anything of the sort, relegating the poor queen to little more than a footnote in the history of French cuisine. The truth is undoubtedly more nuanced.
Caterina de’Medici, as the Italians knew her, came from the great Florentine merchant family, the only daughter of Lorenzo de’Medici and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, a French duchess. In 1533, at the age of 14, the orphaned Caterina was betrothed to Henry d’Orleans, the second son of Francis I. After a ceremonious wedding in Marseilles, attended by her uncle, Pope Clement VII, and Francis I of France, the Italian teen largely disappeared from view. Commentators have rightly pointed out it is unlikely that the 14-year-old had much influence on the French court when she first arrived, culinary or otherwise, or that she was accompanied by a large entourage of Italian cooks as she left Marseilles. There is certainly no documentation of ice cream in France or Italy in her lifetime. See ice cream. She seems to have lived in relative obscurity until the death of her royal father-in-law, after which her husband ascended the throne in 1547 as Henri II.
It was only then that the 28-year-old Catherine stepped into the limelight, first as queen and then queen regent after the untimely death of her husband in 1559. In the years that followed, she would become the most powerful woman in the history of royal France. She spent enormous fortunes patronizing the arts and architecture (in Paris, the Tuileries gardens are all that remain of her once grand palace). She became renowned for staging great public festivals where mock jousts, musical entertainments, ballet, and even fireworks competed for attention. The Italian influence was unmistakable in both the music and the staging of the banquets. Was this entirely Catherine’s doing? Undoubtedly not. Italians set the fashion across Europe in the sixteenth century. Certainly, Francis I had been a great Italophile and had introduced many southern innovations to his court. In France, Italians were instrumental in setting up the manufacture of satin, stockings, cotton, ribbons, silk faience, glass, mirrors, and other luxury goods. In later years Italian artisans set up cafés and lemonade stands. See lemonade. That said, it would be hard to believe that Catherine’s Medici lifestyle and powerful coterie of Italian hangers-on did not have significant influence on culinary fashion during her decades of dominance.
But was her involvement in pastry more personal? Her library contained at least one copy of Bartolomeo Scappi’s influential Opera, first published in Venice in 1570, with its recipes for fried cream puffs and biscotti (there called mostaccioli alla Milanese). See biscotti. According to the early-nineteenth-century Irish writer Sydney Morgan, Francis I had actually put Catherine in charge of the royal household, including the office where confectionery was made: “les patisseurs de la Dauphine shed a glory on the whole order, by the ingenuity they displayed in their architectural and allegorical structures.” See sugar sculpture. Whatever the truth of this assertion, it is clear that the prevailing fashion in confectionery changed during Catherine’s years in power.
It is worth comparing a banquet celebrating Catherine’s coronation in 1549 to a later feast given in honor of Anne of Austria, the Medici queen’s new daughter-in-law in 1571. The earlier occasion had a decidedly medieval sensibility, with vast piles of game birds, hare, and rabbit. There were plenty of old-fashioned French pastries like cream tarts (darioles de cresme), date tarts, marzipan, choux pastry rings, crescent-shaped cakes, stirrup-shaped cakes (estris), various wafers, little flaky pastries, and “tartres de Millan” (a sort of shortbread moistened with curds). See dariole; marzipan; pastry, choux; and wafers. The confectionery supplied by Pierre Siguier, apothecary and spicer, was also decidedly medieval. He provided “spices, dragées, hippocras, wax and other drugs furnished for the feast.” See hippocras. Fast forward some 20 years and the occasion might as well have taken place in Venice or Ferrara. The evening began with dinner, which was followed by dancing and finished off with a meal of sweetmeats (here called a collation, the French take on the Italian collazione). See dessert and sweet meals. The display included preserves, both dry and liquid, sugared nuts, fruit pastes, marzipans, biscuits, and “every kind of fruit in the world.” See fruit pastes; fruit preserves; and suckets. There were even the sort of sugar sculptures for which Italian artisans were famous. Among these were Minerva and other classical figures, as well as trompe l’oeil meat and fish made of tragacanth paste. See tragacanth and trompe l’oeil.
Italian confectionery was no doubt the most advanced in the sixteenth century, in part because Venice and other Italian towns led Europe in sugar refining, and in part because of the peculiar nature of Italian Renaissance courts, which sought to outdo their neighbors through the magnificence of their patronage of the arts, including confectionery. See venice. This was a magnificence that both Francis I but most especially his Medici daughter-in-law would seek to emulate—if not exceed.
medicinal uses of sugar may seem counterintuitive in modern Western society, where sugar is considered a substance at worst inimical to health and at best a guilty pleasure carrying empty calories. However, in most past civilizations sugar was not merely the spoonful that helped the medicine go down, it was the medicine. This medicinal usage is rooted in ancient dietetic theory.
Sugar is a giant grass, Saccharum officinarum, native to the highlands of New Guinea, but there are also species found in India. Indians were the first to cultivate and process sugar, and the Sanskrit word sarkara is the origin of the Arabic sukkar, our “sugar,” as well as the word in most other languages. See sugar. The Latin epithet officinalis that is sometimes used in place of officinarum for the plant’s botanical name denotes that the substance belongs in the medicine cabinet. In the Ayurvedic system of ancient India, sugarcane juice is used to increase kapha—the dosha or bodily humor that regulates fluids in the body and lubrication. By this logic the juice serves as an expectorant in coughs, as an aphrodisiac that increases the libido, and as a diuretic to detoxify the kidneys. See aphrodisiacs. The ancient Charaka Samhita offers one of the earliest references to sugar’s medicinal value: “The juice of the sugarcane, if the stalk is chewed with the aid of the teeth, increases the semen, is cool, purges the intestines, is oily, promotes nutrition and corpulency and excites the phlegm.”
Sugar was brought to China from India along with Buddhism, and there it was considered nourishing for the spleen, strengthening for qi (vital energy), and having a cleansing property. It was also thought to generate bodily fluids, an idea that may have been borrowed from Ayurveda.
The ancient Greeks did not know sugar, although it was briefly encountered in the expeditions of Alexander the Great into South Asia. The Romans, too, were only familiar with sugar as an exotic medicine. Pliny the Elder mentions it in his Natural History as a medicine, as does the botanist Dioscorides, who wrote that “there is a kind of concreted honey, called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, like in consistence to salt, and brittle to be broken between the teeth, as salt is. It is good for the belly and the stomach being dissolved in water and so drank, helping the pained bladder and the reins [kidneys].” The great physician Galen also mentions sugar briefly, saying that it is less sweet than honey but has the same medicinal properties.
Sugar was much more familiar to medieval Persian and Arab physicians. Avicenna in his Canon of Medicine not only uses sugar in many compounds but also mentions sugar-coated pills: “In the case of pills, some doctors give them a coating of honey, or boiled honey, or boiled sugar … Various expedients may be adopted to meet various temperaments or personal proclivities, thus enabling the patients to swallow the drug without being aware of it being a ‘medicine.’” See pharmacology.
After the year 1000, when trade connections to the East gradually proliferated, sugar became more familiar in Europe but still retained much of its medicinal association, inherited largely from traditions in the Muslim world. As a sweet substance, sugar, according to humoral physiology, was considered a heating and moistening aliment, one that is especially nourishing. In fact, for anyone but the choleric in whose bodies sugar might burn up, it was believed to be an ideal food.
By the late Middle Ages the culinary and medicinal use of sugar reached an unprecedented level, and the cane began to be grown in Sicily and islands such as Madeira and the Canaries. See sugarcane. The historian and first librarian of the Vatican Library, Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina, wrote that sugar is nourishing and good for the stomach, and that there is no dish not improved by sugar. This approbation became so widespread that Europeans became virtually addicted to sugar, especially after it was grown in the Caribbean and used to sweeten new caffeinated drinks like coffee, tea, and chocolate.
It was this very success and ubiquity that gradually stripped sugar of most of its supposed therapeutic value in Western medicine. Not only did new chemical and mechanical theories of physiology replace the humoral system, but also empirical evidence steadily mounted that sugar does little else than provide calories. Nonetheless, it continued to be used by habit in medicine. In the eighteenth century, for example, the French physician Louis Lemery prescribed it for colds and chest disorders and for cutting through viscous phlegm, much as sugar is still used today. Its use in formulating syrups and electuaries, as well as in making pills palatable, has remained standard right down to the present. Sugar is still a major ingredient used by the pharmaceutical industry, and when the price of sugar goes up, so does the price of drugs.
See also ancient world; comfit; panning; and sugar and health.
Mehlspeise, literally “flour food dish” in German, is today roughly translated as “dessert” or “pastry,” but in earlier times the meaning was quite different. Until the late nineteenth century, in Catholic Austria, Bavaria, and the adjoining regions, Mehlspeise referred to a wide variety of flour-based foods, from strudels and vegetable tarts to dumplings and noodles.
J. G. Krünitz’s Oekonomische Encyclopädie (Economic Encyclopedia, 1802) defined Mehlspeise as “any dish prepared from flour, so that [the word] can therefore also be understood to include dumplings, pancakes, noodles, etc. In particular, only certain soft-textured (pap-like) foods are considered Mehlspeisen, which are baked in a mold or bowl and contain mainly flour but also rice, sago, noodles, etc. with various fruits and other nourishing or flavor-enhancing additions.” As the Encyclopädie implies, these dishes were predominantly sweet, but not always; a strudel might be filled with crayfish or apples, while pasta could be sprinkled with sugar or baked with Parmesan cheese. What characterized them was that they were all meatless and thus permitted on the many fast days prescribed by the Catholic calendar. Many regional cookbooks include a Mehlspeise category in the fast-day recipe section.
As elsewhere in Europe, meatless days were hardly abstemious for those who could afford fine food, and in Central Europe starchy side dishes were often served along elaborate fish preparations. However, as social status decreased, these flour-based foods became an ever more central component of the meal. Bavaria and the territories of the Hapsburg Empire were almost entirely landlocked, and although fresh fish were caught in the rivers and raised extensively in reservoirs, they were never as abundant or available as in countries with long seacoasts. In the nineteenth century some Czech peasants found fish to be such a rarity that they served fish-shaped loaves instead of the traditional carp for Christmas dinner.
If Central European Renaissance cookbooks are any guide, even the literate elite ate a great number of grain-based foods. The culinary guides have extensive sections devoted to porridge (Muß) of every description (predominantly meat-free, though not always). Many of these gruels were sweetened with fruit or honey (or grated honey-sweetened gingerbread) by poorer folk, and with sugar by the elite. The sixteenth-century citizens of Jindřichův Hradec in southern Bohemia made a specialty porridge with blueberries, flour, and gingerbread called žahúr, leading them to be called by the local nickname žahúři. Fitting more neatly into the Encyclopädie’s definition, myriad varieties of fruit dumplings, sometimes fried rather than boiled, as is the case today, were another Renaissance favorite. See dumplings. Early versions often incorporated dried or fresh fruit into the dough, whereas today, fruit-filled dumplings such as the Wachau’s Marillenknödel enclose whole fresh apricots in dough. Pancakes, sweetened with fruit butter, honey, and later sugar, were also commonly eaten as meatless, flour-based main courses. In much the way Italians of a certain class might make a meal out of pasta, Central Europeans often turned noodles into supper, but rather than dressing them with a savory sauce, they frequently topped them with cottage cheese, poppy seeds, and grated gingerbread or another sweetener.
Central European cookbooks devoted extensive sections to Mehlspeisen. Maria A. Neudecker lists some six dozen recipes explicitly categorized as Mehlspeisen in her 1806 Die Baierische Köchin in Böhmen (The Bavarian Cook in Bohemia). There are five strudels filled with ingredients from crayfish to chocolate, a wide assortment of dumplings, waffles, and baked puddings. Other recipes, such as one for Kugelhopf or various kinds of kolatschen, are closer to the more contemporary sense of Mehlspeisen as a hearty flour-based dessert. A hundred years later, the category has become even more blurred. The 1903 version of Katharina Prato’s bestselling Die süddeutsche Küche (South German Cookery) still includes recipes for crayfish strudel (both with sugar and without) and macaroni with ham and cheese, but she also offers recipes for plum dumplings, Kaiserschmarrn (a partially shredded pancake), and polenta topped with butter, cinnamon, and sugar. The great majority of these dishes would still have been considered main courses, though not all.
