The United Kingdom comprises Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Many, perhaps most, of its people associate the word “sweets” with the confectionery lining supermarket shelves or displayed in jars in small local shops. Confusingly, the term also covers a wider array of sweet foods eaten at the end of a meal, which may be called “sweet,” “dessert,” or “pudding,” depending on linguistic usage as well as social and geographic position. The word “afters” has now entered the culinary lexicon to refer to all three, in an attempt to avoid arguments about which word to use.
Sugar first came to Britain in the eleventh century, along with spices. It was a high-value rarity, a status symbol, and was recorded in the spice accounts. Sugar’s earliest use was as a medicine, and this link with the work of the apothecary continued into the seventeenth century. See medicinal uses of sugar. Similar to its use on the European continent, sugar was also a valued sculptural medium. These uses of sugar were largely developed by men. Imported confections, especially preserved fruit and fruit pastes such as marmelada, were also sought after. See fruit pastes and fruit preserves. By the Elizabethan age—the second half of the sixteenth century—sugar was cheaper and more widely available; increasingly, it replaced honey as the usual sweetener, not only for the gentry but also for the rising yeoman class. The German traveler Paul Hentzner noted that the English had a taste for sugar, and that their teeth suffered in consequence. See dental caries.
Sugar work became a fashionable pastime for ladies in their own homes, as illustrated by Sir Hugh Plat’s Delightes for Ladies (1602), which provided instructions for “preserving, conserving and candying.” See plat, sir hugh. Over the next two centuries, several women wrote books for domestic use, with instructions for fruit preserving and other sugary recipes, but men remained predominant in the public sphere and as confectioners in wealthy households. The elegant shops of professional confectioners glittered with fruit pastes, ices, biscuits and cakes, comfits, drops, and lozenges for the gentry and bourgeoisie. The most influential also published their recipes for their apprentices and for home cooks. Their names—Negri, Gunter, Jarrin—guaranteed quality because they sold goods made on the premises. See jarrin, william alexis.
Confectionery
West Indian sugar produced by the plantation system was ever more available, a source of revenue for the government and the foundation of many British personal fortunes. See plantations, sugar. By the mid-nineteenth century, sugar, no longer taxed, had become a vital food for the workers in the industrial cities that were developing in many parts of the British Isles. In the damp and chilly climate, the desperate poor could buy calories, comfort, and a brief glimpse into a refined world of sweetness and light from the cheap confectionery that developed from the older aristocratic tradition. But they could not afford to buy from reputable shops; in London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew recorded the large variety of sweet goods and confectionery made by sweet-stuff makers to “tempt the street eaters.” Garish colors were achieved using lead, mercury, or copper-based dyes, and public concerns were raised about cases of (sometimes fatal) poisoning. See adulteration. Gaudy stalls and shops sold dragées, lozenges, mints, and sweets molded into highly colored shapes to appeal to children. Fantasy was, and is, more important than taste when it comes to sweets. See children’s candy.
Nineteenth-century industrialization moved the production of sweets from retailers to factories, and from midcentury onward, advances were made in mechanization. Factory brands became important, especially in chocolate manufacture, and subsequently for toffees and other boiled sweets. The great variety of sweets on sale today has come about in the last hundred or so years, although many are simply reinterpretations of techniques and formulae known for centuries. Britain is now one of the biggest producers and consumers of confectionery in the world. Sweets may have little nutritional value beyond providing energy, but they have a social role when given as a reward, as consolation or comfort, or as an encouragement. Among children, they can be items to barter. On a wider level, sweet foods of many types are important in the United Kingdom—jams and preserves, desserts, pastries, cakes, biscuits, and sweetened dairy products.
Fanciful forms of confectionery are still popular: fruits, hearts, animals, licorice allsorts “sandwiches,” and lollipops on sticks. See licorice and lollipops. Transparent fruit drops and barley sugars, chewy caramels and toffee, fudge, marshmallows, jelly beans, gumballs, and gobstoppers all have their enthusiasts. See barley sugar; chewing gum; fudge; jelly beans and marshmallows. Some sweets are traditional to season or place: eggs at Easter and candy floss (cotton candy) at fairgrounds. Hard sugar molded into joke shapes and sticks of rock with letters running through them and a vivid pink coating are an essential purchase on any seaside holiday. See rock. Sweets, once elegant morsels for adults, are now largely designed to appeal to, and be consumed by, children.
