Nanaimo bar is a type of unbaked cookie that is assembled in a pan, chilled, and then cut into rectangles. The bar is made up of three layers: a cocoa, coconut, and graham cracker crumb base; a layer of custard buttercream; and a topping of chocolate.

The Nanaimo bar is perhaps best described as a product of industry. It is an amalgam of several processed foods, containing as it does white sugar, confectioner’s sugar, cocoa, vanilla custard powder, chocolate baking squares, graham cracker crumbs, and dried coconut. Such innovations certainly reduce preparation time. They also hint at the bar’s provenance: the recipe most likely came together when such ingredients were increasingly available, affordable, and popular. The Nanaimo bar made one of its first published appearances in 1953, in pseudonymous Edith Adams’ Fourteenth Prize Cookbook, part of a series of readers’ prize-winning recipes published by the newspaper Vancouver Sun.

The city of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, has played a substantial role in ensuring the longevity and widespread popularity of its eponymous dessert. From a mayor-initiated competition to determine the ultimate Nanaimo bar recipe (1986), to the current “Nanaimo Bar Trail Map” featuring local eateries that make, sell, and deconstruct the bar, the now iconic treat has become a product of the tourism industry. As a home-baked dessert, the Nanaimo bar also enjoys a long-standing presence at church lunches, afternoon teas, fund-raisers, potlucks, family reunions, and wedding or baby showers. However, this catering to family and community appetites generally remains outside official discourse.

Maple Sugar

Although many trees such as birch (Betula spp.), ash (Fraxinus spp.), hickory (Carya spp.), and box elder (Acer negundo) have sap that can be made into sweet syrup, or evaporated for sugar, maples (Acer spp.) have rich and very high-volume sap. See maple syrup and sap. Chippewa, Iroquois, Potawatomi, Dakota, and other tribes living in maple-growing regions made “Indian sugar” and maple syrup from “sugar trees” or maples, with the sugar maple (Acer saccharin) the most prolific in yield. Maple sugar was described in treaties as a tribal right and a significant part of the diet. If correctly tapped, the trees were not damaged and were used annually for years.

In March or April depending on the latitude, during the Sugar Moon, the “juice” or sap was at the peak of sweetness. Hollowed trees were filled with hot rocks and the collected sap was boiled and evaporated to create maple sugar. In later years, iron kettles were used for boiling the sap. Sap was sometimes allowed to sour to create “vinegar.” Thimble berries, a type of blackberry (Rebus Canadensis), were mixed with maple sap and water to create a beverage used by the Iroquois in longhouse ceremonies. On occasion the sap was fermented and used to create beverages like beer. Maple sugar was a stable commodity more easily transported, stored, and traded than maple syrup. The sugar cakes made were used to season food, frequently instead of salt, in all forms of cookery; they were also mixed with other foods and added to hot or cold drinks, depending on the time of year. Birch bark molds weighing 100 pounds apiece were a trade commodity, and maple sugar was sometimes used as currency. Small, formed maple sugar cakes were made into shapes like flowers or bear paws and decorated with porcupine quills as special gifts, or they were offered for sale. Potawatomi children made candy by cooling maple sap in the snow. Large quantities of maple sugar meant food for the winter months, a necessity for survival for many tribal groups.

Corn, Maize, Indian Corn

Some archaeologists have recently speculated that corn was developed as an important domesticated plant not for the food value of the ears, but primarily as a source of sugar. By removing the ears from the stalk when they are young or “green,” the ears will have absorbed some of the sugar but the stalk will still hold most of the sugar. An early explorer writes from Roanoke in 1585 that “we have found here maize … whose ear yieldeth corn for bread … and the cane maketh very good and perfect sugar.” In caves throughout the Southwest and Utah, archaeologists have found discarded quids of yucca (Yucca spp.), mesquite beans (Prosopis spp.), maize husks (Zea mays), bulrush plants (Scirpus spp.), agave (Agave spp.), and prickly pear (Opuntia spp.). Chewing quids of these sweet plants would have been like indulging in a candy bar, with the quids discarded, for future archaeologists to find, when they were no longer sweet.

In a process called “sweet corning,” the ears were picked when sweet and cooked; the kernels were dried and later reconstituted by placing them in hot water. When these kernels were ground and combined with water, they made a sweet drink. Soft and sweet corn, called “papoon,” was a food favored by many children of the northeastern tribal groups. The Corn Planting Moon in May was followed in August by the Green Corn Moon. In the Southwest, the Hopi would make corn balls from finely ground sweet corn by mixing the corn with water and potash, and cooking it by dropping the balls in boiling water, or baking them in corn husks. The Cheyenne used a similar process for corn balls that figured in their eagle-catching ceremony. Numerous tribes throughout much of the United States grew various types of corn, including sweet corn. The Iroquois evaporated cornstalk syrup to make a corn sugar. The Pawnee dried cornsilk and mixed it with ground corn as a sweetener. The Hopi would use baked and dried corn kernels to sweeten dishes during the winter. Masticated corn was also used to sweeten foods. Dried and roasted kernels were mixed with cornstalk syrup to create a candy that sometimes included seeds and nuts.

After maple sugar collection, usually in March, the Mohawk would prepare for corn cultivation. Green corn was ripened in water for several months and then eaten as candy. The Iroquois preserved green or young corn by parching it over a fire and then removing the kernels from the cob. This allowed the corn kernels to be stored and reconstituted later with water. Once ground, this meal was mixed with maple sugar and would be taken on hunting or other trips. It could be mixed with water and eaten either cold or hot. Mohawk corncakes sometimes included vegetables or fruit, such as squash or berries, and could be made into betrothal or funeral cakes. The cornstalk was used as a storage container for maple sugar and other items, with corncobs as stoppers (cobs at the time were much smaller than our modern ones).

Stevia

Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni is known for its sweet taste. Native to the New World, over 80 species of Stevia exist. The plant’s range was restricted to temperate parts of the United States, Central America, and South America. It was mainly used for medicinal purposes, and many of its varieties actually have a bitter taste. See stevia.

Honey

Honeybees arrived in North America in the seventeenth century, traveling by sea with European immigrants, and beekeeping quickly spread in the American colonies. Some bees escaped and established feral populations, whereas others remained domesticated and cared for by the colonists. The arrival of honeybees in a new area was said to signal to the Native Americans that the colonists were not far behind. See honey.

Juniper

With Junipernus spp. quite abundant in certain areas with a diverse range, juniper berries are quite sweet and were eaten by the Utes and other tribes. The Apache roasted the fruit; other tribes dried the fruit, crushed and stored it, or used it as a spice. Gum from the juniper was also chewed as a special treat. The Navaho ground the fruit to eat in corn mush and also to make into candy.