As the hold of Catholic food observances faded in the twentieth century, so did the habit of eating flour-based foods as a main course, though not entirely. It is not considered odd to make a filling meal of dumplings or pancakes even if there is little Lenten association. When it comes to the term “Mehlspeise” itself, contemporary Germans barely use the word. It is still widely used in Austria, and to some degree in neighboring Bavaria, though the meaning no longer includes savory dishes as it once did. Today, the word is used broadly for just about any cooked sweet. This usage extends to the plural Mehlspeisen, in Austria sometimes used in place of “dessert” for the final sweet course of a meal.
meringue is a billowy blend of whipped egg whites and sugar, with the addition of an acid, such as cream of tartar or lemon juice. When incorporated with an invisible ingredient, air, this foam multiplies eight times from its original unbeaten state, producing one of the most vital cornerstones of the confectionery kitchen, used in a myriad of pastries and desserts.
As far back as the seventeenth century, beaten egg whites and sugar were molded into small open baskets called “paper coffins.” The renowned nineteenth-century French chef Marie-Antoine Carême was likely the first to use a pastry bag to pipe meringue, rather than shaping it with a spoon. Piped meringue made possible the creation of elaborate vacherins (large meringue shells) and other showpiece confections, such as Baked Alaska, a dramatic layer of meringue spread over an ice cream center and browned in the oven, one version of which is said to have been created for Delmonico’s New York restaurant to commemorate the Alaska Purchase. See baked alaska; carême, marie-antoine; and vacherin. The early twentieth century gave us the pavlova, a heavenly meringue cake that is topped with fruit and whipped cream from Australia and New Zealand, which was devised in honor of ballerina Anna Pavlova. See pavlova.
History
Legends claim that the airy mixture of meringue was named after the Swiss village of Meiringen, or even after the French Merovingian kings, but these etymologies are false, and uncertainty surrounds the origins of meringue and its name. We do know that meringue developed from the egg-white mixtures whisked with bundles of cleaned twigs that appeared in European cookery texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, generally with the addition of cream of tartar. See whisks and beaters. When sugar began to replace cream of tartar in the seventeenth century, the mixture became even lighter and was referred to as “sugar puff.” By the eighteenth century recipes close to those known today for modern meringue were already well known.
Written recipes for egg whites whipped with sugar appear in early English cookbooks, although they were not yet called “meringue.” For instance, Lady Elinor Fettiplace’s receipt book (1604) includes a brief recipe called White Bisket Bread, which calls for 1½ pounds of sugar, a handful of fine white flour, and the whites of 12 beaten eggs—proportions surprisingly similar to those used for meringue today. The first documented recipe actually titled “meringue” was published in François Massialot’s Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois (1691).
The Science of Meringue
When a recipe specifies using only two or three ingredients, such as egg whites, sugar, and an acid, achieving perfection can be a challenge, as is the case with meringue. So it is helpful to understand the chemistry of egg foams. See eggs. Egg whites are composed of proteins and water. When beaten and combined with air, the albumen, or thick white of the egg, separates into gaseous foam, a stable mass of tiny bubbles coated with a thin layer of water. When air and acid are incorporated into the whites, or when the mixture is exposed to heat with the help of steam, the bonds of the whites unfold, denaturing the proteins and making it possible for them to join and solidify. As meringue cooks, another protein, called the ovalbumin, goes to work and changes the fluid foam into one that is solid, thus preventing collapse of the structure.
Beating whites to the correct consistency can be a baker’s nemesis. It is essential to begin with a clean bowl and whip, whisk, or beaters that have been wiped lightly, usually with an acid such as white vinegar, to remove any trace of fat. Eggs that are closer to their expiration date make the best candidates for meringues; because the whites are thinner, they beat up faster, quickly attracting air cells. Very fresh eggs have thicker whites and should be stirred or blended together with a whisk or fork before whipping, to achieve even viscosity. The whites must be completely free of egg yolk; cold eggs are easier to separate. Using a copper bowl to whip egg whites produces a more stable foam and greater volume. Some pastry chefs advise against using salt when beating egg whites because they believe it leaches water from the whites and increases beating time. Because whipped egg whites are fragile, tender handling is always required. Overbeating or overheating can ruin a meringue.
Methods for Making Meringue
Three methods exist for incorporating sugar into the egg foam: French, Swiss, and Italian. The least stable of the meringues but most popular and easiest to make is the common or French meringue. Here, sugar is whipped into room-temperature egg whites, at about 70°F (21°C), without the use of heat. To make Swiss meringue, the whites and sugar are first whipped with a balloon whisk in a bowl set over a hot-water bath (bain-marie) and warmed to 110° to 120°F (40° to 50°C) to dissolve the sugar; the mixture is then beaten until cool on medium-high speed in a stand mixer. Italian meringue, the strongest of the three, starts with egg whites at room temperature. After whipping the whites to soft peaks, a hot sugar syrup is added and the mixture is beaten until cool. All three meringues should contain cream of tartar or lemon juice for stability and added volume, and should be whipped until thick, smooth, and glossy.
Sugar is the invaluable ingredient that captures air, creates volume and texture, and provides the gift of sweetness to meringues. Extracting cane juice from the sugarcane plant began in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago. India deserves credit for transforming cane juice into granules more than 2,000 years ago. A fine grained sugar is favored for making meringues because it is quick to dissolve and has the ability to entrap air well. See sugar and sugar refining. If unavailable, it can be made by finely grinding granulated sugar in a food processor. Confectioner’s sugar, also called powdered or 10X, is a blend of granulated sugar and 3 percent cornstarch. Its powdery texture is achieved by milling granulated sugar 10 times (hence the name 10X). The presence of cornstarch in meringue is believed to aid in absorbing moisture.
Cream of tartar is an acidic ingredient extracted from wine residue that forms on the inside of wine vats. Its primary usage in meringue preparations is to stabilize beaten egg whites and increase volume.
There are two types of meringue, soft and hard. Achieving one or the other depends solely on the amount of sugar incorporated—soft requires less, whereas hard requires more. Generally, the ratio of sugar per egg white is 2 to 4 tablespoons, but the exact quantity used within this ratio is guided by the specifications of the recipe.
Soft meringues not only use less sugar, they require less beating time and shorter baking in a moderate oven at 325° to 350°F (163° to 177°C). Popular recipes made with soft meringues include pie toppings, sponge, chiffon and angel food cakes, soufflés, mousses, chewy cookies, buttercreams, and other frostings.
Hard meringues use the maximum amount of sugar and require more beating time and longer baking. These confections are slowly baked in a low oven at 200° to 225°F (93° to 107°C). They should remain light in color, with no sign of browning (unless made with ground nuts, cocoa, or espresso powder). To maintain the white color and optimum crispness, hard meringues are often dried in an unlit oven for several hours or overnight to remove all moisture. This procedure applies to vacherins, meringue nests, crisp cookies (such as kisses), and ornamental decorations like meringue mushrooms.
Baking is not recommended during humid weather because of the negative effect it has on all baked meringues. Soft meringue made on days with high humidity can result in a gummy texture, while hard meringues lose their crispness. Sugar and egg whites attract moisture, which often causes “weeping,” brown beads of melted sugar that form on the surface.
Tricky as working with meringue may be, once the baker gets a feel for the process, the rewards are great and enable the baker to produce a delightfully diverse array of baked goods.
See also france.
Mexico to this day show traces of three distinct traditions in its sweets. Pre-Hispanic sweets included fruits, saps, and honey, although chocolate, now so much part of the Western sweet kitchen, was then prepared as a cold, bitter, spiced drink. In the colonial period, the largely Islamic-derived sweet kitchen of late medieval Spain was further developed and adapted to the products of the New World. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants introduced other sweet traditions and new technologies that allowed for the flourishing of new kinds of sweets.
The Aztecs, the Mayas, and the many other peoples living in what is now Mexico enjoyed a variety of fruits. See fruit. In the tropical lowlands, they picked, for example, pineapple, cherimoya (Annona cherimola) and guayabana (soursop, Annona muricata), and creamy orange mamey (Pouteria sapota). On the high, arid central plateau, they gathered little golden apple-shaped tejocote (Crataegus Mexicana in the hawthorn family) and tiny black garambullos that outlined the branches of the old man cactus (Myrtillocactus geometrizans), as well as vivid pink and yellow pitahayas (Hylocereus family) and pink and green tunas and xoconostle from the nopal or paddle cactus (Opuntia family). To make a long-keeping sweet paste, they macerated and dehydrated the tunas. See fruit paste. They extracted the sweetness from mesquite pods by boiling and evaporation; they sucked the juices of maize and relished young cobs for their sweetness. They made syrup (aguamiel) from the sap of agaves and collected honey from the combs of native bees (Melipona beechiae), the papery nests of wasps (Brachygastra mellifica) and ants. See agave nectar; honey; and sap. Scholars believe the Indians showed a preference for a sweet/hot flavor profile that is still much appreciated.
In 1521 the Spanish conquered Mexico City. They quickly introduced new plants and animals, such as the European honeybee, cattle, sheep, goats, wheat, citrus, and above all sugarcane. Within a few years of the Conquest, Hernán Cortés established a sugar plantation near Cuernavaca, a hundred miles to the south of Mexico City. Other plantations and refineries soon followed. See plantations, sugar and sugar refineries. The Spanish sweet tradition was expanded to include American fruits and nuts, particularly pecans and peanuts. Chocolate was used to make a hot, sweet, spiced drink, though rarely in baking or confectionery.
Just as important, the Spanish brought with them the ovens, stoves, and implements of European kitchens and bakeries, as well as cookbooks and know-how about baking and confectionery. They also continued traditional European ways of organizing male kitchen workers into guilds of bakers, who turned out sweet breads (pan dulce) as well as regular bread; cake makers; and biscuit makers, who prepared “fruits of the oven” (frutas de horno), essentially cookies of different combinations of wheat flour, sugar, eggs, milk, and water. Confectioners created what are now known as traditional sweets (dulces tradicionales). Included were wafers (obleas), fruit- and nut-based confections deriving from the Islamic tradition, egg yolk and sugar confections developed in Portugal and Spain, and boiled-down milk confections. See egg yolk sweets; islam; and wafers.
The sweet goods prepared by male guilds overlapped with those made by women in haciendas, town houses, and, above all, convents. See convent sweets. A tradition of manuscript cookbooks flourished, a high proportion of the recipes being for sweets. The sophisticated, diverse sweet tradition of the colonial period was underwritten by the wealth that flowed from the colony’s fabulously rich silver mines.
The culmination of the colonial tradition can be appreciated in the 800 or so sweet recipes in the first published Mexican cookbook, El cocinero mexicano, which appeared in 1831, immediately after independence from Spain. Cake and pastry making (pasteleria) is the subject of the first of six sections. Represented are puff pastry (hojaldre); choux pastry (masa real, “royal” dough); pastries for empanadas and raised pies; cookie doughs (regalo de horno, gift of the oven); buñuelos, which merit 30 recipes; and bizcochos (which usually contain flour, sugar, eggs, and sometimes lard, occasionally a leavening agent). See fried dough; pastry, choux and pastry, puff.
Desserts and confectionery (reposteria) make up the remaining five sections. Tortas, puddings, and bread- and bizcocho-based sweets include both sweet and savory “cakes”; Anglo-style “pudines,” among them Indian (hasty) and plum pudding; and a series of variants on bread pudding (golden soup, sopa dorada) and French toast (torrejas). See pudding. The eclectic section that follows begins with egg sweets (the convent-developed egg-based confectionery), gelatins, and creams (identified as French). See desserts, chilled and gelatin desserts. It continues with antes, elaborate composed dishes served at the start of the meal, often sponge cake covered with a fruit paste and topped with spices, dried fruits, and syrups. Postres, the dishes served after the meal, cross the sweet/savory divide. Medieval/Islamic blancmange (manjar blanco), a purée of chicken, rice, and almonds, for which 10 recipes are given, is joined by dishes such as pork meatballs in syrup with raisins, almonds, and pine nuts; a paste of ground chickpeas or dried broad beans with sugar and milk; and a variety of flans (leche cuajada). See blancmange and flan (pudím).
