by James Walvin
The British were quick to switch from coffee to tea. In 1700, they consumed ten times as much coffee as tea. Twenty years later, that began to change. As volumes of imported tea increased, the price fell and the popularity of tea-drinking took off. Coffee maintained its niche, of course, notably in the proliferation of coffee shops. By 1662, there were eighty-two of them in London; and around 550 in 1740. By then, they had become ‘a chief focus of social life’.11 Some catered for the highest of high society, others for the lower echelons. Some effectively became offices (for insurance and banking, for example), but all offered good company and conversation – without the drunken excesses associated with the alehouse. The coffee was served black, but with sugar always on hand to spoon into the drink to counteract the bitterness.
The French, as we have seen, were noted for the amounts of sugar they heaped into their coffee. Parisian coffee shops had emerged, not from the commercial milieu we see in Amsterdam, London and Boston, but from the Ottoman Embassy, liberally dispensing coffee at social and diplomatic gatherings. Lacking the direct commercial links to coffee-producing regions, and without the essential commercial groups to encourage coffee-drinking, Parisian coffee shops struggled at first. They took hold as a location for fashionable aristocratic society, and were unusual in that they sold alcohol alongside coffee; they were, as they remain to this day – cafés, not coffee shops.12 Even so, sweet coffee was soon to be found in all corners of society. It was served in royal palaces, and sold by itinerant hawkers on the streets of Paris.13
The three major Western European cities where coffee shops proliferated from the mid-seventeenth century – Amsterdam, Paris and London – were all linked to a burgeoning sugar trade. In the course of the eighteenth century, French Caribbean colonies disgorged ever-growing volumes of slave-grown sugar, culminating in the massive production in St Domingue in the mid- and late eighteenth century. Amsterdam had established its own links to the sugar-producing regions of the Americas, first in Brazil (which the Dutch had governed, briefly, until 1654). London, meanwhile, was the commercial and financial engine behind the development of Britain’s sugar-producing colonies. The end result was that sugar was everywhere by 1700, sweetening the unpalatable drinks which had become an inescapable feature of Western life.
Coffee had initially been imported to Europe via complex trade routes from its native regions. Britain’s early coffee came via the Levant, much of it from Yemen, but by 1720 coffee was arriving via the East India Company, although a great deal of it was re-exported to Holland. Europeans were keen, however, to establish their own coffee-producing territories. Indeed, all the major European colonial powers were anxious to establish commercial ventures in their colonies and trading posts, and all of them actively experimented with crops transplanted from one region to another: sugar from the Mediterranean to the Americas; tobacco from the Americas to Europe; coffee from Mocha to Java, and to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, and high in the spiny ridges of St Domingue; later, breadfruit from the South Pacific to the Caribbean; and tea from China to India. All this activity created ‘the Colombian exchange’, with peoples, animals and plants being uprooted and resettled far from their native regions, first of all to see if they could simply survive, then flourish, and so become the basis of profitable commerce.
So it was that bitter, black coffee found its place in Western life, first in Europe’s main port cities and capitals, later across the face of society, before moving across the Atlantic where it followed a similar route into the new towns and settlements of the Americas. Boston, a large, lively town by the late seventeenth century, had its own coffee shops, modelled on the London prototypes, to provide refreshment and commercial opportunities. They, too, offered that vital mix of coffee and of print, and were soon followed by other coffee shops in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston. Here, too, men found an ideal rendezvous for political and commercial debate. They also became a focus for the rising tide of American anger against British colonial rule and regulation. Throughout the 1770s, coffee shops were associated with American dissent and resistance to British rule, although one in New York provided a regular meeting place for British troops.14 The seismic American upheaval in 1776, and the real and symbolic throwing of 300 tea-chests into Boston harbour in December 1773, led to a conscious American effort to abandon the British fashion for tea-drinking. It was part of the broader rebellion against what Americans viewed as iniquitous taxation (on tea, in this case) by their colonial masters. Thereafter, Americans turned their back on tea-drinking and became a nation of coffee-drinkers. But even this new nation of coffee-drinkers laced their dark, bitter beverage with sugar.