Mesquite

Honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) and other varieties of mesquite (Prosopis spp.) similarly have a wide range throughout the South and Southwest and were heavily used by many Native peoples. When the beans are ground and mixed with water and dried in the sun, the mixture creates a very sweet cake. Pods are also mashed and boiled, and the gum is eaten as a candy. Sometimes this gum is mixed with saguaro syrup to create a conserve. The pods are eaten raw like candy or ground and mixed with water to make a drink, which Gary Paul Nabhan (1985) has described as “sweet, like carob or chocolate pudding in flavor and texture.”

Saguaro

Saguaro (Carnegia gigantea) fruit is much appreciated by the Apache, Pima, and Papago. It is eaten raw or dried in the sun; the fruit is cooked into a type of butter, while the juice is made into a jam, as is the pulp; the dried fruit is shaped into blocks as a way of preserving it for future use. Strained, boiled pulp is thickened into a light brown syrup used as a sweetener.

Agave

The leaves and hearts of the American century plant (Agave spp. and Agave americana) are cooked on hot stones for several days, then eaten or pounded into flat cakes that have a sweet taste. They are very fibrous and can be carried while traveling, although the fiber is not swallowed. The heart of the plant and fruit heads are also cooked, dried, and eaten as candy. The Apache take the thick, juicy base of the leaves and center to make a “head” that is baked slowly in a pit oven of heated stones covered with dirt until it turns very sweet.

Fan Palm, California Fan Palm

The fruit of the fan palm (Washingtonia filifera), which is very sweet, is eaten raw or sun-dried; the juice is mixed with water for a beverage.

Prickly Pear

The tuna or fruit of the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.) is used by the Apache, who boil it down into a stiff jam they call “tuna cheese” or queso de tuna. The tuna is also pit-roasted, dried, and made into jelly.

Berries and Fruit

Native American grapes (Vitis vinifera, Vitis spp.)—Muscadine and other varieties—had broad geographic distribution and were eaten fresh, dried, crushed, and preserved. They were used to make all sorts of cakes and preserves by a wide range of tribal groups, including the Mendocino, Cherokee, Iroquois, Lakota, and Pawnee. Seasonal berries and fruits included blueberries (also called huckleberries or hurtle berries) (Vaccinium spp.), raspberries (Rubus spp.), blackberries (Rubus spp.), and Fragaria Virginia and other varieties of strawberries (Fragaria spp.), as well as various fruits of the Prunus spp. family, including plums, cherries, and peaches. (The last of these was introduced by the Spanish but quickly spread by Native Americans.) All were highly prized as fresh fruits by varied tribal groups, but as a result of their perishable and seasonal nature, they were frequently sun-dried for future use, or made into preserves and concentrated syrups. Dried fruit was reconstituted with water and made into cakes with cornmeal, or cooked into a sauce. The dried cakes were used as travel food by the Iroquois. The Navajo considered strawberries a delicacy.

Hickory

Hickory (Carya spp.) nuts were pounded by the Creek and placed in boiling water, then strained to yield a thick “milk,” described by John Bartram in the eighteenth century as being as sweet and as rich as fresh cream. This milk was used with cornmeal to make cakes and as an ingredient in cooking. The nuts were also eaten plain or roasted and used as seasoning.

Pinyon and Various Pines

Pinyon (Pinus spp.) are found throughout the Great Plains and parts of the Southwest. The nuts are a special delicacy, and the sap is used for candy and can be chewed like gum.

Camas

The explorers Lewis and Clark wrote that “among these last [roots] is one which is round and much like an onion in appearance and sweet to the taste; it is called Quamash and is eaten either in its natural state, or boiled into a kind of soup or made into a cake called ‘pasheco.’ After our long abstinence, this was a sumptuous treat.” The root of camas (Camassia quamash), tasting a little like a pumpkin, was used from the Rocky Mountains west and throughout California.

Sweet Root

The peeled roots of sweet root (Cymopterus newberryi) have a pleasant taste and are eaten by the Hopi and Navajo.

Sweet Potato

The Cherokee and Seminole used the tubers of the sweet potato plant (Ipomoea batatas) for food, including roasting in ashes and mixing with cornmeal to form a kind of bread.

Public Holidays and Feast Days

The Dutch added luster to public celebrations by baking all manner of delicacies, and they took this custom with them when they fanned out to other continents in the seventeenth century. On New Year’s Eve, Dutch immigrants in the United States baked koekjes, wafels, and krulkoeken. The Americans adopted these delicacies as cookies, waffles, and crullers. Elsewhere, Dutch names for various types of pastry were taken over as well. For example, the name krakeling (cracknels) stuck in France and Indonesia, and wafel (waffle) in Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia.

The most popular Dutch feast day, celebrated since the seventeenth century, is the feast of St. Nicholas (Sinterklaas). This holiday was brought to the United States by the Dutch, where Sinterklaas developed into Santa Claus. Dutch children were (and are) given sweets like marzipan (marsepein), fondant (borstplaat), gingerbread men (speculaaspoppen), and spiced biscuits (speculaasjes). See gingerbread; marzipan; and speculaas. St. Nicholas distributes spice nuts (pepernoten), ginger nuts (kruidnoten), gingerbread (taaitaai), meringues (schuimpjes), and confectionery (suikergoed). In the nineteenth century, the custom of consuming pastry and chocolate shaped in the form of letters—amandelletters, banketletters, boterletters, and chocoladeletters—was introduced for St. Nicholas Day.

Cookies of All Sorts

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the price of sugar dropped still further, which made sweets more affordable for increasing numbers of people. It became customary to fill pastry with almond paste, called banket. A fashion arose for serving coffee and tea, sweetened with sugar and accompanied by cookies or pastry, at home. In the nineteenth century a switch from cane sugar to industrially produced, cheaper beet sugar took place, resulting in an increase in sweets consumption and the production of all kinds of new products, each of which had its own name. See sugar beet. From 1900 on, specialized factories were set up to manufacture a wide assortment of cookies, including bastognekoeken, bitterkoekjes, eierkoeken, gevulde koeken, janhagel, jodenkoeken, lange vingers, makronen, mariakaakjes, pindarotsjes, and roze koeken—each made with distinct ingredients and methods.

Seeing in the New Year traditionally entails preparing deep-fried doughnut balls (oliebollen), apple turnovers (appelflappen), and apple fritters (appelbeignets). Christmas festivities include eating almond pastry rolls (banketstaven), Christmas loaves (kerstbroden, kerststollen), Christmas cookies (kerstkransjes), and turban-shaped cakes called tulbanden. See christmas.

Confectionery

During the Middle Ages, children were given sugar balls on special occasions, but specialized types of sweets date only to the end of the eighteenth century. The best known are bull’s eyes (babbelaars or toverballen), marshmallows (spekjes), dolly-mixture (tumtum), and acid drops (zuurballen or zuurtjes). Fairground attractions include cinnamon sticks (kaneelstokken), nougat (noga), cotton candy (suikerspinnen), and sticks of rock sugar (zuurstokken). See fairs. A typical Dutch custom, known since the late eighteenth century, is to offer people rusks with aniseed comfits (beschuit met muisjes) on the birth of a child: blue ones for a boy and pink for a girl. See comfit.

