Refined Taste or Food

Refined Taste: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America

Author: Wendy A Woloson

American consumers today regard sugar as a mundane and sometimes even troublesome substance linked to hyperactivity in children and other health concerns. Yet two hundred years ago American consumers treasured sugar as a rare commodity and consumed it only in small amounts. In Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America, Wendy A. Woloson demonstrates how the cultural role of sugar changed from being a precious luxury good to a ubiquitous necessity. Sugar became a social marker that established and reinforced class and gender differences.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Woloson explains, the social elite saw expensive sugar and sweet confections as symbols of their wealth. As refined sugar became more affordable and accessible, new confections-children's candy, ice cream, and wedding cakes-made their way into American culture, acquiring a broad array of social meanings. Originally signifying male economic prowess, sugar eventually became associated with femininity and women's consumerism. Woloson's work offers a vivid account of this social transformation-along with the emergence of consumer culture in America.

What People Are Saying

Warren Belasco
This is an intriguing, highly original history of the democratization of sugar marketing in 19th-century America. Separate chapters narrate the evolution of children's candy, ice cream parlors, fine chocolates, ornamental sugar works, and homemade sweets. In tracing the various ways that sugar became more widely accessible and more widely used, this book stands within the growing literature that deals with the origins and evolution of modern consumer culture.

Table of Contents:

Contents:



Preface and Acknowledgments



Introduction: Refining Tastes



ONE Sugarcoating History: The Rise of Sweets

TWO Sweet Youth: Children and Candy

THREE Cold Comforts: Ice Cream

FOUR Sinfully Sweet: Chocolates and Bonbons

FIVE The Icing on the Cake: Ornamental Sugar Work

SIX Home Sweet Home

CONCLUSION: The Sweet Surrender



Postscript: The Sweet and Low Down

Notes

Essay on Sources

Index

Interesting textbook: Tasty and Exotic Foods or The World of Soy

Food

Author: John Knechtel

Shortlisted for the 2008 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.

Food is essential to our sense of place and our sense of self, but today--as fast food nation meets the slow food movement and eating locally collides with on-demand arugula--our food habits are shifting. Food examines and imagines these changes, with projects by writers and artists that explore the cultural and emotional resonance of food, from the "everyday Dada" of mashed potatoes and Jell-O to the rocket science of food eaten by astronauts in space.

In Food, an artist photographs everything he ate in 2006 (and some things he didn't eat, including "Food I Left in the Fridge Too Long") and finds the results both "seductive and repulsive"; a writer describes the global agro-assembly line that produces an organic bento box for Japanese commuters containing rice and vegetables from California, pork from Mexico, and salmon from Alaska; a short story writer offers an eight-page graphic novel, Eating in Cafeterias; a landscape architect compares a commercial orange with an organic apple using visualized data; an award-winning New York City food writer tells a postmodern tale about small-town Chinese-American cuisine (featuring chop suey, egg rolls, and flaming lava cocktails); an expert explains the principles of urban food sustainability. Other projects include a map of the free food from fruit trees on public land in a Los Angeles neighborhood, a visionary plan for farms in skyscrapers, and a surprising report on food security. The essays, artwork, and stories in Food offer readers a full menu of intellectual nourishment and aesthetic delight.