Raising cane: A bittersweet tale of sugar

BATON ROUGE, La.— As autumn baking season sets into full swing, sugar is an essential ingredient.

It balances sour, salty and bitter flavors. It sweetens, tenderizes and browns baked goods. It's essential in creamy fudge, chewy caramels and crispy brittles.

But cane sugar, the oldest type of sugar in the United States, has a bittersweet history.

Fortunes were made and lost over it, thousands of slaves and sharecroppers spent their lives toiling over it, wars and weather took their toll on it.

Sugar cane, native to Southeast Asia, is a tall grass with sweet sap in its thick, fibrous stalks. It was one of the early crops introduced to the Caribbean area by Spanish and Portuguese explorers, where it flourished.

In 1751, Jesuit missionaries brought sugar cane plants, along with experienced field workers, to what is now downtown New Orleans.

But, turning it into a commercial enterprise took awhile. Sugar cane is a tropical plant, and the southern United States stretches the boundaries of a tropical climate, said Charley Richard, a Louisiana-based sugar research consultant and publisher of an industry magazine called Sugar Journal.

Louisiana's relatively short growing season and early frosts were a challenge, and the resulting sugar was of poor quality.

Instead of the crystallized grains that we enjoy today, it was either a syrup or large, hard chunks that could be chipped off as needed.

Then in 1795, Etienne de Bore, who later became New Orlean's first mayor, succeeded in getting cane syrup into granular form. De Bore married the daughter of the former treasurer of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Destrehan, and risked the family fortune on sugar cane.

His first successful crop of sugar was sold for 12.5 cents per pound; the molasses was 50 cents per gallon, according to Richard's article, "200 Years of Progress in the Louisiana Sugar Industry."

Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color born in New Orleans and educated in Paris, patented a triple effect evaporator in 1843, which revolutionized the process of turning the hot boiling syrup into sugar crystals.

Slaves and sugar

The harvesting and production of sugar cane was labor-intensive, and that fueled the slave trade. By the 1860s, the sugar industry was using 300,000 slaves, according to Richard's account.

The country's largest sugar plantation during this period was Houmas House near Baton Rouge, known in its heyday as "The Sugar Palace."