Thanks to Dutch innovations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chocolate became available in the form of tablets, slabs, and bars. In the late eighteenth century, Caspar Flick’s Amsterdam chocolate factory began manufacturing chocolates that are still called flikjes. In 1828 the Dutchman Casparus van Houten Sr. took out a patent for an inexpensive way to separate the fat from cocoa beans, which boosted the production of chocolate products. See cocoa and van houten, coenraad johannes. In 1907 the Dutch firm of Kwatta produced the first wrapped chocolate bar, which was intended for the army. The best-known names of chocolate bars were Kwatta and Koetjesreep, literally “cow-bar,” a kind of imitation chocolate bar with a cow on the wrapper. These Dutch products have now been replaced by international brands like Mars, Snickers, and M&M’s. But Dutch youngsters still relish a bread topping called hagelslag, chocolate sprinkles, which dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century. See sprinkles.

A typical Dutch product is licorice (drop), a delicacy in the Netherlands since the eighteenth century. The Netherlands is currently the largest licorice-producing nation in the European Union. There is a wide selection of sweet and salty types, and a corresponding variety of names, mostly based on the taste, such as anijsdrop and laurierdrop (anisette and bay-leaf flavored), or on the form, such as muntdrop and veterdrop (coin or shoestring-shaped). See licorice.

Desserts

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, people began to mark the end of a meal by eating a simple sweet dessert, which was given the Dutch name of toetje ([little] afters). Of the many possible offerings, a typical selection might include lammetjespap or zoetepap (meal pap), griesmeelpudding (semolina pudding), havermoutpap (oatmeal porridge), karnemelkspap (buttermilk mush), rijstepap (rice pudding), and watergruwel (gruel). In the 1960s and 1970s, all segments of the population got into the habit of ending dinner with a ready-made dairy dessert. The Dutch Dairy Board strongly promoted a variety of dairy products like vla (custard), pudding, and yogurt in various flavors, sold in cartons that could be kept fresh in the fridge. Since then a multitude of varieties of this typically Dutch dessert have been produced, with continually changing names.

Burema, Lambertus. De voeding in Nederland van de Middeleeuwen tot de twintigste eeuw. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1953.

Jobse-van Putten, Jozien. Eenvoudig maar voedzaam: Cultuurgeschiedenis van de dagelijkse maaltijd in Nederland. Amsterdam: SUN, 1995.

Van der Sijs, Nicoline. Chronologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands: De ouderdom en herkomst van onze woorden en betekenissen. Amsterdam: Veen, 2001.

Van der Sijs, Nicoline. Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops: The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.

Van Otterloo, Anneke H. Eten en eetlust in Nederland (1840–1990): Een historisch-sociologische studie. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1990.

Nicoline van der Sijs; translated by Frits Beukema

neuroscience, the study of the human nervous system, offers a number of intriguing insights into the perception of sweetness. Sweetness is one of the most important sensory signals for our brain to detect, typically signaling calories, which are essential for energy and growth. While sweetness can be detected (or sensed) only by a certain class of taste buds in the oral cavity (concentrated primarily on the tongue), the neuroscience evidence demonstrates just how important the integration of cues from every one of our senses is to the perception of how sweet something tastes (to us) and also how much we happen to like the experience. See sweetness preference.

Taste buds sensitive to sweetness can be found all over the tongue but tend to be concentrated around the tip. The taste buds transmit information to the brain about the chemical properties of the soluble (or sapid) compounds in the mouth. The latest evidence demonstrates the existence of a taste map in the brain (specifically in the insula), with sweet tastes activating one area, sour tastes another, and so on.

Difficulty of Directly Tasting Sweetness

The various receptors found in the oral cavity can interact and mutually suppress one another. This phenomenon, known as sensory suppression, makes it difficult for the brain to assess just how sweet a food really is (based on nothing more than what happens to be signaled by the various gustatory receptors). What is more, the temperature at which a food or drink is tasted can also play havoc with our ability to ascertain the sweetness of that which we are consuming. Just think about how cloyingly sweet most colas taste when served warm. The actual sweetness obviously has not changed—what has changed, and dramatically, is our perception of the taste. However, even if we were able to accurately ascertain the sweetness of a foodstuff, we certainly cannot stick everything we come across into our mouths in order to decide whether or not it tastes sweet.

Multisensory Perception of Sweetness

Given the difficulty of assessing sweetness directly (or any other taste property, for that matter), our brains have evolved to utilize information from the other senses, such as olfaction and vision, in order to try and infer, or predict, whether a particular foodstuff is likely to be sweet or not, long before it ever reaches our mouth. Put simply, the challenge for the brain is to integrate the gustatory cues from the tongue with olfactory information from the nose, as well as any oral-somatosensory, visual, and even auditory cues that may be available. See olfaction; sound; and vision. Sometimes our brain combines signals from the senses in ways that are surprising. So, for example, the brain frequently shows evidence of sensory (often visual) dominance. What this means in practice is that if one changes the color (or visual appearance) of a food, it could well change the perceived taste or flavor of that food. Evidence also suggests that the brain sometimes combines sensory cues in ways that are nonlinear (either super-additively or sub-additively). Such observations, worked out in the cognitive neuroscience laboratory, have created great excitement in the food and flavor industries, as they seem to offer the promise of delivering flavors more cheaply (and, who knows, perhaps more healthily) by getting the combination of food-related sensory cues just right.

In nature, a natural correlation exists between the ripening of fruits and their transition from green and sour to the redder, riper, and hence sweeter end of the spectrum. Perhaps as a result of our brain’s picking up on this correlation, coloring a food or beverage red has been shown to be a particularly good cue to sweetness (e.g., in a beverage). See food colorings. Indeed, the very development of trichromatic color vision in our hairy ancestors may have developed in order to enable them to more effectively pick out the ripe red fruits out among the dark green canopy. Whatever the cause, nowadays, as the expression goes, we eat with our eyes. As such, our brain uses visual cues in order to determine, or predict, what a food will taste like. This is something that appears to occur relatively automatically, and within a matter of milliseconds. Hence, one of the ways in which the sweetness of a food or beverage can be changed is simply by changing its color. Our brain uses the color to make a prediction, and as long as our experience matches it when we put whatever it is in our mouth, we will likely see “assimilation”—that is, we will experience what we expected. It is only when the experience (e.g., of sweetness) is drastically different from what we expected that one may see a “disconfirmation of expectation,” which, on occasion, can lead to a rebound effect whereby we rate the food as tasting less sweet than we otherwise would.