Today, it is simply assumed that Americans are coffee-drinkers, and although they came to the habit later than Europeans, their desire for the addition of sugary sweetness was just as compelling. Thus, on both sides of the Atlantic, the development of hot beverages saw a huge increase in the personal consumption of sugar, which had become the natural partner of tea and coffee.
Coffee in North America, though, remained costly and, in 1783, Americans per capita consumed only tiny amounts of coffee each year.15 Even after independence, coffee remained exclusive and pricey for some time, mainly because of the years of revolutionary upheaval in the Caribbean. (Coffee production in Haiti effectively ceased.) But the return of peace, and the economic development of the early republic, saw a massive growth in American coffee consumption. By 1830, Americans were drinking six times as much coffee as tea; by 1860, nine times as much.16
Coffee poured into the new USA. In 1791, less than I million pounds of coffee were imported; five years later, it had reached 62 million pounds.17 When the tax on coffee was removed after 1832, imports shot upwards – 150 million pounds were imported by 1844. By then, the average American was consuming more than six pounds of coffee annually, drinking it at mealtimes and as an occasional drink.18
Initially, the American demand for coffee forced the price upwards, but the rapid expansion of coffee cultivation, especially in Brazil, Java and Sumatra, led to a substantial fall in prices. In 1823, coffee cost 30 cents a pound in the USA but, by 1830, it had fallen to 8 cents. When the tax on imported coffee was removed in 1832, the country was flooded with coffee and, by the 1850s, Americans each consumed five pounds of coffee a year. By the end of the nineteenth century, that figure had reached eight pounds. Coffee consumption had outstripped tea by 1830, and Americans were firmly established as a nation of coffee-drinkers.19
For all the revulsion against British tea as a stimulant to American coffee-drinking, it was the relative proximity of coffee growing in the Caribbean and Brazil that helped swing North America behind coffee. The development of trade between North and South America saw coffee imported in return for timber (and also for shipping African slaves to Brazil). US coffee consumption was also helped by the large-scale immigration of North European coffee-drinkers. Unlike Europe, however, North America did not have a café culture, and Americans enjoyed their coffee at home, buying green, unroasted beans, before roasting them and turning them into drinkable coffee at home. The end result was that coffee was marketed and sold to housewives, with all the subsequent efforts to create brand loyalties among customers.
Better roasted coffee (as opposed to green coffee beans sold for roasting) emerged from the new coffee technology as the century advanced. Better coffee roasters, grinders and a wide range of new, improved coffee pots, all helped to facilitate the production of better coffee for the American drinker. In 1852, New York had its own Coffee Exchange, and the modern era was ushered in of coffee as a global commodity, bought and traded on the exchange floor, much like cotton, for the rest of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, the US federal government also intervened to ensure standardisation and quality of the coffees sold on the American market.