Then come dry preserves, mainly candies, marzipan and nougat (turrón), crystallized fruits, compotes (poached fruits), and conserves (jams and marmalades), fruit pastes or cheeses (cajetas, little boxes from the containers in which they were stored), and syrups. See fruit preserves; marzipan; and nougat. A couple of sections on sorbets, ices (helados) made with cream and eggs, fruit waters, and liqueurs round out the extensive range of sweets. See ice cream and sherbet.
Since galleons sailed annually between New Spain and the Philippines (with links to Panama and Lima, Peru), the sweets described in El cocinero mexicano reached Asia and reunited with those in other Spanish colonies. And since this cookbook was the model for other foundational cookbooks published elsewhere in Latin America, Mexican sweets continued to have influence beyond the country’s boundaries.
The third stage in the evolution of Mexican sweets began after independence and is still progressing today. Cake shops, coffee shops, and tearooms in the European tradition, and soda fountains in the American, provided new places where respectable women were welcome and could consume sweets on a regular basis outside the home. See café and soda fountain. The cake shops El Globo (1884) and Pasteleria Ideal (1927) still exist, while the restaurant, confectionery, and bakeries of Sanborns, founded by Walther and Frank Sanborn in 1903 (acquired by Walgreens in 1946 and since 1985 in the hands of Grupo Carso), remain draws for the middle class in the centers of every major Mexican town.
New immigrants from the Spanish Basque country at the beginning of the twentieth century took over the baking industry, at least in Mexico City. They were probably responsible for the popular sweet breads for Day of the Dead (pan de muerto) and Three Kings Day (pan de tres reyes). See day of the dead and twelfth night cake. On a daily basis, bakery shelves are stacked with an enormous variety of small, mildly sweet breads (pan dulce), the most popular being conchas (shells) eaten for breakfast or with chocolate before retiring to bed. See breads, sweet. Chinese immigrants introduced salted, aniseed-flavored dried fruits (see mui), which were Mexicanized as bright pink tamarind and mango chamoy sold alongside the dulces tradicionales. Japanese immigrants were almost certainly responsible for the popularity of shaved ice with syrup (raspados), and Lebanese for widely available Middle Eastern pastries. See shave ice.
Refrigeration meant a proliferation of cold sweets. Starting in the early twentieth century, ice cream makers (neveros) appeared in town squares, twirling metal buckets of fruit, cheese, and nut mixtures in wooden tubs of ice. In the 1950s those of Tocumbo, a remote town in the central state of Michoacán, began selling fruit pops (paletas michoacana); now their townsfolk have outlets all over Mexico. In the 1960s and 1970s custard ice cream makers set up business, followed by international chains such as Baskin-Robbins. See baskin-robbins.
Condensed milk transformed home desserts. See sweetened condensed milk. Nestlé’s La Lechera condensed milk cans and cookbooks offered tantalizing, easy recipes. Their recipe for flan magico, flan prepared in a pressure cooker, became to all intents and purposes the national dessert. The chief challenger was gelatin, opaque with condensed milk or transparent with fruit juice. See gelatin desserts. In the late twentieth century gelatins became yet more glorious with colored-syrup flower shapes embedded by syringe. Then came pastel de tres leches. See tres leches cake. Most recently, chocoflan, a flan recipe mixed with a packaged chocolate cake recipe that separates into two layers, has become the rage.
By contrast, home baking of cakes, cookies, and pies remains unusual, even though ovens have been commonplace in well-to-do homes for a century and are creeping into the kitchens of even the poorest. Instead, women turn to supermarkets and small entrepreneurs for cookies, pies, and cakes, which are still reserved for birthdays and other celebrations. The prestige line of cookies, many of them wafers, is Mac Ma, with its own line of stores. Then comes Marinela, part of the Bimbo baking empire, founded in 1945 by Catalan immigrant Lorenzo Servitije and associates. Among its offerings are cookies such as Mexican wedding cookies (polvorones), Lors (an Oreo type of cookie), Principe (“Prince,” a chocolate cream sandwich), and individually wrapped pies (pecan, pineapple) and snack cakes. In 1956, following its purchase of extrusion machinery for cakes, Bimbo began producing snack cakes, the most popular being the Gansito, a chocolate-covered sponge with a white creamy center containing strawberry jam.
Mass-market confectionery is dominated by Mars, Nestlé, Frito-Lay, Kraft, Ferrero, and Hershey’s, which turn to firms such as Grupo Piasa for high-quality sugar from modern mills. See hershey’s; mars; and nestlé. Medium-size Mexican companies such as La Lorena and Dulces Vero, and a host of tiny ones, turn out hard candies, tamarind candies, and chamoy-flavored sauce for use on fruit. Nestlé is the biggest seller of drinking chocolate, still the major use of chocolate.
Modern Mexican sweets are consumed across the Americas thanks to over 34 million Mexicans in the United States, as well as Bimbo’s presence in Latin America and the United States.
See also chocolate, pre-columbian; portugal; and spain.
The Middle East—Egypt and the Fertile Crescent countries, with Arabia as a late-joining partner—is where agriculture began around 11,000 years ago with the domestication of that versatile grain, wheat, which has figured ever since in so many sweets and pastries. It is also where literature began 4,500 years ago, but early scribes gave regrettably little thought to our curiosity about what they ate.
For instance, šʿ-t, one of the scores of ancient Egyptian words that can be translated as “bread,” might have been sweetened with dates or date juice, or maybe not. The Babylonians made something called qullupu for the monthly Eshshēshu festival, and from context we can be sure it was made with honey, linseed oil, or dried fruits, but was it a sweetened bread, a fried pastry, or a rich pudding? The Hittites were a little more forthcoming about their baked goods, but they often represented the names with Sumerian logograms such as NIN.DA4, rather than spelling them out in Hittite, so we do not know what they actually called them, which might have cast some light on what they were like. Fortunately, what seems to be a translation of NIN.LÁL into the related Luvian language, malitiwallas kuisa, gives a little clue, because it means “honey bread (shaped like a) fang.”
A young woman displays watermelon for sale at a railway station in Syria. jules gervais courtellemont / national geographic creative
Yes, a fang. The sweets that were recorded in ancient times were made for religious occasions and often had symbolic shapes, especially in Egypt. See symbolic meanings. At the same time, ordinary people were probably making humbler sweets for everyday use that perhaps resembled some that are current in present-day Oman, such as a sort of pudding made by boiling date juice with flour and a little butter until thick.
In the sixth century, we suddenly know a good deal about everyday foods in one particular area, western Arabia. Muslims had a pious interest in the life of Muhammad, and religious scholars felt an obligation to learn everything about the Arabic language in which the Qurʾān was written, so over the next two centuries a colossal amount of data was collected on early medieval Arabia. See islam.
From what the scholars recorded, it is clear that meat was a highly regarded food for special occasions, but the everyday cuisine was overwhelmingly based on dates, barley, and dairy products. The dates meant that many dishes were more or less sweet, but this fairly wholesome diet suffered grievously from monotony. See dates. The eleventh-century Moorish linguist Ibn Sīda compiled a glossary of Arabian food names that suggests a desperate desire to wring variety out of this severely limited pantry.
For instance, he lists separate words for dried dates steeped in milk (siqʿal), pounded dates thrown in buttermilk (raḍḍ), milk poured over dates (majīʿ), pitted dates mixed with milk (waṭīʾa), cottage cheese pounded with dates (ʿabītha), toasted barley mixed with dates (bakīla), dates kneaded with toasted barley (ʿujjāl), and so forth. Of this repertoire, the only Arabian sweets that the seventh-century Muslim conquests spread to other countries were hais, which was originally dates mixed with butter and cottage cheese—later medieval recipes would substitute cake crumbs, nuts, and sesame oil for the last two ingredients—and ʿaṣīda, a simple peasant porridge optionally sweetened with dates. In its turn, ʿaṣīda was later rendered more grand by using flour instead of barley grits and adding nuts, sugar, and other upscale ingredients.
Tenth-Century Haute Cuisine
On conquering Persia, the Arabs discovered the splendor and luxury of its imperial court and speedily jettisoned their ancestral dishes in favor of Persian cuisine. See baghdad and persia. The caliphs of Baghdad organized cooking contests among their boon companions, just as Persian emperors had, and gentlemen of their court kept collections of favorite recipes, just as Persian noblemen had. In the tenth century, a book titled Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh (The Book of Dishes) was compiled from these court recipe collections, so we know a very great deal about what the aristocrats of Baghdad ate during its golden age, the eighth through tenth centuries.
Most of the sweets in this book have Persian names: various delicate puddings called fālūdhaj, fancifully shaped fritters (zulābiyā) dipped in honey, and, above all, marzipan (lauzīnaj) in a pastry wrapper so delicate that one poet compared it to grasshoppers’ wings. See marzipan and zalabiya. It was immersed in sugar syrup and sesame oil until it was eaten. According to a famous anecdote, when a rough Turkish warrior named Toghril Beg conquered the city in 1055, Baghdadis presented him with some lauzīnaj in the hope that he would appreciate their precious, sophisticated civilization. Unfortunately, he is said to have responded, “These are good noodles, but they need garlic.”
The most esteemed meat dish, jūdhāb, was itself partly a sweet. As meat roasted in a tandoor oven, a tray of pudding (the jūdhāb proper) was inserted under it so that the pudding could be enriched with the running fat and meat juices. The diner received a serving of roast meat on top of a portion of this jūdhāb, which could be a bread or rice pudding, a cornstarch-thickened pudding flavored with fruits such as apricots or mulberries, or even a tray of fried bananas or crepes folded around a ground nut filling. So, it was basically sugar, starch, meat, and fat—scarcely what your doctor would prescribe, and your doctor would probably not be surprised that it was very popular.
As they represented courtly tastes, the recipes emphasized expensive ingredients. Khabīṣ, a sort of fruit- or nut-flavored pudding adopted from the Aramaic-speaking Christian population of the Fertile Crescent, was usually thickened with flour or crumbled biscotti (kaʿk), but in this book one luxurious recipe substitutes ground almonds. Muhallabiyya was basically rice pudding, but two recipes in Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh were custards flavored with nuts. (Medieval Arab rice puddings were often enriched with shredded chicken breast, so many a muhallabiyya resembled the medieval European blancmanger and the modern Turkish tavuk göğsü.) See blancmange.
A newly recorded pastry, which would become very important in later centuries, was qaṭāʾif, a sort of eggless crepe made by kneading a stiff dough and then gradually working in enough water to make it slack. Relatively slack, that is—qaṭāʾif could be rolled out for frying or baking, but the batter would be thin enough for dipping food for frying. See fried dough. In Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, the crepes were usually fried and sweetened a bit like modern pancakes, but the most distinctive treatment was to fry them on one side only, leaving the upper sides tacky; top them with sweetened, ground nuts; fold them over and seal; and then deep-fry the resulting packets.
Egypt had made two contributions to the sweets repertoire. One was kaʿk (from Coptic kʾaakʾe), a sort of ring-shaped biscuit that has survived to the present. The other was an extra-thin flatbread, kunāfa (Coptic kenephiten), which served as a wrapper in sweets.
After learning of pulled taffy (fānīdh) from Iran, Baghdad cooks had started exploring the higher densities of sugar syrup. In Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, a sort of nougat called nāṭif was made by beating thick hot syrup with egg whites. It could also be made with boiled honey, but from this point on sugar quickly replaced honey in confectionery. See nougat and taffy.
The Thirteenth Century
Three substantial cookbooks date from thirteenth-century Egypt, Syria, and Iraq and share a common repertoire of dishes. To take one example, Kitāb Waṣf al-Aṭʿima al-Muʿtāda (The Description of Familiar Foods) includes most of the tenth-century sweets, although zalabiya is now made by dribbling leavened batter into boiling oil, in the manner of Pennsylvania Dutch funnel cakes. See pennsylvania dutch. The cuisine is less extravagant than that of the Baghdad of the caliphs, and various new dishes have been invented, such as qāhiriyya, a ring of pistachio paste dipped in batter, deep-fried, and drenched in syrup. A number of new desserts have been created based on stuffing or layering qaṭāʾif.