People in the West describe certain smells such as vanilla, strawberry, and caramel as sweet, yet anyone who has ever tried biting into a pod knows that vanilla actually tastes very bitter. So why then do most of us describe such smells as sweet? Is this anything more than merely a metaphorical use of language? The evidence suggests that it is. Indeed, a fascinating body of research by Dick Stevenson and his colleagues in Australia has demonstrated that foods really do taste sweeter when a sweet-smelling aroma is added. This factor might be part of the reason why vanilla ice cream is so successful, as at very low temperatures the taste buds do not work so well, as noted above. It appears that our brains learn the associations between particular (especially novel) aromas and particular taste qualities within a few exposures to their paired presentation in food and drink. Learning has even been shown to take place in the absence of any awareness of the contingency. Such exposure-dependent learning helps to explain why it is that aromas like benzaldehyde (the cherry-almond smell associated with Bakewell tart) will likely smell sweet to a Westerner, whereas consumers from Japan, where such desserts are uncommon, may instead associate (and hence integrate) the smell of benzaldehyde with monosodium glutamate (MSG) because those ingredients co-occur more frequently in the foods of the region, such as, for example, in pickled condiments. These multisensory interactions between taste and smell in food can sometimes be super-additive.

Neuroscientists distinguish between sensory-discriminative and hedonic responses to foods. On the one hand, we can estimate how sweet a particular dessert is—this is a sensory-discriminative judgment. On the other, we may find that level of sweetness very pleasant, or we might judge it excessively sweet—this is a hedonic response. By putting people into a brain scanner, and seeing where the pattern of blood flow changes (“which part of the brain lights up,” as it were), neuroscientists have been able to establish that different parts of the brain are responsible for coding these different responses to taste and flavor. The insula, often referred to as the primary taste cortex, appears to code the sweetness of a food (that is a sensory-discriminative attribute), whereas the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a roughly walnut-sized structure located between the eyes and back a bit, codes for the reward (or hedonic) value of a food. So, for example, if a hungry participant is fed a sweet dessert, something that she really likes, then activity will likely initially be seen in both of these brain structures. However, if the participant continues to eat until sated, then the activity in the OFC will drop off, while the activity in the insula will remain relatively unchanged. The OFC not only codes for the reward value of food; it is also a key integration site where gustatory, olfactory, visual, and oral-somatosensory textural cues, and presumably even auditory cues, are integrated. Intriguing neuroimaging research has shown that the activity in the OFC increases when we experience a congruent combination of taste and smell (sweetness combined with the smell of strawberry, say) and declines when we are exposed to an incongruent combination of inputs (sweetness with the smell of chicken broth, say). Such brain responses can be thought of in terms of the notion of super-additivity and sub-additivity.

Intriguingly, our response to sweetness changes over the course of development. Young children appear to like sweetness more than adults, presumably a sensible strategy for a growing organism. Even as adults, though, the population seems to segment into sweet likers and sweet dislikers. Such differences reflect more than simply a difference in sensitivity to sweetness. Future neuroimaging research may be able to help scientists determine whether such differences, both developmental and individual, are reflected in the response of the OFC, or in some other brain region.

One bizarre neurological condition that highlights the importance of the insula to our perception of, and response to, food comes from those rare patients suffering from Gourmand’s syndrome. Following brain damage, such individuals suddenly develop a profound and enduring interest in everything food-related. Brain scans have revealed that these rare patients have normally suffered damage to the right anterior part of the brain. Such neurological damage can shift a person from “eating to live” to “living to eat.”

Prescott, J. Taste Matters: Why We Like the Foods We Do. London: Reaktion, 2012.

Small, D. M. “Flavor Is in the Brain.” Physiology and Behavior 107 (2012): 540–552.

Spence, C., and B. Piqueras-Fiszman. The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.

Trivedi, B. “Hardwired for Taste: Research into Human Taste Receptors Extends beyond the Tongue to Some Unexpected Places.” Nature 486 (2012): S7.

Charles Spence

New England (U.S.) is a region known for such classic early American desserts as pumpkin pie, Indian pudding, and Indian meal pound cake, all of which evolved from English recipes adapted to the native ingredients corn and pumpkins. Another group of sweets, including apple and mincemeat pies, apple dumplings, hard and soft gingerbreads, and Election cake, relied on the apples and wheat that settlers had brought with them, along with familiar recipes from their English homeland.

Some of these desserts migrated westward as New Englanders settled elsewhere in the country. Others nearly vanished, overtaken by new styles in sweet cookery, particularly cakes, cookies, and cold desserts in the nineteenth century, a process speeded by the adoption of chemical leavens, inexpensive fine wheat flour and white sugar, and ingredients like baking chocolate. See baker’s; chemical leaveners; and sugar. In the twentieth century, commercial products and recipes from test kitchens broadened dessert offerings, while blurring the distinction between national dessert trends and traditional regional ones.

Pies and Pudding

Apple, mincemeat, and pumpkin pies have graced New England’s Thanksgiving dinner and other significant dinners for nearly three centuries, in addition to being a popular choice for daily fare. See pie. In her diary, midwife Martha Ballard of Augusta, Maine, recorded making these three pies nearly year-round in the early 1800s, rarely mentioning any others. Puritan settlers did not observe Christmas, with which mincemeat was strongly associated in England. Unwilling to give up mincemeat, however, they repurposed the pie for Thanksgiving celebrations, which made seasonal sense—as a kind of butchering-season preserve, mincemeat recipes call for meat, suet, apples, raisins, spices, and cider. Cooks baked apple pie from fresh apples from autumn through winter, as long as they stored well, and from dried apples when the fresh ran out. Colonial cooks discovered that sliced pumpkin cooked up much the way apples did, but the custard-based pumpkin pie we know today was developed from English milk puddings. See pudding.

The New England version of the milk and cornmeal pudding called Indian pudding is sweetened with molasses. (Southern versions usually use sugar.) The several sorts of Indian pudding varied in consistency from firm enough to be boiled in a pudding bag to baked puddings with eggs and even flour added. Indian pudding is still made occasionally at home today, and it is sometimes served in restaurants.

Apple dumplings—pastry-wrapped apples—were boiled individually in cloths in early New England. They were replaced by baked versions in the later 1800s. Other nineteenth-century apple desserts, including homely pandowdys and apple roly-poly puddings using pastry or biscuit-like dough (sometimes boiled in a cloth, sometimes baked), gave way in the 1900s to nationally popular crisps with streusel toppings. See fruit desserts, baked.

Molasses Cakes and Gingerbreads

Molasses, derived from cane sugar and imported from the West Indies as a sweetener, predominated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for common baking in most New England households. See molasses. White or brown cane sugars accrued to the gentry and, up until the later 1800s and early 1900s, were reserved for special occasions and for preserves, except in economically depressed regions and households. Apple cider reduced to thick syrup, called cider molasses, served well as a substitute.

