Before Europeans discovered the sugarcane they only had the natural sweetness of things to make sweet food, the sweetest of which is sugar beet, whose sugar is lot harder to purify than that of sugar cane.
How sweet can cake be without some reasonably pure form of sugar you can add. Did the concept of cake even exist in Europe before that?
Edit: nevermind - I forgot the sweetness of fruit (oops).
Most sugar produced in Europe is from sugarbeets, but that production is still less than the imported sugar from sugarcane (because sugarcane is just vastly more productive).
They didn’t extract sugar from sugar beet back in the 14th century. In fact only in 1747 was it discovered that beets had sucrose and sugar beets themselves were only created after that, via selective breeding, so I don’t think they had sugar as we know it back then. However as somebody else pointed out, they had honey which has a very high concentration of sugar.
I suspected sugar wasn’t extracted from sugar beet in the Middle Ages or earlier but I wasn’t sure and prompted by your question I went searching for it and indeed that is the case since sugar beets didn’t even exist back then.
Sugar!
Before Europeans discovered the sugarcane they only had the natural sweetness of things to make sweet food, the sweetest of which is sugar beet, whose sugar is lot harder to purify than that of sugar cane.
How sweet can cake be without some reasonably pure form of sugar you can add. Did the concept of cake even exist in Europe before that?
Edit: nevermind - I forgot the sweetness of fruit (oops).
Honey?
Yeah, I really missed pretty much the entire domain of sweet things.
Most sugar is made from beets nowadays in Europe.
Most sugar consumed in Europe is from sugarcane.
Most sugar produced in Europe is from sugarbeets, but that production is still less than the imported sugar from sugarcane (because sugarcane is just vastly more productive).
They didn’t extract sugar from sugar beet back in the 14th century. In fact only in 1747 was it discovered that beets had sucrose and sugar beets themselves were only created after that, via selective breeding, so I don’t think they had sugar as we know it back then. However as somebody else pointed out, they had honey which has a very high concentration of sugar.
I suspected sugar wasn’t extracted from sugar beet in the Middle Ages or earlier but I wasn’t sure and prompted by your question I went searching for it and indeed that is the case since sugar beets didn’t even exist back then.