Some of the sweets resemble more recent Arab favorites. Luqam al-qāḍī, little deep-fried pellets of dough dressed with sugar syrup, have scarcely changed since the thirteenth century. A cannoli-like pastry called “Zainab’s fingers” (aṣābiʿ Zainab) resembles modern Arab pastries with similar names, except that the tube that is stuffed with nuts was made of noodle paste and cooked by frying, while the modern versions use filo dough and are baked. See filo. A pastry not given a name in the books was what is now called kunāfa in the Arab world—thin strings of batter dribbled on a heated tray to make something that looks like semi-cooked vermicelli. This would be kneaded with butter and baked, making the pastry known as kadayıf in Turkish, kadaifi in Greek, and—somewhat confusingly since it is nothing of the kind—“Shredded Wheat pastry” to many Americans.
Experimentation with sugar syrup was ongoing. A sort of cookie called aqrāṣ mukallala was glazed by dipping it into very thick syrup, and a new variety of lauzīnaj was virtually the same as modern nougatine (sugar cooked without water to the hard crack stage, then stirred with almond paste). Hard candies (aqrāṣlīmūn) had been invented and were colored red, yellow, or green, like lemon drops or Life Savers. See hard candy; life savers; and stages of sugar syrup.
The Moors transmitted the Middle East’s knowledge of sweets to Europe during their occupation of Spain (717–1492) and Sicily (827–1224), starting with the culture of the sugarcane. See sugarcane. Lauzīnaj spread under a new name, makhshabān, giving European words for this product, such as Spanish mazapán and English marzipan. Along with the knowledge of syrup the Moors passed on the technique of candying. A third-century Damascus cookbook titled Kitāb al-Wuṣla ilā al-ḥabīb gives a recipe for candying gourd, which is essentially identical to the Spanish dulce de calabaza. An anonymous thirteenth-century Moorish cookbook gives a recipe for puff pastry under an Arabic name (muwarraqa) and a Spanish one (folyatil), both meaning “leafy,” which suggests that puff pastry might have been a joint invention of the Moors and the Spanish. See pastry, puff.
The Turkish Period
Already in the thirteenth century, Arab cuisine had started to show the influence of the Turks who had been moving into the region from Central Asia, first as mercenary soldiers, then as rulers. Along with Turkish breads and pastas, a few sweets appeared in the Arab cookbooks. One was qarni yārūq (split belly), which was made by kneading flour and water as if for noodles but with the addition of some melted butter. This rich paste was rolled out thin, cut into strips, and fried crisp. Dressed with syrup and pistachios, it was like a slightly crumbly, deconstructed baklava. See baklava.
Another was qāwūt, a sweetened mixture of grain and nuts fried in butter that was originally served to women in childbed. It paralleled a traditional Middle Eastern food, not recorded in the medieval books but clearly of great antiquity: boiled whole grain sweetened and served on religious occasions. See wheat berries. Grain symbolizes rebirth, so Christians made this dish for Easter and the feast of the martyr St. Barbara. Shiite Muslims made it on ʿĀshūrāʾ, the tenth day of the month of Muharram, which is the anniversary of the martyrdom of the caliph ʿAli, so Muslims know this dish as ʿāshūrāʾ.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks had conquered the entire Arab world east of Morocco, except for the remoter parts of Arabia. Originally, the Ottomans’ idea of haute cuisine was derived from books written in thirteenth-century Baghdad, but as the capital of a large and wealthy empire, Istanbul quickly developed its own style, the cuisine of elaborate kebabs, eggplant stews, stuffed vegetables, and baklava-type pastries that now dominates the eastern Mediterranean. See turkey.
Today
Even centuries ago, Middle Eastern pastries and confections tended to avoid the sweet–sour combination, which was considered appropriate only for meat dishes. As a result, the sole fruit regularly used in sweet preparations has been the very sugary date. Mixed dried fruits, however, are cooked together as fruit compote, khoshāf.
Some of the medieval pastries have survived to the present: zulābiyā (also called mushabbak, meaning “lattice”), qaṭāʾif; aṣābiʿ Zainab (or related names meaning “lady’s fingers,” such as ṣawābiʿ al-sitt), and luqam al-qāḍī. Puddings are still popular: muhallabiyya (usually thickened with cornstarch), rizz bi-ḥalīb (rice pudding, which has medieval antecedents), and mughlī (a nut-enriched cross between a pudding and a custard). See pudding. At one point in the late Middle Ages, a crumbly butter cookie evolved under the name ghurayba (literally, “the little extraordinary thing”). Borrowed in Turkish, it was pronounced kurabiye, the name by which it has become known in the West through its Greek spelling, kourambies (pl. kourambiedes).
If you look into a bakery in most of this area, you will be struck by the predominance of Turkish baklava-type pastries. The Turkish influence is strongest in Damascus, which was a local center of administration under the Ottoman government. Damascus still has a significant Turkish population and is known for making the best baklava-type pastries in the Arab world. Other widespread Turkish sweets are qamar al-din, the famous “apricot leather,” and sujuq, a confection made by dipping a string of walnut meats into a boiling mixture of grape syrup and cornstarch, as if dipping a candle. The name means “sausage” in Turkish, and the product does end up looking like a rather lumpy sausage.
Particularly characteristic of northern Syria is ḥalāwat jibn, a versatile sweet that is a little difficult to classify. It is made by toasting flour with butter and stirring it with syrup—making a sweet roux, in effect. When the mixture thickens, the cook kneads it with crumbled mild cheese to make something with a texture oddly reminiscent of a washcloth. It can be eaten by itself or rolled around a stuffing such as nuts.
The most famous Egyptian sweet is om ʿAli (mother of Ali), a sort of bread pudding made by baking torn-up pieces of bread or filo dough with milk and nuts. It is suspected that this dish is actually adapted from the English bread pudding, which was introduced at a hospital in Upper Egypt during the early twentieth century by a nurse named O’Malley.
Iraq shows recent Iranian influence, for instance, rangīna, a confection of dates and toasted flour, and nūni panjara, fritters cooked with a special iron like the Italian rosette. Iraq has indigenous specialties of its own, such as deep-fried cardamom-flavored cakes called ṣalūq. The Persian Gulf cooks much like Iraq, except that there is far less Turkish influence.
The southern and eastern Arabian Peninsula cooks rather differently. Most sweets in Oman are pudding like, thickened to one degree or another with starch, agar agar, or other products. In ascending order of firmness, they are sakhana, khabīṣa, and ḥalwā. Some have unusual flavorings, such as fava beans or even garlic, and concentrated milk figures in many ḥalwās, possibly reflecting Indian influence. See halvah and india. Oman is closer to Bombay than to Baghdad and has adopted at least one Indian dessert, the Indian vermicelli, siwāya, cooked with sugar and nuts.
Yemen, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, is one of the world’s poorest countries. Its traditional sweets are usually flavored with honey, which is considered medicinal and also blessed, because it is mentioned in the Qurʾān. Despite the country’s poverty, surprisingly expensive honey boutiques are located in Sanaa. A typical sweet is fatūt, crumbled bread that can actually be mixed with anything but very often is flavored with honey or bananas. The specialty of Sanaa is bint al-ṣaḥn—layers of leavened dough, stacked up, baked, and served with butter and honey. In Sanaa, this dish is usually served at the beginning of the meal.
See also honey and north africa.
The Midwest (U.S.) is the area of the United States encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Long before this official definition, however, Midwesterners themselves were characterizing their region and its food. In 1842, for example, Mrs. Philomelia Ann Maria Antoinette Hardin published the wonderfully titled Every Body’s Cook and Receipt Book: But More Particularly Designed for Buckeyes, Hoosiers, Wolverines, Corncrackers, Suckers, and All Epicures Who Wish to Live with the Present Times, giving the Midwest its first truly regional cookbook. Hardin’s book, purportedly the first printed west of the Alleghenies, wasn’t a collection of recipes that she culled from cooks in the East Coast or England. She speaks to the stomachs around her, with recipes for “Hoosier Pickles” and “Buckeye Rusk.” Here is her recipe for “Wolverine Pudding”:
A quarter of a pound of buiscets [sic] grated, a quarter of a pound of currents cleanly washed and picked, a quarter of a pound of suet shred small, half a large spoonful of pounded sugar, and some grated nutmeg; mince it all well together, then take the yelks [sic] of three eggs, and make it all into balls as big as turkey’s eggs; fry them in fresh butter of a fine light brown.
This was a dessert to get a Wolverine through a Michigan winter, and if readers lived in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, or Illinois, they could find recipes to satisfy their sweet tooth, printed alongside “Valuable Rules” for making medicine, raising honey bees, or cultivating fruit trees. Hardin’s book firmly roots its advice and recipes in the region now called the Midwest. See pudding.
The term itself, as it refers to the stretch of the United States east of the Ohio River and west of the Missouri, did not come into American usage until the 1890s, and Hardin’s title hints at the difficulty of describing this region’s character. Buckeyes, Hoosiers, and Wolverines still embrace those nicknames, but people from Kentucky or Illinois are not likely to see themselves as Corncrackers or Suckers. Midwestern sweets are marked by this clash in the region between continuity and change. From the Native Americans’ precolonial use of sinzibuckwud—the Algonquin word for “tree sap” that literally means “drawn from wood”—to the maple candy that Pa gives his daughters in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s popular Little House on the Prairie series (“It was better even than their Christmas candy”), to the 568,000 gallons of maple syrup produced by Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2013, Midwestern sweets have been created and consumed in response to the needs and desires of the people who live there; people who have constantly inherited, invented, and adapted their food from the land around them; and the people, sometimes very different from themselves, who live alongside them. See maple sugaring; maple syrup; and native american.
The Great Plains states of Kansas, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Nebraska have given Americans one vision of the Midwest: a heartland of small towns and agrarian values, where endless acres of cereal crops, such as corn and wheat, unfurl among silos and farmhouses, as a classic dessert like sugar cream pie cools on the sill. Also known as Hoosier pie, farm pie, Indiana cream pie, and finger pie, because you stir it with your finger, this simple mix of flour, butter, salt, vanilla, and cream originated with the Amish and perhaps Quaker communities who settled in Indiana in the early nineteenth century. See pie. Over 600 miles away, in the Dakotas, recipes brought in the same period by Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian immigrants give a sense of the communities who would come to represent Middle America: the krumkake is a waffle cookie with Scandinavian origins that traditionally shows up for Christmas celebrations, alongside the sandbakelse, a sugar cookie baked in a fluted tin, and the rosette, an ornate, wafer-sized, deep-fried pastry. Powdered sugar might dust any of them. With their ties to the old country and ongoing presence at today’s tables, these desserts testify to America’s belief in the Midwest as a place of family and tradition, where sweets offer one of life’s simple pleasures.
This vision differs from the Midwest of the Great Lakes states, in which Rust Belt industrialization, widespread immigration, and urban values, with Chicago’s mighty skyline beckoning, define the region. Here, tradition and innovation work together. Immigrant sweets such as the Italian cassata cake found in Cleveland bakeries or the Polish pączki in Detroit, filled with cream or jam and reminiscent of a jelly doughnut, give the Midwest its signature character, but so do desserts like the brownie, said to have been invented by a chef at the Palmer House Hotel in 1893 during the Columbia Exposition. See cassata and doughnuts. Apparently, one Mrs. Bertha Palmer asked the chef to make a “ladies dessert”—not so messy as a piece of pie, not so big as a slice of cake—that she could include in the lunch boxes for women working at the fair. Voilà, the brownie. See brownie. The Twinkie and the Cracker Jack also came from Chicago. See cracker jack and twinkie. In this vision, Midwestern sweets are as diverse as its cities’ inhabitants and inventors, with Indian gulab jamun (fried balls soaked in sugar syrup) and sweet potato pie brought north during the Great Migration as symbolic of Midwestern sweets as the famed cherry pies of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula or its Mackinac fudge.