Several varieties of gingerbread, including hard sugar and soft molasses gingerbreads, commonly appear in American cookbooks, and they were popular in New England as well, where molasses was most commonly used. Subcategories of gingerbreads evolved nationally into varieties of soft molasses and ginger cookies. In New England, versions of soft molasses cookies using drippings or bacon fat were made on fishing boats at sea and in lumber camps. See drop cookies and gingerbread.

Molasses-sweetened cakes and doughnuts, common in the past all over New England, persisted in more isolated parts of the region, particularly in Maine, where they can still be found, though rarely. See doughnuts. Molasses blueberry cake, still made there, is an example, though the sugar-sweetened one is more common.

Maple sugar desserts are another New England specialty. Nearly always, in the earliest days of maple sap harvesting and boiling, the goal was to produce maple sugar as a substitute for cane sugar, or to produce maple molasses. Baked goods, confections, puddings, and pies made with maple sugar and syrup carried the distinctive maple flavor. In more recent times, maple syrup, most strongly associated with Vermont, is used in desserts for its own sake. See maple sugaring and maple syrup.

Election Cake, a yeast-leavened cake made in the tradition of English festival cakes and rich bread, was traditionally associated with annual election and militia training days during the late 1700s and into the early 1800s. In-town households expecting to offer hospitality to rural visitors coming for the day made the cakes with enriched yeast dough containing eggs, butter, sugar, and currants or raisins; they were also sometimes iced. See celebration cakes.

Brownies and chocolate chip cookies are now ubiquitous American desserts, but they appeared first in New England. In the 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book, Fannie Merritt Farmer included a brown-sugar version she called “Brownies”; today they are called “blondies.” She published the chocolate-flavored brownie recipe in 1906. See brownies and farmer, fannie. Ruth Wakefield, in Whitman, Massachusetts, is generally credited with mixing broken chocolate bars into brown-sugar dough to create Toll House Cookies, named for a restaurant she and her husband operated.

Travelers and locals continue to enjoy many of New England’s traditional desserts. For example, chefs offer Indian pudding on dessert menus, and it is conveniently canned for home consumption. Pies are de rigueur at church and lodge bean suppers, and local eateries known for serving them have parking lots full of cars.

Child, Lydia Maria. The American Frugal Housewife. 12th ed. Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Co., 1833. Reprint, Worthington, Ohio: Worthington Historical Society, 1965.

Cornelius, Mary Hooker. The Young Housekeeper’s Friend: Or, a Guide to Domestic Economy and Comfort. Boston: Tappan, Whittemore, & Mason, 1850.

Farmer, Fannie Merritt. The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896. New York: Crown, 1973. Facsimilie reprint of the first edition of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.

Parloa, Maria. The Appledore Cookbook, Containing Practical Receipts for Plain and Rich Cookery. Boston: Andrew F. Graves, 1880.

Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery: Or, the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables. New York: Dover, 1984. Facsimile of the 1796 version, with introduction by Mary Tolford Wilson.

Sandra L. Oliver

New Orleans, the Queen City of the South and the largest city in the state of Louisiana, abounds with sugar-laden dishes, served from breakfast through dessert, many with centuries of tradition attached. As the oldest and most historic sugarcane-producing U.S. state Louisiana, not surprisingly, is known for its tremendous affection for sweets. Jesuit priests planted the first sugarcane there in 1751, and by late 1795, Etienne de Bore had perfected the process of crystalizing brown sugar from cane. See sugar and sugar refining.

Even New Orleans’s governmental rule played a part in the prevalence of sweets. Until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Code Noir governed societal norms among the white, free black, and slave population. Under the code, slaves were allowed to purchase their freedom and, additionally, all slaves were allowed one free day each week. On the slave’s day off (frequently Sunday), many became street vendors, peddling tempting sweet treats such as tac-tac (popcorn balls bound with cane sugar) and earning money that eventually bought freedom for many of the enslaved and their families. See race and slavery. Sugared native pecans served in paper cones, flat ginger cakes called stage planks, and la colle—a cake made with molasses and roasted peanuts and pecans—were also popular street foods.

Praline vendors abounded, as did calas ladies. See praline. Their special street call “Calas, calas! Belle calas tout chaud!” rang through the streets of the French Quarter, the Vieux Carré. Calas are ancient rice cakes that originated in the rice-growing regions of West Africa, namely Ghana, and were popularized in New Orleans by the enslaved from that area. Like the more famous beignet sold from stands in the French Market, calas were often consumed for breakfast. Rice was also an integral ingredient in riz au lait, a type of rice pudding made with leftover rice and milk and served warm for breakfast. It was called rice blancmange when chilled for dessert. See blancmange and pudding.

A vendor sells pralines in New Orleans’s historic French Quarter in 1929. ngs image collection / the art archive at art resource, n.y.

By the early 1900s, horse- and mule-drawn carts traveled New Orleans’s suburbs selling waffles and other sweets. Sam Cortese, a son of Sicilian immigrants, began selling Roman Taffy Chewing Candy from a cart in 1910. Today, Cortese’s grandson Ronald Kottemann continues the family tradition using the original, mule-drawn cart.

Sicilians also popularized a shaved ice treat flavored with brightly colored, flavored sugar syrups sold from handcarts in the streets. In 1939 a New Orleans machinist, Ernest Hansen, invented an electric ice shaver that transformed blocks of ice into a fluffy, fine, snow-like ice that became known as the Sno Bliz or, more commonly, the SnoBall. See shave ice.

Flour was available from the city’s earliest days, and the thrifty Creoles never wasted any. New Orleans French bread (known from the twentieth century as “poor boy bread”) is a unique, light, airy loaf with a shattering crust that becomes stale within 24 hours. Slices of stale French bread soaked in egg and sugared milk, laced with brandy or vanilla, were called pain perdu or “lost bread” and served with cane syrup for breakfast. See cane syrup.

Another favorite use for stale French bread is a custard-like bread pudding incorporating local ingredients like pecans, topped with liqueur-laced sauces, and served either cold or warm. Canned fruit cocktail became a popular addition in the early twentieth century, and later, white chocolate became another. Commander’s Palace restaurant is renowned for its soufflé-style bread pudding.

Creole cream cheese, a soft cheese much like a fromage blanc, was made by clabbering fresh milk. It was most frequently eaten sweetened with sugar for breakfast but was also served frozen for dessert once ice became available in the early 1800s. See cheese, fresh.

Although claimed across the southern United States as a classic dessert, pecan pie is also a Louisiana favorite. Native pecans are an important ingredient in a cookie called “cocoons.” The pointed oval, sugared shortbread cookies were named for their resemblance to the silky threads that envelop the local moth’s larvae in autumn.