Chocolate was known as a drink, and it only become a significant item in confectionery in the nineteenth century. See chocolate, post-columbian. Mechanization was well suited to processing cacao, and the first chocolate bars appeared in the 1860s. Initially, they were sold unwrapped from large boxes and distributed to shops across the country by railway. Production became concentrated in the hands of a few firms—Fry, Cadbury, Rowntree, Terry—names still found on chocolate today. See cadbury. Growth in the production of boxed chocolates and bars increased hugely as prices of chocolate fell in the early years of the twentieth century. Production and consumption have continued to rise, slowed only by the rationing imposed for 10 years during and after World War II. See chocolates, boxed.
Recent years have seen the emergence of artisan chocolatiers working with single varieties of cocoa beans from specified estates or countries. They have become the smart confectioners of the twenty-first century, commanding high prices for their “grand cru” chocolates. See chocolate, single origin.
Banquets and Desserts
The Forme of Cury (the first British cookery book), compiled in the late fourteenth century, was written for informed, sophisticated palates. It makes clear that some savory and sweet dishes were served together. Small game birds appeared on the table with tarts, fritters, preserved fruits, and the sweet wafers introduced by the Normans.
This pattern of dining remained until the sixteenth century, when sweet dishes could also become a banquet laid out in a separate room or a special building. See banqueting house. As a show of wealth, the table was decorated with sugar-paste sculptures and spread with candied fruits and nuts, quince paste, marchpanes (marzipan), jellies, almond cakes, fruits made from sugar, and even tableware of sugar paste that could be eaten. See marzipan and sugar sculpture. The Elizabethans called these dishes and the sweet, spiced wines that accompanied them “banketting stuffe.”
Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book (1604) reflects the shift from medieval dishes to the more modern; the spicing of earlier times was much reduced, although rosewater remained as a flavoring for desserts. Almond milk, a mainstay of earlier cooking, was little used, as religious changes led to the relaxation of the Catholic notion of fasting; cream and milk took its place. A “creame” might be cooked, clotted, raw, or whipped into a syllabub. See cream. Lightly spiced warm custard poured into a precooked pastry “coffin” was baked to make a tart. Curds were made into cheesecakes and tarts. See cheesecake and tart.
Milk products became increasingly important. Baked milk “puddings” of rice, sago, bread, and oatmeal, spiced and sweetened with sugar, became popular. Cabbage cream, made with the skins that formed over a bowl of thick cream layered with rosewater and sugar and carefully built up to resemble a cabbage, remained in vogue until late in the seventeenth century.
When the banquet went out of fashion in the eighteenth century, sweet dishes such as cakes, creams, ice creams, jellies, puddings, and pies were called “dessert” after the French model. Sugar also sweetened drinks such as chocolate, coffee, and the tea that became inextricably entwined in social life throughout Great Britain and Ireland, and it was increasingly used in cakes. Following the building of ice houses on country estates, ice creams based on fruits and nuts or flavors we think of as modern, such as jasmine or Parmesan, became fashionable. See ice cream.
The present-day trifle came into being at this time; Hannah Glasse provided one of the first recipes in The Gentle Art of Cookery (6th edition, 1758). It calls for Naples biscuits, macaroons, and ratafia cakes soaked in sack (fortified wine), covered with a “good boiled custard,” topped with a syllabub, then decorated with more ratafia cakes, currant jelly, and flowers. Syllabubs remained a dessert, served in glasses to show the clear wine below the thick cream. However, trifle eventually replaced the syllabub as the British party pudding, and whipped cream was used to top the trifle instead of syllabub. See syllabub and trifle.
Other items from the Elizabethan banquet that survived and prospered included “biscuit bread,” or Savoy Biscuit, the ancestor of modern sponge cakes, and various types of sweet pastry. See sponge cake. These have been much enriched by the influence of pastry cooks of Continental European origin, supplementing the home-grown tradition of fruit cakes and other sweet baked goods. The British sweet tooth was further indulged by the development of the biscuit industry in the nineteenth century, providing mass-produced alternatives to the fine almond macarons and more robust shortbreads of earlier times. In Britain, biscuit became a catch-all term for small flat baked goods, roughly equivalent to the American “cookie.” See biscuits, british.
Puddings
The British also developed a wide range of sweet puddings from originally savory recipes. Pudding is an ambiguous word in English, now referring both to frivolous dessert items and to more substantial sweet dishes counted as staple foods. History only partially explains this usage.