These competing visions of the Midwest as city and country fail to capture the rich complexity of the region, where small-town and big-city ideals constantly mix. A city such as St. Louis preserves its German heritage with a fruitcake called stollen, and a town of 27,000, as Mansfield, Ohio, was in the 1920s, can give birth to a mass-market product such as the Klondike bar. See stollen. In fact, the Midwest is where the national food industry began and is currently housed. General Mills, Hostess Brands, the Kellogg Company, Kraft Foods, Nabisco, Quaker Oats, and Sara Lee all started in the Midwest. See hostess and sara lee. Wherever people are eating a mass-produced dessert, whether it is wrapped in plastic or pulled from the freezer, they are eating Midwestern fare, a regional vision of food that has reached around the globe.
mignardise, also called “friandise,” is a general category that includes many kinds of little sweets—small cakes, cookies, macarons, chocolates, candied fruits, and pralines—served most often at the end of a meal with coffee and liqueur. The word comes from the French mignard, meaning “delicate” or “pretty,” which in turn derives from the medieval word mignon, meaning “small.” Mignardise can be synonymous with the petit four (literally, “small oven”), which appears to be a creation of the nineteenth century. The famous French chef Marie-Antonin Carême claimed that the name referred to the baking of these small cakes in a slow oven whose heat dissipated after the large desserts had finished baking. See carême, marie-antoine. In his Physiologie du goût (1826), Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin refers to the “multitude of delicate pastries which make up the fairly new art of baking little cakes.” M. LeBlanc, author of Roret’s Nouveau manuel complet du pâtissier (1829), refers to the confection of petits fours as a branch of patisserie in which particular commercial bakers specialized. He advises professional bakers to have two ovens, including a smaller oven devoted to baking petits fours and all sorts of small cakes, to save on cooking fuel. By the time LeBlanc was writing, there were already at least 50 different types of ovens that the professional baker could purchase.
See small cakes.
military sweets are often overlooked, with studies of food and the military generally focusing on the nutritional content of rations. After all, as the popular saying goes, “An army travels on its stomach.” However, since the creation of the U.S. Armed Forces, sweets have sustained our servicemen and women emotionally and physically. Sweets have also served as a goodwill ambassador of sorts, distributed to foreign populations by American troops for generations.
The Revolutionary War–era Continental Congress first established an official field-feeding program for the military in 1775, attempting to standardize rations and their preparation. The basic “garrison ration” allocated per soldier per week typically included beef, pork, or salt fish; bread or flour; milk or either cider or spruce beer plus a small stipend; and peas or beans. Slight variations on this garrison ration remained the standard for servicemen under all conditions, whether they were in camp, in the field, or in combat, from the Revolution through World War I.
By World War I, the military had created a slightly broader range of rations, designed for use under varying conditions of warfare. There existed, for example, reserve rations, trench rations, and emergency rations. Some of these rations included chocolate bars, which dispensed energy and morale, the Quartermaster Corps declared.
Sergeant Walter P. Goworek, from Jersey City, New Jersey, treats two girls dressed up for a 1944 Fourth of July celebration in La Mine, France, to some G.I. candy. The sign in the background indicates the French feeling of gratitude toward their American liberators. signal corps photo / library of congress
Following the war, the government attempted to improve rations based on soldiers’ complaints. It was suggested that all rations could be improved by adding chocolate, among other items, to the basic pattern of canned meat, tinned bread, and beverage (previously, only some rations contained chocolate). By 1922 an Army specification for rations mandated that each include 3 ounces of corned beef or chocolate—an interesting equivalency.
During World War II, a multitude of new rations appeared for use in varying climates and conditions of warfare. There were, for example, rations specific to ground troops, aviation crews, for use in tropical climates, for high-altitude climates, for desert climates, for use in lifeboats, for use immediately prior to combat, for distribution by the Red Cross to prisoners of war, and so on. Most of these rations contained sweets, and a popular slogan of the period declared, “Candy is a fighting food.” Sweets in these rations included candy-coated peanuts or raisins, hard candies, caramels, chewing gum, fudge disks, cookies, candy bars, pudding, chocolate drops, pan-coated cream centers, fondant creams, gumdrops, and jelly and licorice drops. See candy bar; caramels; chewing gum; fondant; hard candy; and licorice. Some of these sweets were commercial products, like Tootsie Rolls and M&M’s. Others were items specifically designed for military use, like the notoriously unappealing D-bar.
Field Ration D, also known as the D-bar, was a chocolate ration bar produced by Hershey’s for the military. The D-bar was meant to be consumed in emergency situations when no other food source was available; thus, the military’s requirements were as follows: that it weigh 4 ounces (112 grams), be high in food energy value, withstand high temperatures, and taste “a little better than a boiled potato,” so that soldiers would not be tempted to snack on it for fun.
Soldiers almost unanimously hated the bars. In 1943 the Army asked Hershey’s to produce a more traditional chocolate bar with improved taste, one that would still survive the extreme heat of the Pacific Theater. The resultant Hershey’s Tropical Bar (often erroneously called the D-ration throughout the war, despite its new formula) better mimicked a normal chocolate bar in its shape and flavor than the original D-ration, which it gradually replaced by 1945. Still, nearly all U.S. servicemen and women found the Tropical Bar tough and unappealing. Nonetheless, an estimated 3 billion D-rations and Tropical Bars were distributed to soldiers throughout the world between 1940 and 1945.
Military rations have evolved nearly continuously since World War II, but once sweets found their way into government-issue rations, they never left. Today, the official ration of the U.S. Armed Forces is known as the Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE). These MREs offer a variety of sweets, including a broad spectrum of cookies, cakes, and candies, some of which are iconic, commercially produced treats such as Skittles, Reese’s Pieces, and M&M’s. See hershey’s; m&m’s; and reese’s pieces.
Although the military did not officially include sweets (outside of the occasional sugar for coffee, or perhaps syrup or molasses) in its earliest rations, the writings of soldiers from all conflicts dating back to the Revolution mention the consumption of, and comfort provided by, sweets obtained privately. Other evidence of the consumption of individually acquired sweets abounds; records show that, for example, during World War I, the American Red Cross distributed some 5.5 million chocolate bars to doughboys stateside, and that during World War II the Wakefields of cookie fame reportedly sent their Toll House chocolate chip cookies to servicemen and women all over the world.
Any analysis of sweets and the military must also note that America’s servicemen and women have, over the years, earned a reputation for sharing their sweets. During the World Wars, they often distributed sweets to the civilians they encountered, including survivors of the concentration camps of World War II. This concept of using sweets to spread goodwill continued into the Cold War period and beyond. During the Berlin airlift in 1948, for example, American plane crews dropped an estimated 23 tons of chocolate, chewing gum, and other candies over various locations in the city. The tradition of handing out sweets continues to this day. Sadly, there can be unintended negative consequences to these goodwill gestures, as in the case of starved concentration camp survivors who became ill after eating calorie-dense chocolate shared by troops, or children who have been injured because of their proximity to soldiers from whom they sought candy.
Whether created specifically for the military or commercially produced, included in standard, government-issue rations, or obtained via alternate routes like post exchanges or care packages, sweets have provided servicemen and women with energy and morale for generations. Sweets have also become a calling card of the American military, used to generate goodwill around the globe. While today’s servicemen and women still consume and share old standards like the ever-hardy M&M’s, there are now healthier alternatives like the HooAh Bar. Reminiscent of the D-ration of yesteryear, this nutrition bar comes in the timelessly appealing flavors of chocolate and mocha. Although current dietary trends may warn of the dangers of too much sugar or other empty calories, sweets in the U.S. military are sure to endure.
milk in the strictly biological sense is both the first and the most chemically complex food encountered by any mammal in a lifetime of eating. Cow’s milk, like that of less familiar dairy animals including goats, sheep, and water buffaloes, has literally innumerable components that take on still more complexities in handling and cooking. For this reason, it can play enormously diverse roles in making all kinds of sweets.
Simple gravity easily splits unhomogenized cow’s milk into two parts. A lactose-rich water-based solution (whey) holding suspended particles of a major milk protein called casein sinks to the bottom as “skim milk” in any container. A top layer containing the much less dense milk-fat globules along with a small amount of the basic solution rises to the top as “cream.” See cream. Both parts can be manipulated into other forms through means including the action of lactic acid bacteria and/or some enzymes, possibly combined with heat. See buttermilk; cheese, fresh; sour cream; and yogurt. Agitating cream (or whole milk, or yogurt) under the right conditions produces butter along with a wheylike solution, true buttermilk. Various Old World peoples had mastered these and other transformations in ancient (in fact, prehistoric) times. Bacterially cultured products flourished from the Balkans eastward; concentrates of boiled-down milk were beloved in India; and simple unripened cheeses were familiar from northeastern to northwestern Europe.
By contrast, milk and cream not modified by fermentation, curdling, or churning did not achieve huge culinary importance in Western Europe and North America until well into the Industrial Revolution. Only with nineteenth-century advances in transportation, refrigeration, and sterile packaging could “sweet” milk and cream safely reach a large, mostly urban market. Almost at once, the technology also arrived for manufacturing sweetened condensed and evaporated milk as well as producing butter on an expanded commercial scale. See butter; evaporated milk; and sweetened condensed milk.
The dietary importance of fermented milk products declined in Western Europe and North America throughout the nineteenth century, while “sweet” milk and various derivatives became safe, cheap, and universally available. Their expanded role rested on the same pursuit of manufacturing innovation that was simultaneously bringing Western consumers refined white flour and sugar—those other prerequisites for making many sweetened items that swiftly multiplied on the tables of all but the poorest classes between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I.
Of the specialties that either originated or gained popularity at this time, sweetened beverages included cocoa and hot chocolate, milk punches, eggnogs, and milkshakes. See cocoa; egg drinks; and milkshake. Chemically leavened cakes using milk or cream as the principal liquid and butter as shortening enjoyed a tremendous vogue, along with custard-based desserts and starch-bound milk puddings. Milk was also the usual liquid used in fudge, caramels, penuche, and many other candies, along with a host of frostings and dessert sauces. Ice cream became far easier to prepare at home, thanks to the invention of hand-cranked freezers; new whisking or beating devices enabled cream to be whipped in a few minutes. In the Old World, butter-based pastries like puff paste were largely products of the same era, as were buttercream frostings or fillings.
After the start of the twentieth century, some products of the older preindustrial milk technologies enjoyed a certain resurgence. Their rediscovery has been encouraged in the last few generations by increased immigration to the United States from such regions of the Old World as the Balkans, the Middle East, parts of the former Soviet Union, and the Indian subcontinent. For instance, the fudge-like milk sweet called khoa and sweetened versions of yogurt-based lassi are to be found wherever people from India have settled. See india. In another vigorous trend, immigration from Latin America has created an audience for dulce de leche and canned-milk flans. See dulce de leche and flan (pudím).
Simultaneously, “sweet” fluid milk is being explored as never before, as a way to differentiate products aimed at a growing bevy of specialized clienteles. Though campaigns against dietary fat and cholesterol are now on the wane, they continue to generate sales of milk classified by butterfat content, from “fat-free” up through 0.5, 1, and 2 percent to so-called whole milk. (At a standardized 3.25 percent, this last is actually well below the average fat content of cow’s milk not subjected to the centrifuging, partial recombining, and homogenizing processes universally used in today’s dairy industry.) Other niche versions of milk have been developed in response to the problem of lactose intolerance. Various dietary agendas have inspired manufacturers to create white, pourable plant-based mixtures sold as “almond milk,” “rice milk,” “soy milk,” and so forth, though they are completely unrelated to milk. For purposes of dessert making, great caution should be used in substituting reduced-fat, reduced-lactose, or plant-based products for whole milk (or cream, which has its own family of imitations) in recipes.
See also caramels; fudge; ice cream; icing; latin america; pudding; refrigeration; sauce; and whisks and beaters.
milkshakes and malteds are cold, thick, creamy beverages made by combining milk, ice cream, iced milk, sorbet, or yogurt in a blender or mixer. To enhance the flavor, the mixologist has a vast range of options, including chocolate, coffee, malted milk, vanilla extract, honey, fruit syrups, juices, spices, and liqueurs. In different regions of the United States, the milkshake is variously called a frappe, a frosted, a thick shake, a cabinet, or a velvet.
The milkshake’s exact origins are unknown, but evidence indicates that it began as a soda fountain drink in the 1880s or earlier. See soda fountain. The ingredients and flavors resembled those of such traditional treats as English syllabubs and eggnogs. See egg drinks and syllabub. James Tufts, a soda fountain manufacturer, patented the Lightning Shaker for mixing milkshakes in 1884. The shaker, which was bolted to a counter, held one or two glass canisters with metal tops. The mixologist poured the milkshake ingredients into a canister and turned a crank to blend them. An 1890 dictionary defined milkshake as “an iced drink made of sweetened and flavored milk, carbonated water, and sometimes raw egg, mixed by being violently shaken by a machine specially invented for the purpose.”