The major drive in the US coffee market was in packaging and marketing, but green coffee beans remained dominant until c. 1900. Thereafter, vacuum packing of roasted and ground coffee b
eans ushered in a new era of coffee-making and drinking. All this created a massive increase in US coffee-drinking. Between 1880 and 1920, consumption doubled to 16 pounds per head. Over the course of the nineteenth century, imports of coffee into the USA increased ninety-fold.20
In the twentieth century, American coffee-drinking became a social activity, much as it had been in Europe in the eighteenth century and in Arabia long before. People, especially clerical workers, took ‘coffee breaks’ at work and restaurants attracted customers by offering cheap coffee and free refills. Grocery stores sometimes sold coffee as a ‘loss-leader’ to lure customers to buy their goods. By the mid-twentieth century, coffee was widely viewed as a necessity in American life. It punctuated the working day, it provided a break for women tied to domestic chores, and it seemed to restore energy and alertness to working people when they felt themselves flagging. Throughout the Second World War, it was a basic constituent of military rations. Indeed, that war confirmed coffee’s essential role in the US armed services, especially when ‘instant coffee’ could be transported to all theatres of war and easily concocted by the mere addition of hot water.21
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What had happened in the USA in the years between the Civil War and the Second World War was a repeat of the pattern we have seen in Britain a century before. Coffee, like tea in Britain before it, became an indispensable part of everyday American life. It was no accident that soldiers in all America’s major wars were given coffee as part of their daily rations (coffee had replaced rum as an official drink of the US Army in 1832). In the Civil War, the Confederate Army reprinted a pamphlet by Florence Nightingale, which included a prescription: ‘Coffee for One Hundred Men, One Pint Each.’22 But severe wartime shortages of both sugar and coffee during the Civil War forced people to resort to a range of substitutes – plants, beans, grains – whatever seemed to provide a dark, coffee-like end product.23
In the USA, coffee and sugar went hand in hand as much as tea and sugar were companions in Britain. As coffee consumption boomed, so, too, did the demand for sugar. But the American addiction to coffee cannot alone explain the extraordinary explosion in the US demand for sugar. The massive growth in population in the early nineteenth century, primarily via immigration, created vast numbers of working people engaged in physically demanding labour. These were the consumers of sugar on a major scale. In the thirty years before the Civil War, the rise in personal income (and a fall in sugar prices) produced a remarkable expansion of sugar consumption. In 1837, they consumed 161 million pounds of sugar but, by 1854, that had increased to 900 million pounds. The per capita consumption of sugar stood at 13lb in 1831; thirty years later, that had risen to 30lb.24 That had more than doubled again by 1900, to 651b per capita – before peaking in 1930 at 110lb.25 As Americans imported and consumed ever more sugar, some began to ask: wasn’t it time for the USA to cultivate its own sugar? Or perhaps even acquire sugar-growing colonies?
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By the time of the American Revolution, coffee had become ubiquitous in the Western world. Although it had been dislodged by tea as the national drink in Britain, it maintained its distinctive position in coffee shops as cause and occasion of male conviviality, business and conversation. It was served in elaborate rituals with accompanying equipment (some made by the finest of Europe’s craftsmen in porcelain) in the highest of high societies, from one royal court to another, and it also helped sustain working people en route to work. Whatever the location – a City of London coffee shop humming with affairs of trade insurance and overseas commerce, a fashionable Parisian café, the Palace of Versailles or in the argumentative political crucible of a Boston coffee shop – the bitterness of black coffee was tempered by sugar. Tea had conquered the British home, from the highest to the lowest. It was organised, prepared and served by the women of the house. In more fashionable homes, at teatime and at the start and the end of the working day among humbler folk, tea was part of British domestic and family life. Coffee was both more public and more masculine, a focus for men’s social and commercial activities. Yet wherever tea or coffee were served, in a palace or a hovel or in public coffee shops, there, too, we find the sugar bowl. Hot drinks were always sweetened. So, too, were a remarkable number of Western foodstuffs; sugar had become an indispensable ingredient in food as well as drink.
7
Pandering to the Palate
PICK UP PRACTICALLY any modern cookbook, and you will find sugar listed among the ingredients required in a modern kitchen. Sugar is a basic ingredient in the supplies of any self-respecting cook. Long before the Western world discovered its taste for sugar, the cuisines of many distant societies had made elaborate use of cane sugar. Though the arrival of sugar in Europe had been symbolised by elaborate displays of sugary confections and sculptures, all this had remained within the world of the rich and influential. Less privileged members of society had to acquire their sweetness from traditional, cheaper sources, most notably honey. But the expansion of sugar production in the Americas in the early seventeenth century enabled sugar to slip its moorings from the world of privilege and to find favour among all strata of society. Sugar followed the pattern of other exotic commodities which had also once been the prerogative of Europe’s elites and those who were excessively wealthy but didn’t have the corresponding status, such as the traders who made their money in commerce but who lacked superior social standing. During the seventeenth century, sugar settled among the common people, in town and country, and they used it both in their drink and their food.