By the late 1800s, strawberries and citrus were widely cultivated in south Louisiana. Springtime strawberries are preserved, incorporated into cakes, and frozen into Sicilian-style ice. See italian ice. The citrus crop inspired sweets such as candied citrus peel and marmalade. See candied fruit and fruit preserves. Ambrosia, made with local satsuma oranges, imported coconut and sugar, and served in glistening crystal bowls, was a fixture of Christmas and other winter holiday celebrations. See ambrosia.

New Orleans became the nation’s top banana port in the early 1900s. In 1951 Owen Brennan, founder of Brennan’s Restaurant, asked his chef Paul Blange to create a flaming dessert utilizing the tropical fruit, and Bananas Foster was invented. See desserts, flambéed.

The king cake tradition, which originated in Catholic France, is a Mardi Gras staple. The brioche dough ring, sprinkled with sugar in Carnival colors of purple, green, and gold, contained a hidden favor, originally a bean. Over time the favor became a tiny porcelain doll and then a plastic baby doll. The recipient of the hidden favor was named king or queen for the day, and was usually tasked with purchasing the next king cake. See breads, sweet; carnival; and twelfth night cake.

Founded in 1855, the Elmer’s Candy Company still supplies New Orleanians with Heavenly Hash and Gold Brick chocolate Easter eggs. “Turtles,” small chocolate patties containing chopped pecans and sporting whole pecans to imitate a turtle’s legs and head, are another popular twentieth-century candy.

In 1933 Beulah Ledner created the Doberge cake, inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Dobos torta. See dobos torte. Thin sponge cake layers are filled with custards flavored with chocolate, lemon, or caramel and finished with buttercream and poured fondant icing. See fondant. Ledner sold her recipe and her business to Gambino’s Bakery, which continues to make the popular cakes today.

The story of New Orleans’s sweets would not be complete without the mention of sodas and cocktails. Local pharmacist I. L. Lyons created a bright red sugar syrup flavored with almond and vanilla that he named “Nectar.” When combined with soda water and ice cream, topped with whipped cream and a cherry, it became the iconic Nectar Soda sold at pharmacy soda fountains throughout the twentieth century. See soda fountain. Sweet cocktails like the Ramos Gin Fizz, Brandy Milk Punch, the Grasshopper, and the Hurricane were all invented in New Orleans, where they are still enjoyed.

Egypt

Egypt, separated from the rest of North Africa by a huge tract of Libyan desert, belongs more to the Middle East rather than to North Africa, both culturally and in its cuisine. See middle east. Most Egyptian sweets (as well as savory dishes) are closer to those of its neighbors to the East. Still, Egyptians have their own distinctive sweets, the most famous being om ʿAli (mother of ʿAli), a bread pudding made with very thin flatbread (reqaq) layered with mixed nuts and moistened with sugar-sweetened milk before baking. There are several stories behind the name, none of which can be verified. One dates the sweet to the first wife of the thirteenth-century ruler Sultan ʿIzz al-Dīn Aybak, whose son was named ʿAli. The sultan’s second wife also bore him a son. When the sultan died unexpectedly, it was assumed that the throne would pass on to the first-born ʿAli, but the second wife wanted power to go to her son. To prevent this, Umm ʿAli had the second wife killed, and then prepared the dessert to celebrate the first son’s ascension to the throne. Whether the sweet is really named after her cannot be verified, but what is certain is that om ʿAli is one of Egypt’s most iconic desserts, with a lovely, flaky texture when properly prepared.

Bassbussa is another typical Egyptian sweet, a sponge cake made with semolina and garnished with almonds, then soaked in sugar syrup. Bassbussa is found with slight variations in other Middle Eastern and North African countries that came under Ottoman rule (called nammura in Lebanon, hʾrisseh in Syria, and revani in Turkey).

Maghreb

Kaʾ b el-ghzal (gazelle’s horn) is the Moroccan sweet par excellence, made by wrapping the thinnest pastry dough around sweet almond paste flavored with orange blossom water and mastic (the dough is also made with orange blossom water). The filled dough is then shaped into a thin, raised crescent similar to a horn; hence its name. It is served at all celebrations and also offered with mint tea to visitors in between meals. Kaʾ b el-ghzal is also found in Algeria and Tunisia; however, in the latter country, kaʾ b el-ghzal describes a shortbread cookie made with chickpea or sorghum flour, whereas in Algeria, the pastry is similar to the Moroccan one. The Moroccan version is the finest and most delicate.

A proud sweets seller exhibits his dried fruits and confections in Morocco’s famous Marrakech souk. © raoul d.

North Africa does not have a tradition of specialist sweet makers comparable to that of the Arab world, where sweet making is the preserve of specialists. By contrast, North African home cooks know how to make the whole range of sweets and take pride in making their own pastries. They will only buy commercial sweets from pastry shops that employ women who were formerly home cooks like themselves. Each of these professional women has her own specialty; some make only warqa, the Moroccan analog to filo (known as malsuqa in Tunisia), made by dabbing a very wet dough onto a hot plate (tobsil) until the plate is covered with a very thin round sheet of pastry. See filo. Warqa is used in both savory and sweet preparations. Home cooks will sometimes hire these expert women pastry chefs to prepare sweets in large quantities when they are hosting a diffa (reception) for either a wedding or other celebration. Of course, as North Africa becomes more and more modern, increasing numbers of men are doing the same job.

Warqa is also used on its own to make bstila au lait (literally, “milk pastilla,” though it is actually made with custard). Sheets of warqa are fried and layered with custard, which is sprinkled with crushed toasted almonds and cinnamon. The flavoring of the custard varies but traditionally it is orange blossom water and ground mastic.

Mʾ hanncha is a variation on kaʾ b el-ghzal, in which instead of using pastry dough to wrap around the almond paste, cooks use warqa. In Morocco, the sweet is served sprinkled with powdered sugar and cinnamon; in Algeria, it is sometimes soaked in sugar syrup or honey.

Another typical Moroccan sweet is chʾ bakkiyya, which during Ramadan is served with harira, a thick soup that is the first thing people eat to break their fast. Known as griouch in Algeria and in some parts of Morocco, chʾ bakkiyya is made by plaiting thin strips of dough, which sometimes have a little ground sesame mixed in with the flour, to form small, intricate pastries that are fried and then dipped in hot honey or sugar syrup. North Africans traditionally used heated honey to sweeten their pastries, but today they more often use sugar syrup because it is cheaper. Sometimes the syrup is flavored with orange blossom water (Morocco and Algeria) or geranium water (Tunisia).

If kaʾ b el-ghzal is the Moroccan sweet par excellence, the Tunisian one is maqrud, stamped cookies filled with dates or crushed almonds that are fried, then dipped in honey or sugar syrup.