The Tufts trade catalog stated that the milkshake “has sprung into great popularity in the South in a surprisingly short time. Wherever it has been properly introduced, it has immediately become extremely popular.” The catalog included a recipe that called for milk, shaved ice, and flavored syrup (preferably chocolate or vanilla), with the option of adding port wine. Other early recipes recommended whiskey to give the drink a little extra punch. To make a richer, thicker drink, upscale soda fountains used heavy cream or ice cream along with milk in their shakes.
Malted milk originated as a nutritional supplement and found a second market as a flavoring for malted milk shakes. Brothers William and James Horlick emigrated from Britain to Chicago, where they formed the Horlick Food Company to make a dietary supplement for infants and invalids. They knew that malt sugars aid digestion, but moist malt ferments easily. In order to make a nonalcoholic digestive aid, they had to prevent fermentation. They employed a vacuum process to dry wheat and barley malt, which they pulverized and packaged as a powder. In 1875 they received a patent for their new product, and two years later they opened a factory in Racine, Wisconsin. See malt syrup.
Horlick’s powder tasted best when mixed with milk, but the milk supply was not always safe in the days before refrigeration and government regulation. See milk. To ensure the purity of their product, the Horlicks bought dairy farms, raised their own cows, and made powdered milk. They mixed the dry milk with the other ingredients in their product, and the consumer added water to convert it into a liquid. Horlick’s malted milk sold briskly, so other companies, including Carnation and Borden’s, began to market similar mixtures. An unknown mixologist came up with the idea of adding malted milk powder to milkshakes. The result was a hearty, filling drink that became very popular, especially with men.
Horlick’s success inspired another Racine entrepreneur to invent an electric drink mixer to blend malted milk powder with liquids. Frederick Osius, the ingenious powerhouse who ran Hamilton Beach Manufacturing, created the Cyclone Drink Mixer in 1910. The Horlicks refused to bankroll the start-up costs for production, so Osius journeyed to New York to find investors. When he ran short on cash, he persuaded the owner of the Caswell-Massey store on Broadway to lend him money, with a Cyclone mixer as collateral. The novel blender created a sensation at the Caswell-Massey soda fountain, and malted sales soared. When the sales manager for a milk company saw the Cyclone, he immediately grasped its potential. He bought blenders from Osius and gave them to his customers, who ordered large quantities of malted milk. In 1922 Osius sold Hamilton Beach and moved to Miami, where he continued to develop new mixers.
In 1936 Earl Price invented the Multimixer, an automated milkshake machine that made up to five shakes simultaneously. Countless soda fountains, restaurants, and roadside stands used the Multimixer because it was a sturdy, reliable machine that produced tasty shakes. Although the Multimixer was efficient, fast-food outlets wanted something even quicker and simpler. Premade machine-mix milkshakes, containing artificial flavorings and chemicals instead of fresh ingredients, became a favorite shortcut in the fast-food industry.
See mars.
mince pies, small pies filled with a sweet mixture known as mincemeat, are essential to the British Christmas. They are double crusted, round, and baked in patty pans or little foil molds. Plain or sweet short crust, or puff pastry, is used, according to taste. See pie dough. The top crust is now often cut in a star shape, just one more innovation in the long history of these pies. The mincemeat filling, homemade or purchased, consists of minced or chopped dried fruit (currants, raisins, sultanas); candied peel; apple; beef suet (or sometimes butter or vegetable fat); sugar; sweet spices such as cinnamon and cloves; and brandy to taste. The “meat” element of the name is explained by the former addition of meat to these ingredients.
Made at home or by craft or industrial bakers, mince pies are consumed in vast quantities from early December onward; eaten as snacks or offered as hospitality; accompanied by tea, coffee, sherry, or mulled wine. Although mince pies are known in the rest of the English-speaking world, enthusiasm for them is variable outside of the British Isles. They are sometimes made as large pies in the United states.
Myths have accrued to mince pies for centuries—for instance, that the spices represented the gifts of the Magi, and that Elizabethan shapes echoed the crib the infant Jesus lay in. There is little historic evidence to support this lore, and examination of early recipes shows that, under various names—minc’d pies, shred pies, secrets pies—these pies once took their place among pies of many types. In early modern European cookery, pie fillings combined meat or fish, dried fruit, spices, and sugar (in relatively small amounts in early recipes). Robert May (The Accomplisht Cook, 1685) gives recipes typical of the time, always including meat of some description (or fish or eggs for meatless days). He includes recipes for pies in the French and Italian fashions, and his book illustrates numerous different forms, including small, round pies that are tall in relation to their diameter, and more ornate shapes. See pie.
Eighteenth-century mince pies took elaborate forms, such as crescents, fleurs-de-lis, and trefoils, shaped in molds with straight sides and turned out before baking. They were arranged in kaleidoscopic patterns on plates for the table. By the nineteenth century the shape had settled down to the small circular ones still made, sometimes with short-crust bases and puff pastry tops. The filling ingredient that changed most over the years was the meat. Tongue, mutton, beef, and tripe (as well as fish such as herring, salmon, or salt cod) are mentioned in earlier recipes. In the nineteenth century, beef was the usual choice, but it had vanished from recipes by the start of the twentieth century. A sweet lamb pie including currants survived until the twentieth century in the Lake District.
The combination of a dried fruit filling and an outer pastry layer, made by wrapping the pastry around the filling rather than using a mold, occurs in other British contexts. See fruitcake. These baked goods tend to be regional and include Eccles cakes and Chorley cakes (both originating in Lancashire), and Banbury cakes (Oxfordshire). Black bun, made in Scotland, is a large pastry cake with a dense filling of currants, traditional to Hogmanay (New Year). Curiously, an Italian regional speciality known as spongata (illustrated in a board game dated 1691, and given in a recipe by the confectioner William Jarrin in 1820) is similar in general plan to “cakes” of this type; it is a large pastry-wrapped confection of dried fruit. Still made in the Parma area and also traditional for Christmas, to British palates, spongata is inevitably reminiscent of mince pies. See jarrin, william alexis.
miracle berry is a bright red berry from the Synsepalum dulcificum shrub native to West Africa, which has traditionally been used to make sour soups and palm wine more palatable. Although the berry has very little flavor of its own, it has a miraculous effect on taste buds. For up to two hours after eating a miracle berry, the taster experiences acidic and sour foods as deliciously sweet. The secret behind this taste transformation is miraculin, a protein that binds to sweet receptors on the tongue. When the mouth environment becomes acidic, the miraculin molecule changes its shape and activates those sweet receptors. Miraculin is sensitive to heat, so cooking the berry eliminates the effect. After eating a miracle berry, anything tart can be gobbled up like candy, though bitter flavors are not affected. Lemons, limes, and grapefruits are popular foods at “flavor tripping” parties, where people gather to share the odd taste experience of miracle berries.
Although the berries can be eaten fresh, they are highly perishable, so they are more commonly available as freeze-dried tablets. Miracle berries have not been approved by the FDA for use in the United States as a food additive, but they have found commercial success in Japan, where dieters and diabetics alike can enjoy low-calorie food with all the sweetness of a sugary dessert.
See also sub-saharan africa.
mithai, meaning a “sweet,” derives from the Sanskrit mishta (sweet) and is a word universally understood in India, despite the country’s huge variety of languages and dialects. It is the most joyful word in the Indian culinary universe, not only connoting items with a sweet taste, but also evoking a sense of social communion, festivity, sharing, and celebration. Although items eaten during religious celebrations are often called mithai, the term has no religious overtones. For Hindus and Muslims, the two main religious communities of India, as well as for others, mithai constitutes an integral part of gustatory pleasure. See india.
Primarily, mithai is a Hindi/Urdu word, an umbrella term incorporating a huge variety of confections made in northern and western India. The eastern Indian sweets made with chhana or fresh curd cheese are usually not referred to as mithai by the local population, although people from other parts of India might choose to do so. The common ingredients of what is called mithai are flour; sugar; legumes (mostly chickpeas); nuts like cashews, almonds, and pistachios; clarified butter; and kheer/khoa (thickened, evaporated milk). They are often perfumed with cinnamon, cardamom, saffron, rosewater, and kewra (screwpine) water. The aroma of good mithai is rich and toasty, and lingers in the air and on the palate.
The ubiquitous laddus (ball shaped sweets) and barfis (rectangular sweets) of northern India are what mostly come to mind as mithai. See barfi and laddu. However, an extraordinary variety of textures and shapes is to be explored in the world of mithai. The jalebi (derived from the Arabic zalabiya), for instance, is made with a batter that is any combination of chickpea flour, rice flour, wheat flour, and urad dal flour. The batter is piped into hot oil to achieve a convoluted shape and then dropped into syrup. The jalebi is crisp on the outside and juicy inside. A similar product is the imarti or amriti made with urad dal flour colored with saffron, but its texture is softer and denser than that of the jalebi.
Mithai also includes a wide range of halvahs (halwas). See halvah. These are made with flour, semolina, several kinds of legumes, vermicelli, and among Muslims, even eggs. Halvahs are cooked in clarified butter and often enriched with khoa and perfumed with sweet, aromatic spices. A particularly rich product is called sohan halwa, made with a combination of milk, sugar, cornstarch, and copious quantities of clarified butter. The product is supposed to have originated in ancient Persia, from where it reached India. At one point, Multan in Pakistan became famous for its sohan halwa. The notable thing about this confection is its hard and brittle texture, unlike the fudge-like texture of most halvahs. The large amount of clarified butter used to make sohan halwa results in an extraordinarily emollient mouth feel, despite the crisp texture. In some families, sohan halwa is made with wheat starch, obtained by repeatedly washing the wheat flour in water until the gluten is isolated. Mostly, however, sohan halwa is made by professionals, and certain sweetshops in both India and Pakistan are famous for this product.
See also hinduism; islam; kolkata; nuts; and zalabiya.
mochi, in Japanese, refers to rice cakes and other dumpling-shaped foods made from sticky substances. Mochi are similar to dango, except that mochi are traditionally made with pounded whole grain and dango are from flour. See dango. Rice cake mochi are made from polished glutinous rice, which becomes naturally sticky when steamed. Traditionally, the steamed rice is pounded in a large mortar with a pestle to form the cakes, a labor-intensive process, which, coupled with the fact that polished rice was expensive, made rice cakes a luxury food. Rice cakes can be formed into many shapes and are integral to ceremonies and seasonal observances. Depending on the region of Japan, round or square rice cakes are used in the savory New Year’s soup called ozōni. Also synonymous with the New Year are the rotund and thick mirror cakes (kagami mochi) created as offerings to deities and as symbols of prosperity. Rice flour has replaced pounded grain in most versions of mochi confectionery, of which there are countless varieties. Rice flour cakes stuffed with sweetened azuki bean paste (an) are wrapped with pickled cherry leaves to make Cherry Leaf Cake, a favorite during cherry blossom season. See azuki beans. Mochi can also be stuffed with strawberries, or covered with azuki paste or sesame seeds. Mochi ice cream is an invention of Los Angeles’s Japan Town. Before World War II, rice cakes were reserved for special occasions, but other varieties of savory mochi were eaten daily. The latter were made from wheat or millet, nuts, sweet potatoes, taro, or bracken (warabi), created with or without a filling, and grilled or added to soups and porridges.
modaka, an ancient sweet that may date back to around 200 b.c.e., is a stuffed dumpling especially popular in western and southern India. The dough is made of rice or wheat flour shaped into little packages that are filled with grated coconut; jaggery (unrefined sugar); nuts (often cashews); sometimes khoa (milk solids, made by boiling down milk); and cardamom powder. Modern versions incorporate ingredients such as chocolate, mango, almonds, paneer, tomatoes, chopped nuts, and dates. They can be steamed and served with ghee (clarified butter) or deep-fried.
Modakas are the favorite food of the Hindu deity Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who is often depicted holding a modaka in one of his four hands. His nickname is modakapriya, meaning “one who loves modakas.” During the festival Ganesh Chaturthi, a major event in western India, a puja (ceremony) honoring Ganesh always ends with offering the image of the deity 21 modakas. After the ceremony, modakas are distributed to the devotees.
Ganesh is said to have once cursed the moon for making fun of him for eating so many sweets, which is why the moon waxes and wanes, regularly losing its beauty and sometimes vanishing altogether. The modaka itself has been compared to the moon, its segments representing the moon’s phases. A related sweet is the karanji, a crescent-shaped modaka.
molasses (known as treacle in England) is a thick, syrupy liquid that ranges from dark brown to almost black in color. It is a byproduct of sugar production and can be prepared from cane, sugar beets, or grapes. See sugar refining. The English word comes from the Portuguese melaço, which in turn is derived from the Latin mellacium, meaning “must” from honey (mel).