In the sixteenth century, currants, dates, and sugar were added to the mixtures of meat or blood—spices and fat that hitherto had been used to stuff the animal guts that made the original sausage-like puddings. Shortly afterward, a more convenient alternative, the pudding cloth, came into use, which meant boiled puddings could be made at any time. It was cited in a contemporary recipe for Cambridge pudding—breadcrumbs, flour, dried fruits, suet, eggs, sugar, milk, and butter, wrapped in a cloth and boiled, ancestor to the plum pudding. Suet was the last link to the original meat pudding. In his Dictionary (1755) Dr. Johnson defined pudding as “a kind of food very variously compounded but generally made of meal, milk and eggs.” Later flavorings included ginger, treacle, syrup, or jam. See pudding.
Baked milk puddings became commonplace, and batter puddings were baked in the oven or cooked under the spit in the dripping from a roasting joint. Since Victorian times, steamed puddings have usually been made in pudding basins standing in a large pan of simmering water.
Puddings were enthusiastically adopted across British society. Steamed, boiled, or baked, with imaginative names—plum duff, spotted dick, apple hat, Sussex pond—they were eaten daily in many households, yet another source of comfort and calories, especially for the less well off. Fruit puddings, particularly pies baked in deep dishes with a pastry crust; bread puddings like summer pudding; and bread and butter pudding remain favorites. See summer pudding. The notion expanded to include dishes of foreign origin such as apple charlotte. See charlotte. Puddings are usually served with a sauce, custard being the most common, or with cream.
Recent years have seen a resurgence of enthusiasm for traditional British desserts and puddings. Forgotten dishes have been revived, and new ones invented. Sticky toffee pudding, Bakewell tart, gypsy tart, queen of puddings, Eton mess, and banoffee pie, to name just a few, are popular at home and in restaurants. See eton mess. Sweetened yogurt and packaged desserts continue the dairy tradition, and even the notion of the old-fashioned sweetshop lined with jars shows a certain resurgence. The British, long known for their passion for sweet things, have not lost their sweet tooth in the twenty-first century.
See also boardwalks; candy; candy bar; comfit; custard; flower waters; fools; hippocras; and sweetshop.
The United States has a culinary culture permeated by sweetened foods and beverages. Many Americans begin their day with a bowl of sugary cereal, doughnut, muffin, pancakes, or other sweet food, typically accompanied by sweet orange juice, sweetened coffee, or a soft drink. For lunch, dinner, or snacks, sugary ingredients are ubiquitous as well, not only in obviously sweet foods but also in savory ones. Most processed foods—from tomato sauce to ketchup, bread to bagels, hot dogs to bacon—contain varying quantities of sugary ingredients, often derived from corn. Other than water, almost all bottled beverages, whether flat or carbonated, contain a hefty dose of corn syrup, sugar, fruit concentrate, or synthetic sweetener. See corn syrup. Given the American predilection for the sweet, it is hardly surprising that even desserts in the United States are often noticeably sweeter than their European counterparts. Ever since the late nineteenth century, Americans have reliably been among the top five per-capita consumers of sweeteners in the world.
The Colonial Period
It is difficult to reconstruct the eating habits of the varied native populations before European contact, but given the foods available, it is likely that Native Americans limited their sweet indulgences to certain corn products, maple syrup, and both fresh and dried wild fruits. See native american. Apart from the use of certain ingredients (maple sugar, corn, pecans, and the like), today’s culture of sweetness inherited little from the continent’s first inhabitants. Instead, America’s sweet tooth was largely passed down from the English colonists who first settled New England and Virginia. As early as the Elizabethan period, the English elite were notorious for their penchant for sweet food. As sugar became somewhat more affordable during the late colonial period, this predilection moved down the social ranks. Imports from the Caribbean assured British North America a continuous supply of both sugar and molasses. See sugar trade. The Molasses Act, passed by the British government in 1733, sought to limit imports of the sweetener from British possessions, but the law was widely flouted by the colonists. The similar Sugar Act of 1764 was one of several triggers of the American Revolution. See legislation, historical.