Health and Religion

In the West, people do not associate sweets with healthy eating, but in North Africa, some sweets are considered health-giving. One is the Moroccan amlou, a thick dip or spread made by finely crushing unpeeled toasted almonds with honey and argan oil to produce a luxurious almond “butter” to spread on crackers or bread or simply to scoop with a spoon. Sellou is another “medicinal” sweet given to women after childbirth to restore their health. It is a slightly different kind of nut butter made by grinding toasted or fried almonds and toasted sesame seeds and mixing them with toasted flour, cinnamon, anise, and mastic before moistening the mass with clarified butter. The clarified butter makes sellou last much longer than if it were made with regular butter. Some people make the mixture firm, whereas others make it loose.

The Tunisians have their own equivalent of sellou, called zrir, which can be made in several different ways—with ground sesame seeds, butter, and sugar syrup, or with added ground hazelnuts, pistachios, or walnuts. The Algerian version is called bsissa and is made with toasted chickpeas and wheat that are ground, then mixed with clarified butter and honey and served on the seventh day after the birth of a child.

A good time to sample sweets in North Africa is during Ramadan, when no food or drink is allowed to pass believers’ lips from sunrise to sunset. See ramadan. However, at dusk, the feasting starts. Typically, people ease back into eating and drinking with a few dates and a drink of water or juice. They then go to pray, and only after that do they sit down to a full meal, which always ends with sweets—at other times of year, fruit is the usual dessert. Because people stay up most of the night, receiving guests or visiting family and friends, sweets are an essential part of life during Ramadan, both as an offering to guests and as a present when one visits others, or even as a gift sent to loved ones. Sweets are also everywhere to be seen on the street, piled high in pastry shops and sold from street stalls that are set up temporarily during Ramadan.

See also blancmange; custard; fried dough; islam; and mastic.

Aït Mohamed, Salima. La cuisine egyptienne. Marseilles, France: Autres Temps, 1997.

Bennani-Smires, Latifa. La cuisine marocaine. Paris: J. P. Taillandier, 1971.

Boubezari, Karimène. Ma cuisine algérienne. Aix-en-Provence, France: Edisud, 2000.

Guinaudeau-Franc, Zette. Les secrets des cuisines en terre marocaine. Paris: J. P. Taillandier, 1981.

Kouki, Mohamed. Cuisine et pâtisserie tunisiennes. Tunis, Tunisia: Maison Tunisienne de l’Edition, 1977.

Anissa Helou

Nostradamus (1503–1566), born Michel de Nostradame in Saint-Rémy de Provence, was an itinerant apothecary, astrologer, and healer. As an apothecary, he perfected his skills in confectionery and jam making. From the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century in France, sugar was sold by the apothecaries’ guilds, because it was considered medicinal, warming, and an effective laxative. See guilds and medicinal uses of sugar. As sugar refining became more widespread across Europe, sugar came into greater use as a flavoring for food; a preservative of fruits, flowers, and some vegetables; and as ornament in confectionery.

Nostradamus produced a number of compilations of “useful secrets” covering jams, cosmetics, and electuaries, which were intended for high-born “ladies” of the elite, who would not have cooked, but who would have been concerned with beauty treatments, preserving fruit, and home remedies. His Traité des fardemens et des confitures (Treatise on Make-up and Jams) appeared in 1552; Bâtiment des recettes (Building of Recipes) and Excellent et moult utile opuscule (Excellent and Very Useful Little Work) were published in 1555. In these works, Nostradamus demonstrated his knowledge of both sugar and honey, explaining the processes of sugar refining and clarifying, and insisting on using the best ingredients. As he wrote in Opuscule, “From good wares good products are made, and from ugly or bad, bad work.” His recipes ran the gamut from preserved lemon and orange peels to quince jelly, marzipan, toothpaste, hair dye, remedies for plague, and love potions. Although Nostradamus remains best known today for his Prophesies—predictions written in rhyme—his contributions to the art of preserving and confectionery should not be overlooked.

Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.

Elizabeth Field

nougat is an elegant, crisp yet chewy aerated confection of honey, sugar, and egg whites containing nuts and sometimes dried fruits. It has a long history and several variations, identified with different names according to type and country of origin. Versions of nougat were probably known in ancient Greece and Rome, although the skills of early Arab confectioners seem to have refined the recipe into the pale, light versions predominant in Europe since the mid-sixteenth century. A tenth-century Persian text contains perhaps the most poetic celebration of its beauty, flavor and mouthfeel, describing nougat as looking as solid and luminous as silver, stuffed with exquisite nuts and flower-like dried fruits, and tasting as soft and sweet as lips.

Whether making the original Persian natif, Turkish gaz, French nougat, Spanish turrón, or Italian torrone, the basic technique is the same. Honey and sugar syrup are boiled to the cracking point, added to just-beaten egg whites, and hot, lightly roasted nuts, either whole or chopped, are mixed in. Once beaten together, the mass is poured into flat trays, generally lined with a layer of edible wafer paper, where it is spread or rolled to a thickness of 1 to 2.5 cm, topped with another layer of wafer paper, lightly pressed, cooled, and cut into rectangular bars or smaller rectangular pieces. Contemporary commercial nougat may have its texture manipulated to be shorter and less chewy with the addition of fat, milk powder, or confectioner’s sugar during the final beating.

Nougat can be made with any nut or mixture of nuts. Almonds are traditional, especially in regions with substantial almond production; they are often combined with pistachios, although there are also versions using hazelnuts, walnuts, or seeds. In some cases, dried fruits may be included, and variations on this theme are becoming more and more common in European and American sweetshops, as are chocolate-coated bars of nougat. See dried fruit. Smaller pieces of nougat enrobed in chocolate have long been included in preselected boxes of bite-sized chocolate sweets, and many common chocolate bars include nougat, whether in the form of chips, as in Toblerone, or with a filling based on a whipped chocolate nougat, like Milky Way or Mars Bars. See chocolates, boxed and mars. German nougat is an exception, being eggless, smooth, and chocolaty, and much more closely related to gianduja or praline. See praline.

Origins and Names

Although it is frequently suggested that the Romans had a nougat-related honey and nut confection called cupedia, the Latin word is, in fact, a general term for dainty, desirable delicacies, both sweet and savory. The Sicilian alternative name for torrone, cupeta, refers to this Latin root. The confection we know today owes more to its Arabic origins, and it is assumed that the Moors brought the necessary skills and ingredients (such as almond trees) with them to Spain in the eighth century, and that nougat entered France from Turkey via the port of Marseilles in the mid-sixteenth century. In neither case did the early Persian names of helva or natif travel with the confection; neither did the Arab confectioners’ tendency to perfume the nougat with spices or flower waters. See flower waters. The Italian and Spanish names refer to the roasted nuts (from the Latin torrere, “to toast”), whereas the French name evokes a nut cake (from the Latin nux, meaning “walnut,” and French gâteau, meaning “cake”). In other parts of Europe, such as Austria and Hungary, nougat’s name, translated as “Turkish honey,” refers to its mid-sixteenth-century arrival from Turkey.

Types of Nougat

Regardless of regional origin, there are three main categories of nougat, most readily distinguished by color.

