Sugar

Any of a group of simple carbohydrates occurring naturally, especially in fruits and honey. Most often, the word is applied to the sweet powdered substance refined from sugarcane or (less commonly) the sugar beet. Our ancestors drank the raw juice of the sugarcane. Later on, in order to make white sugar, the juice was cooked until syrupy, then hardened and dried.

Sugarcane was first cultivated in India 2,500 years ago and was called karkara in Sanskrit. The recorded history of cane sugar began when a member of Alexander's army mentioned it in 325 BC. It had reached China by 100 BC. The Japanese did not have it until AD 700, although by AD 400 it was widely cultivated in the Middle East. Legend has it that during the T'ang Dynasty (AD 618-907) in the Plan-Shan mountains in China, a monk named Tsen let his donkey come down the mountain one day and eat up the cane plantation belonging to a man named Noang-chi. As compensation for the damage, the monk taught Noang-chi how to make sugar.

Sugar derives from the Arabic sarkar, meaning "grain", and appeared in England in the 13th century. The Roman historian and naturalist Pliny called it a kind of honey made from reeds. So did the crusaders, who brought it back to Europe for the first time in 1148. The sweetener would soon be priced above honey. But until the 16th century, when cane sugar from the West Indies became readily available and inexpensive, the world depended mainly on honey as its sweetener. It remained expensive until Columbus introduced canes into Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1493. Despite setbacks, its cultivation spread throughout the islands, and sugarcane became, and still is, a main source of sweetener. See also gur, jaggery, khandsari, palm sugar, temperature.

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