There are several varieties of molasses, beginning with the lighter type prepared from the first boiling of the cane, which is known in the southern United States as cane syrup or light molasses. See cane syrup. The second boiling of the sugarcane juice produces dark molasses, and the third yields bitter blackstrap molasses. If the first or second molasses has been bleached with sulfur, it is known as sulfured molasses and has a distinctive taste. Recently, this type of molasses has become less popular because of concerns about the use of sulfur in its production.
Historically important in the United States, molasses was the primary sweetener in the country up until World War I, when it was replaced by refined sugar. In the colonial and Revolutionary War period, molasses played an even greater role in the diet. It was widely consumed by the poor, who often subsisted on molasses accompanied by bread as their sole staple. In the late 1700s many Massachusetts fishermen and their families ate as much as 30 gallons of it annually. In the American South, molasses constituted a significant portion of the slave diet, along with cornmeal and smoked pork. But its most prominent colonial use was in the production of molasses beer and rum, a major beverage of the era. See rum. The conversion of molasses into rum for use as a trade good for the purchase of slaves is a hallmark of one leg of the triangular transatlantic slave trade. See slavery.
The syrup’s early dietary importance is evidenced by the 1733 Act for the Securing and Encouraging the Trade of His Majesty’s Sugar Colonies in America. The so-called Molasses Act taxed molasses imported from anywhere other than the British sugar islands. Raw sugar and molasses were shipped for refining into sugar either to Europe or to the colonies that would become the United States. Regulating the source of molasses was an attempt to keep the colonists economically tethered to England and a way of maintaining economic and political control over the cane-growing colonies as well. The Act was largely ignored. In 1763, out of 15,000 hogsheads of molasses brought into Massachusetts, 14,500 were smuggled in. The tariffs were reduced somewhat in the Molasses Act of 1764, but the reductions were too little, too late. Along with the better-known tax on tea, the Molasses Acts are considered to be a cause of the American Revolution.
Molasses remained a staple of the diet of the middle and lower classes in the American North and the South until well into the twentieth century. It was sold from barrels by grocers and in general stores, and used in classic American recipes such as gingerbread, Indian pudding, anadama bread, shoofly pie, gingersnaps, Boston brown bread, and Boston baked beans. By the end of the nineteenth century, molasses began to be canned, and trade brands developed, such as Grandma’s and Br’er Rabbit. In the early twentieth century Noah Taussig brought together a consortium of molasses producers under the name American Molasses Company and worked with the Food and Drug Administration during World War I to promote the consumption of molasses in order to save sugar.
Today, molasses is considered by many to be a health food. It has approximately the same amount of calories as sugar, but it contains glucose and fructose and only about half of the sucrose of sugar. See fructose and glucose. It is high in magnesium and manganese and a good source of vitamin B6 and potassium. For these reasons, while molasses can still be readily found in many grocery stores, it is also available in health food stores, especially blackstrap molasses, which is reputed to have increased health benefits. Molasses, however, was not healthy for the ocean in September 2013, when a leak from a pipeline in Hawaii owned by Matson, the state’s largest cargo shipper, leaked some 233,000 gallons into Honolulu Harbor from one of the last remaining sugar export routes from Hawaii to the mainland. The leak caused the death of 26,000 fish and other marine animals and put molasses in the news once again, ironically exposing an unhealthy aspect of what is widely regarded as a health food.
See also boston molasses disaster; colonialism; legislation, historical; pekmez; sugar beet; sugar trade; and sugarcane.
molds, jelly and ice cream, shape jellies (gelled juices) and ice creams for dramatic presentation. Early European and American molds were produced largely from pewter, a metal that transmits heat fairly slowly and allows for a brief immersion in warm water or for standing at room temperature, a process that melts a very thin layer of the jelly or ice cream and permits it to be unmolded without losing its shape or the decorative pattern from the mold. Other materials used in the manufacture of molds have included red-ware, yellow-ware, ironstone, copper, stamped tin, and steel. Today, molds are often made of flexible silicone.
Ice cream and jelly (the historical term for gelled juices) were originally luxury dishes, served primarily to the elite who could afford the ice houses necessary for chilling during the warm months. Because these desserts lent themselves to dramatic presentation, molds were made in a great variety of sizes and fanciful shapes. There were patriotic themes (George Washington, his hatchet, or Lincoln); gender themes (dolls and flowers for girls; vehicles or drums for boys); and holiday themes (Christmas trees or St. Valentine’s Day hearts). Small molds in the form of hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds; cylinders and cubes; and assorted fruits and vegetables chilled single-portion servings. Larger sizes (e.g., a 1-pint pumpkin mold and a 1-quart clover mold) could handle a crowd. Represented among the larger molds were special ones for bombes—ice cream desserts consisting of two or more layers of variously flavored ice creams frozen in a large, round, bullet- or melon-shaped mold. See desserts, frozen. One imaginative example is the “watermelon bombe,” molded in a deep bowl, which contains three layers—green for the outer rind, white for the inner rind, and red for the pulp, with a sprinkling of chocolate chips for the pits. To achieve the distinct layers, the green-tinted ice cream is spread against the outside of the mold and frozen. When it is firm, a thin layer of white ice cream is added, and the mold is returned to the freezer. The red interior with chocolate chips is frozen last.
The Mello-Roll, a tubular form served in a waffle cone shaped to hold it horizontally, was invented in 1912. Its inventor, C. W. Vogt, patented the mold in 1913 and later sold it to Borden. Mello-Rolls came in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, chocolate ripple, and chocolate fudge ripple flavors and were sold in local candy stores in New York and Canada.
This plate from Mrs. Seely’s Cook Book (1902) shows decorative jelly and pudding molds, which were very fashionable at the turn of the twentieth century. Lida Seely’s New York employment agency provided domestic servants to the wealthy. Her cookbook covers French and English cooking, as well as the duties of various household staff.
Molds for shaping jelly were generally less complicated, though for special presentations a hollow circle was used to create a ring of molded jelly whose center could be filled with a pyramid of fruits. In the twentieth century molds may simply have been any container on hand—often plastic—that could tolerate both heat and cold; often the jelly (usually made from commercial Jell-O, which had been introduced in 1897) was simply spooned out rather than being unmolded. See jell-o. Layered Jell-O molds were de rigueur for American housewives in the 1950s. To achieve a dramatic effect, a package of Jell-O was dissolved in the prescribed amount of boiling water (or a mixture of boiling water and fruit juice) and poured into the bottom of a large (preferably tube) pan. It was then placed in the refrigerator for a few hours until completely set. Meanwhile, a second flavor of Jell-O was dissolved in water or juice and cooled until chilled but not yet set; it was added when the first layer had hardened, and the mold was once more refrigerated. A third flavor of Jell-O was dissolved in water and cooled, then added in turn once the second layer was firm. The mold was sometimes enriched with sliced fruits in colors and flavors appropriate to each layer. Unmolding this large concoction required expertise; the practiced cook learned to briefly almost submerge the chilled mold in a large bowl of warm water to facilitate the unmolding process. The amount of liquid used to dissolve the Jell-O was often reduced by a few tablespoons to make the Jell-O firmer and less likely to spread uncontrollably when unmolded.
Molded jellies have once again become chic, thanks in part to the fantastic creations of Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, whose London company Bompas & Parr creates entire cities and landscapes of shimmering molded jelly. Bompas & Parr offers a wide range of molds, including bespoke forms for individualized creations.
See also desserts, chilled; gelatin; gelatin desserts; and marshall, agnes bertha.
mooncake (yuebing) is the traditional Asian pastry eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the most prominent annual holidays celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, which usually falls in September or early October. Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular; most consist of a thin, tender pastry skin surrounding a sweet, dense filling, often with a center of salted duck egg yolk. This pastry is especially beloved by the Chinese for its rich flavor and the role it may have played in Chinese history. According to one folktale, about 700 years ago, during the Yuan dynasty, China was ruled by the Mongols who had invaded from the north. To secretly plot the Mongols’ overthrow, the Chinese shared their planned strategy in paper messages that were hidden in the fillings of mooncakes. The Chinese won the battle, and to this day mooncakes are credited with the victory. Mooncakes are given to friends, relatives, and business associates, and as a sign of respect to one’s boss. They are usually served with tea.
Mooncake varieties are numerous, and the filling and outside pastry vary with the region and country. In southern China, the cakes are typically round or rectangular, and the filling is usually made from red azuki bean paste, lotus seed paste, sweet black bean, or mung bean paste; it may have a salty duck egg yolk in the center, as a symbol of the full moon. A more opulent variety, called “five kernel,” is filled with five types of nuts, dried fruits, and seeds, coarsely chopped and held together with a maltose syrup.
Tender pastry encloses a sweet, dense filling in mooncakes, the favored sweet during the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. A salty duck egg yolk is sometimes hidden in the center to symbolize the full moon. lybil ber
Traditional mooncakes have an imprint on the top displaying the Chinese characters for longevity or the rabbit of longevity, who is said to live on the moon holding a mortar and pestle. Some mooncakes have a bakery name pressed on the top, or they may indicate the type of filling inside.
Over time the crusts and fillings of mooncakes have changed, although the traditional varieties are still widely available and considered the most desirable. Taro paste, pineapple, even durian-filled mooncakes have become popular fillings among overseas Chinese. Contemporary mooncake fillings may consist of yogurt, jelly, chocolate, and fat-free ice cream.
See also azuki beans; china; and ice cream.
MoonPies were first baked by the Chattanooga Baking Company in 1917. Originally designed for coal miners who could not take a work break for a meal, the MoonPie was solid, filling, and circular, fitting snugly inside a worker’s clothes or carried easily in the hand. Earl Mitchell Sr., a bakery salesman, came up with the idea of layering graham crackers with marshmallow; he later added more graham crackers and coated the entire pie in chocolate. The four main flavors of MoonPies produced today are chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and banana.
In the 1930s, MoonPies sold for a nickel apiece, and southern workers fortified themselves with the snack. They soon became an iconic southern treat; paired with the regional RC Cola, they were immortalized in Big Bill Lister’s honky-tonk song “Gimme an RC Cola and a MoonPie.” Since 2008, revelers in Mobile, Alabama, have brought in the New Year with a six-hundred-pound electronic MoonPie that is raised high into the sky as midnight strikes. In addition, MoonPie eating contests and festivals take place throughout the South.
When southern workers migrated north after World War II, they brought MoonPies along. By 1960 the pies were being produced in the Northeast, where they were called Scooter Pies, after the baseball great Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto of the New York Yankees. The Little Debbie Marshmallow Pie, produced by McKee Foods, is a similar snack. See little debbie. In 1964 the Chattanooga Baking Company introduced the Double-Decker, a double-stacked MoonPie with three cookies and two layers of marshmallows.
During a rebranding effort in 1998, MoonPies adopted the tag line “the only one on the planet,” and they are still marketed as being “outta this world!” Also in 1998 the Mini MoonPie was introduced as a response to mothers who wanted a smaller size that would not spoil their children’s dinner. Chattanooga Baking Company often partners with other companies in Tennessee, such as Mayfield, which debuted “moon pie” as its newest flavor of ice cream in 2003: it contains vanilla ice cream, “French silk ribbon” chocolate, and chocolate-covered graham pieces. A million MoonPies leave Chattanooga each day to be distributed across the United States.
See also small cakes and south (u.s.).
See north africa.
mostarda is a typical Italian condiment made from slightly unripe fruit such as apples, pears, peaches, cherries, figs, melon, pumpkin, and citrus peel that have been preserved in syrup, often with a decisive piquant taste from ground mustard seed. Although the word mostarda sounds similar to the French moutarde or English mustard, the word derives from the Latin mustum ardens (fiery grape must), fresh grape juice boiled down to a thick syrup with the spicy addition of mustard seed. Whereas the French and English forms of mustard refer to both the plant and the finished product, in Italy mostarda only refers to the fruit-based condiment, while senape means “mustard.”
Like those of most Italian specialties, the characteristics of mostarda vary from region to region, town to town, and even family to family. The fruit can be of a single kind or assorted; it can be whole, sliced, or sieved; and the syrup can be made of sugar or reduced grape must. See grape must. The amount and quality of mustard seed vary considerably, too, from absent to explosive; it can be added in either powdered form or as an essential oil.