The American population, predominantly of English extraction and refreshed by wave after wave of British immigrants, baked, fried, and boiled the desserts they had grown up with. English cookbooks, such as Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747) and Susanna Carter’s Frugal Housewife (ca. 1765), were both imported and republished in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. As specifically American desserts were developed, some publishers simply inserted an addendum to the English texts. Both Glasse’s and Carter’s books were published (in 1805 and 1803, respectively) with an identical appendix of “new receipts adapted to the American mode of cooking.” Among the new desserts were such New England staples as Indian pudding, pumpkin pie, dough nuts [sic], cranberry tarts (pies), maple sugar, and maple molasses, as well as Dutch-influenced recipes for crullers and whaffles [sic]. The first purely American-written cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), includes a similar selection of unfussy American sweets embedded in a text of mostly English desserts such as puddings, custards, and syllabubs, as well as old-world confections such as quince and red currant preserves. See united kingdom and new england (u.s.).
Outside of New England, the future landmass of the United States was far less homogenous. In the South and West, the Spanish arrived with their own cookies, cakes, and the predecessors to churros. In Louisiana, the French settlers maintained contacts with Paris long after the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, importing French confectioners as well as sending their cooks to France to train. Throughout the South, ethnically African cooks improvised to create such African-inflected sweets as calas (rice fritters), benne wafers, and others. See benne seed wafers. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, German settlers brought a tradition of sweetened yeast breads, doughnuts, and funnel cakes, as well as candy making. The Dutch left a lasting influence on the language, if less so on the cuisine, giving us such words as waffle, cruller, and, most notably, cookie. Even Amelia Simmons includes a recipe for cookies, which take the form of rather dry, coriander-scented biscuits. See new orleans; pennsylvania dutch; south (u.s.); and southwest (u.s.).
Home Baking
With the coming of independence from Britain, American sweet making increasingly began to branch out from its English roots. In England, pies tended to be savory, whereas tarts were sweet. In the United States, pies were not only invariably sweetened, but their varieties proliferated. Hitherto obscure regional specialties such as Hertfordshire’s “dough nuts” multiplied in shape, variety, and technique. Cakes became noticeably daintier than the heavy, fruitcake-type confections of the past—though this was, admittedly, happening across the Atlantic as well. Distinctly American drop cookies, made with oats, peanut butter, and chocolate chips, were developed around the turn of the twentieth century. See drop cookies. Ice cream became relatively commonplace, at least if we are to believe Frederick Marryat, a captain in the British Royal Navy, who, while visiting St. Louis in 1837, noted the universal availability of ice with the consequence that “ice-creams [were] universal and very cheap.” See doughnuts; ice cream; and pie.
Unlike in Europe, food and fuel, as well as ice, were relatively cheap; labor, however, was dear. This circumstance, combined with the spread-out nature of frontier settlements, meant that even middle-income Americans had to rely much more on mothers and wives to do the baking than did their European counterparts, who could patronize professional pastry cooks or have recourse to servants. In the absence of affordable helpers, American women sought to simplify their lives in the kitchen, looking to recipes that used quick-rising artificial leaveners instead of yeast or beaten eggs to aerate their cakes, cookies, and doughnuts, and adopting labor-saving devices whenever possible. See chemical leaveners. In the second half of the nineteenth century, high levels of female literacy, relatively weak bonds to tradition, urbanization, and social mobility created a growing market for cookbooks both aspirational and practical.
Like the home cooks, most of the professional advice givers were female (though they too styled themselves homemakers despite their successful careers). Among the most influential were Eliza Leslie and Lydia Maria Francis Child in the mid-nineteenth century, Fannie Farmer at the century’s end, and Irma Rombauer in the twentieth century. See farmer, fannie and rombauer, irma starkloff. When suburban women of the 1960s sought to learn how to make French cream puffs, they looked to Julia Child rather than to some male chef with a foreign accent.
Sweet Industry
Some of the professional cookbook writers found jobs with large corporations, which were busy pitching the idea that becoming a virtuous, efficient, and loving wife and mother was impossible without newfangled devices such as hand-cranked ice cream makers and rotary beaters, or modern innovations such as Royal Baking Powder, Crisco, Jell-O, and, eventually, Duncan Hines. See cake mix; gelatin desserts; hines, duncan; ice cream makers; and shortening. American corporations used premium cookbooks, packaging, advertising, and product placement to distribute and popularize recipes such as chocolate chip cookies, Rice Krispies treats, and Jell-O salads. By the mid-twentieth century, the recipes published in magazines such as Family Circle—with a circulation of 4 million—often involved little more than assembling mass-produced convenience foods. A typical 1955 recipe for Marshmallow Brownie Pudding is “home-made” from canned chocolate-flavor syrup, marshmallows, and devil’s food cake mix.