Sugar quickly entered the cuisine and the diet of Europe at large. French cuisine adopted sugar not simply because it was recommended by French doctors in the seventeenth century, but because of the way it obviously enhanced certain foods. Adding sugar to oats, for example, made them fashionable in France, where they had previously been plebeian. Working people across Western Europe began to add sugar to basic foods and drinks – French peasants and workers in Gdansk both enjoyed sweet coffee; sailors’ wives in Calais drank sweet tea. Polish workers liked adding sugar to their food, and the habit quickly took hold in North America. John Winthrop noted in 1662 that Indian corn was made tasty by the addition of sugar.
In a number of very different societies, the Catholic Church was instrumental in encouraging a taste for sugary items among the poor. In Mexico and Goa, the Philippines and Mozambique, nuns (in keeping with an older Islamic tradition) made sugary delicacies to sell to worshippers, often based around a religious theme.1 It was the French, however, who effectively introduced sugar into Western cooking via their pioneering and perfecting of sweet desserts, although, again, they were following a well-trodden Islamic culinary path. The fact that we sometimes call desserts ‘sweets’ is a giveaway. It was, again, in the seventeenth century that desserts emerged as sugary concoctions to complete an elaborate meal. Before then, there had been no real distinction between sweet and savoury dishes, though many dishes contained a sweet ingredient. All that changed in the course of the seventeenth century when sugar came to be concentrated in desserts.
No one can really explain why the distinction emerged, why sweet desserts became a distinct and culminating feature of French meals. But thereafter, a sharp divide developed between sweet and savoury, a distinction which was to become a striking feature of Western cuisine everywhere. The timing, however, was no accident. This change in French cuisine evolved in the years when cane sugar became more commonplace, thanks to the development of the French Caribbean sugar plantations. By 1700, wealthy French people began the day with sugar, eating a breakfast that consisted of drinking chocolate mixed with sugar, along with bread or brioche.2
Elaborate, formal French meals and menus evolved as an occasion in three parts, with the last course, dessert, generally cold, sweet and, in fashionable circles, sometimes remarkably ornate. This distinctively French version of dinner was greatly influential across Europe, largely because, by the eighteenth century, France had become the dominant cultural fo
rce in Europe. Even the Russian court spoke French, encouraged largely by the admiration for French culture by Peter the Great and Catherine II. Wherever the French style of dessert took hold, the dishes created used lavish additions of sugar – ice-creams, charlottes, jellies, parfits, sundaes, cakes, pies, syllabubs – all and more relied on sugar. The English versions tended to be altogether more modest, though, in imitation of the French, dessert came last. According to Chamber’s Cyclopaedia of 1741, dessert consisted of ‘fruits, pastry-works, confections, etc.’.3
This culture of elaborate cuisine, at which the French remain the masters, was still founded, of course, in the world of privilege, and it was reflected in the development of printed cookbooks. Today, cookbooks of all sorts and varieties fill the shelves. There are even bookshops specialising in nothing else but cookbooks. It is a story which begins, in its modern form, in the mid-seventeenth century. Between 1651 and 1778, some 230 cookbooks were published in French alone, although the pattern was quickly followed in other Western countries. New in Europe, cookbooks belonged to a publishing (and cultural) tradition which stretched back at least to the early days of Islam. Now, in early modern Europe, and slightly later in America, such volumes were aimed at a widening readership. Cookbooks were designed primarily for literate females who not only managed the kitchen and the household staff, but who sometimes needed guidance and instruction. Those books were also a reflection of a more fundamental shift taking place – the habits of society’s elites were being shared by new social groups. People whose newly acquired affluence, from trade and commerce, their wealth sometimes even surpassing the riches of their royal and aristocratic superiors, were keen to share the pleasures and luxuries of their social betters. Like clothing, houses, carriages and social manners in general, food offered a good way of emulating the lives of people at the top of the social order.