Mustard was already appreciated by the Greeks and Romans, who marinated brassica leaves in vinegar. The ancient Romans learned many methods of food preservation while trading in the Orient, and certainly in India, where chutney is prepared with fruit and mustard seed, ingredients important to mostarda. Lucius Junius Columella, writing in De re rustica (first century c.e.), makes the earliest distinction between mostarda and mustard. He uses mostarda, which he calls mustaceum, for preserving meats, in contrast to mustard, or sinapsis, which accompanies boiled foods. In ancient times, this latter condiment was mixed with finely chopped almonds and fennel.
A Latin recipe from the important fourteenth-century manuscript Liber de coquina is probably the first to indicate how to reduce must to prepare mostarda: “Sic para mustum pro mustarda conficienda: accipe mustum novum, fac eum bullire quod quarta pars solum remaneat vel tertia … Et valet pro carnibus porcinis vel tincis salsatis” (This is how to prepare the must to make mostarda: take fresh must, and boil it down to a third … This is ideal for pork, marinated tench or other dishes).
Mostarda can be found in many regions of Northern Italy. In Piedmont it is known as cugnà, a mixture of spiced fruits always served with bollito misto, mixed boiled meats. The mustarda from Asti is made of quince, walnuts, and dried fruit, preserved in wine must without mustard seed. In Lombardy the fruit is generally preserved in sugar syrup. Mantua has a long history of mostarda produced by speziali (pharmacists and spice dealers). It was kept in decorative ceramic jars; Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua, was particularly fond of this luxury. The painter Andrea Mantegna was known to cultivate quinces for his mostarda, and at the wedding banquet of Vincenzo Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, to Margherita Farnese, mostarda amabile per savore (sweet mostarda as an accompanying sauce) was served. The particular flavor of Mantuan mostarda derives from the use of a special local apple campanina. To this day, delicatessen shop windows in Mantua display large wooden barrels of this appetizing mostarda, which can often be bought directly from the producer.
However, Italy’s most famous mostarda is la mostarda di Cremona, with its glistening whole fruits. The English tourist Edith Templeton (1954) described it as “a jewel of a dish, much too beautiful to be eaten, with cherries like antique coral, green figs like emeralds.” The very first reference to this mostarda can be found in a curious letter from 1397, now in the civic archives of Voghera, that describes a Christmas feast recommending mostarda for capons and wild game. In the French text Ouverture de cuisine par maistre Lancelot de Casteau (1604), the first recipe “pour faire moustarde de Cremone” appears, which is very similar to the present-day version.
Italian artists seem to have been especially fond of Cremona mostarda. The composer Giuseppe Garibaldi was a devotee, and Giuseppe Verdi was considered a “mostarda ambassador.” The poet Opprandino Arrivabene wrote: “There is nothing more wonderful in Cremona than the mostarda and the torrone.” An 1860 publication on Cremona cites the mostarda factories recognized for their excellent quality and exportation. Although the continual exposure to heat and strong vapors were deleterious to workers’ health, conditions today have radically improved.
Mostarda is also made in Emilia-Romagna, and the town of Carpi is well known for its version, which has a quite different consistency resembling a thick jam with no added spices. In La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiare bene (1891), Pellegrino Artusi gives a recipe for Tuscan mostarda made with apples and pears flavored with powdered white mustard. Mostarda can also be found in southern Calabria and Sicily, where the fruit is cooked and preserved in wine must with no mustard.
The taste for mostarda used to be rather limited in Italy, as it united contrasting sweet and spicy flavors. Today, with the influence of Indian, Chinese, and Thai cuisines, attitudes have changed, and assorted cheeses with mostarda or honey are a very popular aperitivo.
See also fruit.
mousse designates a wide variety of desserts. The category can be essentially defined as chilled airy confections made from one of four bases: whipped cream; beaten egg whites; gelatin (in combination with one of the first two); or sugar syrup meringue (also called Italian meringue) combined with whipped cream. Mousses lend themselves to an endless choice of flavorings. In the eighteenth century, a mousse was served in a large silver goblet made especially for this dessert, presumably to retain the icy chill that was a marker of a dessert intended for elite tables. For his Mousse à la crème, François Menon begins by whipping the cream and advises that if the cream does not froth up (mousser) properly, the cook must add beaten egg whites. If done by hand (for Menon, with a bundle of twigs, but later with a whisk), beating the eggs whites properly requires effort. Electric beaters now supply the elbow grease for many cooks. In both cases, the rapid whipping motion enables the cook “to harvest the air” and turn the egg whites into a frothy, stiff structure (McGee, 2004). For his Mousse de chocolat, Menon incorporates melted chocolate into fresh egg yolks, which he then adds to the cream and froths up the mixture as in his first recipe.
These techniques, published in 1750, are not far from how we still make mousse today. One way to create a chocolate mousse is to melt the chocolate over low heat or in a bain-marie to avoid burning the chocolate. When it is melted, beat in the egg yolks one at a time. Other flavorings, such as orange liqueur, can be added at this point. The melted mixture should cool slightly. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and gently fold them into the chocolate base, making sure not to leave streaks of egg whites suspended in the mousse. Pour the mousse into any serving dish, including eighteenth-century silver goblets if you have them, and chill until the mousse is firm. Mousse can be made and served in a charlotte mold, a glass bowl, or a single large or individual small porcelain dishes. In France, a small porcelain dish of chocolate mousse is sometimes called a pot de crème, but that dessert is more accurately custard. The difference is that for custard, the eggs are not whipped but thickened by the slow addition of scalded milk or cream (and flavorings) and poured into ramekins that are then poached in a water bath in a slow oven.
Chilled and frozen soufflés are not true soufflés at all, but mousse that is poured into a soufflé mold lined above the rim with paper or tin foil and then frozen. The trick to getting the extra volume needed for a chilled soufflé is to beat the egg whites to very stiff peaks before folding them into the base. Sometimes gelatin is added to help stabilize the mixture. When the paper is carefully removed before serving, the soufflé gives the impression, the illusion actually, that it has risen above the dish like a real soufflé does when it bakes. See soufflé.
See also custard; gelatin; meringue; pastry tools; and whisks and beaters.
mud pie, also called Mississippi Mud Pie, is a style of twentieth-century American rich chocolate desserts variously composed of pudding (custard), cake, biscuits, ice cream, whipped cream, marshmallows, and liqueur presented in a cookie crust. Hot fudge or chocolate syrup completes the presentation. The dessert’s name playfully recalls the color and consistency of the warm, gooey, mud pies of childhood.
The concept of mud pie descends from European culinary traditions of combining creamy custards with cake or biscuits. Elizabethan-era trifle, nineteenth-century Viennese chocolate tortes, 1900s fudgy brownies, 1920s black bottom pie, 1950s ice cream novelties, and 1960s southern-style Glorified Brownies paved the culinary trail.
According to the earliest print reference for mud pie in the United States, it was made, but not invented, by the wife of a rising-star chef based in Long Beach, California, circa 1965. Early 1970s newspapers include mud pie recipes in readers’ exchange columns and in lists of local fair contest winners, suggesting that the recipe was circulating among home bakers at that time. In the mid-1970s the Chart House restaurant chain added mud pie to its dessert menu, elevating the confection’s popularity to the national level. Upscale restaurants, corporate kitchens, and home cooks embraced the mud. Although it is true that some mud pie recipes come from Mississippi, no evidence exists to suggest they originated there. Dirt Dessert is a simpler version assembled with packaged commercial products.
muffins are defined in various ways, depending on period, place, and the people describing them. To further complicate matters, muffin-type foods themselves are known by different names. Eighteenth-century teacakes, colonial American gems, Civil War cornmeal cupcakes, and nineteenth-century corn sticks all fall into the muffin family. Crumpets, scones, biscuits, and buns are close relations.
The English word “muffin” derives from the Low German Muffe (pl. Muffen), meaning “little cake.” Old French moflet or mouflet denotes a kind of soft bread.
There are two kinds of muffins: (1) English muffins, made with yeast, descend from ancient Celtic griddle cakes. Plain and chewy, they are gently pulled apart and served at breakfast or tea with jellies, preserves, honey, or butter. (2) American muffins are chemically leavened, enriched, semi-sweet quick breads baked in individual portions. Although American muffins can be split, warmed, toasted, and spread with dairy products or fruit preserves, they are generally consumed “as is” at room temperature for breakfast, brunch, or light snacks.
American muffin flavors generally mirror popular quick breads. Instead of being baked in loaf pans, the batter is spooned into hoops, patty pans, gem pans, or muffin tins. Traditional flavors include corn (hominy, mush, Indian), blueberry, apple, milk (buttermilk, cream), rice, oatmeal, banana, and zucchini. “Healthy” muffins contain bran and graham. Savvy consumers examine fat and carbohydrate content to determine the “healthiness” of the product.
American-style mini-muffins were trendy in the 1930s. Oversized gourmet muffins were promoted in the 1980s. Muffin tops (muffin crowns) were introduced in the 1990s. Contemporary palates embrace savory muffins (macaroni & cheese), super-sweet presentations (raspberry chocolate chunk), and experimental flavor combinations (chocolate carrot).
mulled wine, a hot blended drink made of wine, sugar, fruit, and spices, has been known since at least Roman times. Popular throughout Europe, most versions are made with dry red wine or rich fortified wines, such as port, or a mixture of the two. Sometimes spirits or liqueur is added.
The wine is sweetened with sugar (best first dissolved into a syrup) or honey (traditional in southeastern Europe), and seasoned with a variety of spices (whole rather than powdered), such as cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, mace, ginger, allspice, star anise, vanilla, cardamom, peppercorns, juniper berries, and fennel seeds. For maximum flavor the spices are best left to infuse overnight or are cooked in the sugar syrup and strained before serving. Other additions can include lemon or orange juice and peel, the inclusion of clove-studded oranges being typical of a similar drink called bishop. Chopped apple, raisins, and almonds can also be added and served with the wine. Depending on the combination of ingredients, the wine may be sweet, spicy, or fruity. Mulled wine with cinnamon and egg yolks was considered a hot and healthy drink until the early nineteenth century. See egg drinks.
The drink’s various names refer to the wine being heated, boiled, or burnt. The word “mulled” for heated wine first appeared in the early seventeenth century but is of unknown origin. Contemporary mulled wine is not boiled, as the high heat burns off the alcohol and removes the wine’s character.
German Glühwein and Scandinavian glögg are popular at Christmas and the New Year. Both names mean “glowing-hot wine,” and they are often made with raisins, almonds, and cardamom and served with spiced biscuits. In the United States, National Mulled Wine Day is unofficially celebrated on 3 March, though it is unclear who proclaimed this date. Likely, it is a (misguided) marketing ploy by wine or spice producers, as the date is late in the season for the enjoyment of hot wine.
As wine and fruit juice are corrosive, pottery or silver vessels were traditionally used for mulled wine, or a red-hot poker was plunged directly into the liquid to heat it. Modern recipes recommend the use of noncorrosive stainless-steel or enamel pots.
See also fortified wine; gingerbread; hippocras; and spices.
munchies, a term used to describe any general feeling of hunger, is most often associated with the intense hunger experienced after the use of marijuana. Consequently, those experiencing the munchies are often not particular about how they assuage their cravings. Anything from gourmet cuisine to cold, five-day-old pizza can be effective. However, sweets are often considered to provide the quickest and most satisfying relief. After all, the brain associates the sweet with coveted energy for the body, and there is convincing evidence that marijuana use intensifies the enjoyment of sweet things.
A noted scientific study conducted by Japan’s Kyushu University in conjunction with the Monell Center in Philadelphia has found that cannabinoids, the active ingredient in marijuana, act directly on taste receptors on the tongue to enhance sweet taste. In other words, marijuana makes sweets taste even sweeter. Mice given cannabinoids consistently experienced enhanced sweet taste responses, while there was no effect whatsoever on responses to salty, savory, or bitter taste stimuli.
Numerous websites for marijuana aficionados present lists of favorite foods for satisfying the munchies; sweets consistently account for half or more, with salty and savory foods comprising the remainder. Most frequently mentioned sweets include candy, ice cream, cookies, pastries, and soft drinks.