Certainly today, most of the sweet food consumed in the United States is not homemade, however contorted that term has become. Many of America’s favorite sweet snacks have long been made by corporations, whether in the form of candy (M&M’s, Reese’s Pieces, and Hershey’s Bar were the nation’s top three in 2009, according to Businessweek), “snack cakes” (Twinkies, Ring Dings, and others), or cookies (most especially the Oreo). See hershey’s; hostess; m&m’s; oreos; reese’s pieces; and twinkie. Other foods, particularly doughnuts but also ice cream and milkshakes, are eaten, or bought, at franchised outlets such as Dunkin’ Donuts, Baskin-Robbins, and Dairy Queen.
Millions start their day with breakfast cereal, a trend that only went mainstream when Will Kellogg added sugar to his brother’s Corn Flakes recipe in 1906, an innovation that eventually led to the likes of Fruit Loops, Count Chocula, and Honey Smacks. According to a 2011 report by the Harvard School of Public Health, some cereals are more than 40 percent sugar. See breakfast cereal. In the twenty-first century, cereals have been losing market share to such things as the even sweeter breakfast bar and yogurt. See yogurt.
Subsequent to the American Revolution, hot sweetened tea was gradually replaced by sweetened coffee as the nonalcoholic beverage of choice. In the twentieth century the role of these hot caffeinated beverages was mostly usurped by cold, caffeinated drinks, most notably Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola but also, in the last 50 years, a vast panoply of iced teas, sports drinks, and fruit-flavored beverages. See soda. Even coffee has seen a sweet makeover, whether as syrup-laced coffee at Starbucks or in the form of Dunkin’ Donuts’ Caramel Coffee Coolatta.
Ideas of health and morality have been a recurring theme throughout the country’s history. A tasty dessert is described as “sinful” or “indulgent.” At various points, “heavy” foods such as pies and doughnuts were considered objectionable; white sugar was considered healthier than brown, and then vice versa; synthetic sweeteners were sold as a panacea for weight loss until, in the 1970s, studies indicated a link between saccharin and cancer—at least in rats. See artificial sweeteners. More recently sugar has been demonized for being as addictive as cocaine and heroin. See sugar and health.
America Now
In the twenty-first century, America’s populace has become increasingly Balkanized into niche markets based on income, education, lifestyle, ethnicity, age, and gender. Both televised food shows and social media have created a dedicated minority obsessed with food trends. A small but visible reaction to mass-produced desserts has produced artisanal cupcakes, gourmet ice cream shops, four-dollar doughnuts, and ultra-premium versions of Ring Dings and Mars Bars. As this list indicates, many of these sweets pay homage to the industrially formed tastes of American children. For the overwhelming majority, the American sweet tooth continues to be defined by the likes of corporations such as Unilever, General Foods, and Coca-Cola.
See also baskin-robbins; cupcakes; dairy queen; dunkin’ donuts; krispy kreme; and mars.
upside-down cake is an American dessert made by candying slices of fruit in a butter and brown sugar mixture, then pouring a batter over them, and baking. To serve, the cake is turned upside down.
Throughout the colonial period in America, and into the nineteenth century, cooks without ovens often prepared cakes in cast-iron skillets on their stovetops. Even as late as 1943, The Joy of Cooking included a recipe for an upside-down cake made entirely in a skillet.
Upside-down cake’s antecedents were likely the cake-like puddings or cobblers that became popular toward the end of the nineteenth century. They had fruit on the bottom and a very plain yellow cake—often called “cottage pudding”—on the top; some were inverted for serving. Early-twentieth-century cookbooks featured recipes for upside-down cakes using apples, cherries, and other stone fruits, but the cake surged in popularity in the 1920s, when canned pineapple became chic, thanks in no small part to aggressive marketing by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Pineapple rings were placed in the butter and sugar mixture to caramelize over heat, with a maraschino cherry—another newly fashionable ingredient—set in the center of each ring. After baking, the cake was carefully inverted onto a serving platter to reveal the decorative pattern on top.
Pineapple upside-down cake appears in Jean Anderson’s American Century Cookbook: The Most Popular Recipes of the 20th Century. In Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, upside-down cake is sometimes known as “upside-down pudding.” French cuisine’s tarte Tatin, made of caramelized apples and pastry dough, is similarly inverted for serving. See tarte tatin.
See also fruit desserts, baked.