White Nougat

White nougat with almonds is probably the most commonly recognized nougat, well known as nougat de Montélimar in France, torrone di Cremona or di Benevento (with hazelnuts) in Italy, or turrón di Alicante in Spain. It is made by heating sugar syrup or glucose with honey at 285° to 300°F (140° to 149°C), depending on how hard or chewy the confectioner wants the final result to be: the lower the temperature, the chewier the nougat (French-style nougat tends to be slightly chewier, whereas the Spanish versions aim for a crisper, crunchier texture). This hot, sweet mixture is then beaten into stiffly beaten egg whites until well incorporated and thick. Lightly roasted, skinned nuts (and fruit if desired) are added before finishing with edible paper as described above.

Brown Nougat

Light-brown nougats range from a slightly golden off-white to a more caramel hue and acquire most of their color from a second cooking of a white nougat mixture, which begins to caramelize the sugars, as in turrón di Agramut from Lleida in Catalonia. The darker caramel shades often result from the use of ground roasted nuts in the mixture, or from grinding up the result of the first cooking before the second caramelization, as in the Spanish Jijona turrón, which (unusually) has no paper on its outside.

Black Nougat

The closest in form to the Roman honey-nut confections itria—balls wrapped in paper—and flat-rolled gastris honey-nut sweets, this eggless, darkest of all nougats is known as nougatine in France and mandorlato in Italy. See gastris. It was made for sale in sweetshops in England in the early nineteenth century under the name “almond hardbake.” This type of nougat is very dark brown in color and has a slightly more brittle texture than other nougats. Cooked only once like white nougat, the sugar is caramelized rather than made into a syrup, and warmed honey is usually added in a higher proportion than in other recipes. This sweet mixture is heated to a somewhat higher temperature—up to 310°F (155°C)—and no egg white is used. Toasted nuts are added as usual. It is generally sandwiched between two pieces of edible paper and presented in a style similar to white nougat.

Seasonality

In southern Europe nougat is often thought of as a confection for celebrations like Christmas, and it is one of the 13 traditional desserts included in the French Provençal Christmas meal. See christmas. Nougat is also enjoyed at Easter and other holidays in Spain and Italy. Some smaller makers (such as Confiserie Foque in Signes, France) follow this seasonality in their production cycle, producing nougat only between the middle of September and the end of December. It is possible that this seasonality partly originates in the timing of the almond harvest, which usually begins at the end of August. Thus, the freshest almonds could be used while the new honey was being collected and the hens were still laying, before the darkest days of winter set in. Today’s commercial production is now more likely to include corn syrup than sugar and fragrant honey, but in the fine nougat made by regional specialists, one can still taste the light, honeyed confection chewed with enjoyment for millennia.

See also ancient world; honey; nuts; and stages of sugar syrup.

Durand, Jean. Le nougat de Montélimar: Legende, histoire, portraits. Pont-Saint-Esprit, France: La Mirandole, 1993.

Işın, Mary. Sherbet & Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts, pp. 126–136. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.

Mason, Laura. Sweets and Sweet Shops. Princes Risborough, U.K.: Shire, 1999.

Nasrallah, Nawal. Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchens: Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2010.

“Spanish Turrón (Nougat): Sweet Arab Heritage in Spain.” http://www.foodswinesfromspain.com/spanishfoodwine/global/products-recipes/products/4446282.html (accessed 24 January 2014).

Jane Levi

Nutella is the brand name of the popular chocolate-hazelnut spread made by Italian confectionery company Ferrero and distributed to 75 countries worldwide. See italy. Though hazelnuts and chocolate are now thought of as a classic combination, Italians have historically paired the two not necessarily for taste, but for reasons of economy. In 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon issued the Continental Blockade, an embargo on British trade, which caused the price of chocolate to become extremely expensive. In response, chocolatiers in Turin, Italy, began adding chopped hazelnuts, plentiful in the region, to chocolate to stretch the supply.

In the 1940s, as a result of World War II, chocolate once again became expensive in Italy, so pastry maker and Ferrero company founder Pietro Ferrero turned to the hazelnut and chocolate pairing, dubbing his version pasta gianduja after the classic Piedmontese carnival character Gianduja. When his product first appeared on the Italian market in 1946, a kilo of chocolate cost six times more than the same amount of pasta gianduja. Ferrero’s product was originally formed into loaves and wrapped in foil, but he eventually developed a more spreadable version, packaged it in a jar, and named it supercrema gianduja. In 1964 Pietro Ferrero’s son Michele Ferrero renamed the product Nutella, with the intention of distributing it across Europe.

After almost 20 years of successful sales in Europe, Nutella was first imported to the United States in 1983. Today, the kosher spread made from sugar, palm oil, ground hazelnuts, cocoa solids, and skim milk is sold throughout the world. It is a popular breakfast item and has been incorporated into numerous recipes, including those for brownies, pies, and cake icing.

Bourin, Jeanne. The Book of Chocolate, p. 139. New York: Flammarion, 2005.

“The History of Nutella.” http://www.nutellausa.com/history.htm (accessed 15 October 2013).

Emily Hilliard

nutmeg and nutmeg graters have enhanced many a dessert and beverage. The fruit of the nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, is unique in providing two distinct and wonderfully aromatic spices: nutmeg, the seed of the tree; and mace, the dried aril, a reddish lacy covering of the seed’s shell. The main source of nutmeg is the Banda Islands in the Moluccas, the Indonesian Spice Islands. See spices.

Nutmeg has been used, in finely grated form, as a prized flavoring in culinary recipes since medieval times, and it was believed to have medicinal properties. In Elizabethan England, physicians, claiming nutmeg as the only curative for the plague, charged huge prices for what had until that time been seen as no more than a cure for the common cold and flatulence. Nutmeg was, and still is, used widely in desserts, fruitcakes, flummeries, possets, and the like, as well as in savory dishes such as spiced meats and Scottish haggis.

Spice Islands nutmegs were so prized that elaborate implements were devised to grate them efficiently and without waste. Ranging from tinned iron to carved wood and silver, most grinders featured a lidded compartment where the nutmeg could be stored. photograph by michael finlay

Although any fine kitchen grater can be used to powder the nutmeg, a wide variety of graters made specifically for this purpose can be found. Almost all involve a simple nail-pierced tinned-iron grating surface and a hinged lidded cavity where the nutmeg may be stored. Such graters are made in many designs and materials, ranging from the precious—silver (and occasionally even gold), Bilston enamels, and silver-mounted shells—to the simple, including coquilla nuts and the more prosaic japanned tinned iron. Variety exists because a principal use of nutmeg during the eighteenth century was as an additive to the highly popular concocted drinks of the era, such as rum punch. See punch.

Although nutmeg was generally grated into the punch during its making, in order that he could add further spice to his taste, the gentleman-about-town would carry a pocket grater in an attractive design.