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Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America (review)
- Enterprise & Society
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 4, Number 4, December 2003
- pp. 731-733
- Review
- Additional Information
Enterprise & Society 4.4 (2003) 731-733
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One of the tasty aspects of food studies is that you can discuss so many things. Food is transformative. It is a piece of nature (well, one hopes), often heated, mixed, shifted, bought, sold, and consumed. It therefore connects businesses, places, the body, technology, social classes, and the imagination.
Sugar, as Wendy A. Woloson illustrates in Refined Tastes, provides a scintillating lens onto these areas because it is a fun food. Although a hidden flavoring in many dishes—a dash in salad dressing and a subtle pinch in tomato sauce—it is mostly a treat. And treats are what Woloson focuses on in her book, everything from [End Page 731] hard candy to bonbons to wedding cakes. Treats, by definition, are eaten more for pleasure than for nutrition, so a study of sugar parlays into an investigation of special occasions, leisure time, and the trades that nurture them.
Refined Tastes analyzes, in Woloson's words, "the democratization of sugar." The author looks at its transformation in the United States from an expensive extravagance for only the most elite palates in the early nineteenth century to an everyday household staple by the beginning of the twentieth. She then shows how the broadening accessibility and use of sugar affected its meanings and reflected broader changes in American culture. Woloson does a wonderful job of explaining how consumers embed commodities with significance and how and why their attachments are formed. As Woloson explains, in the case of sugar, its "yumminess" is derived not only from its delicious flavor and whimsical forms but also from the ideas and emotions people affix to it. Woloson is particularly interested in the ways sugar became an appellation for women. Though being called "sweetie pie" might seem innocuous enough, she suggests that the connection between women and sweets that developed in nineteenth-century North America had unsettling implications for women's status in society.
Woloson begins her book with a historical overview of sugar and sugar processing. Each succeeding chapter is devoted to a form of confectionery, including penny hard candy, ice cream, chocolates and bonbons, wedding and other specialty cakes, and homemade desserts. She studies the impact of industrialization on food production and availability, but she is mainly interested in how these technological innovations changed sugar's (and sweets') meanings and uses as cultural symbols. Each chapter includes an overview of the confection's cultural and physical origins (for example, the chapter on chocolate traces the cocoa plant back to its early domestication in Mexico and its use by the Mayans), its manufacture in the nineteenth century into a now familiar treat (such as a Hershey's chocolate bar), and its new symbolic meanings (in the case of a box of chocolates, for instance, romantic intentions).
Refined Tastes is primarily written from a business and marketing perspective. The author relies heavily on trade journals to document her story, which is also enlivened by a rich variety of popular sources, such as advertisements, magazines, and cookbooks, many of which illustrate the book. The subject occasionally loses some of the sense of fun in Woloson's distillation of the business and economic details of the various sugar enterprises. She also probably overstates the argument that sweets such as ice cream signified a triumphant taming of the natural world. In her time period, the aim was more to [End Page 732] "improve" upon nature's bounty than to overpower it, as evidenced in popular picturesque landscape gardens and Romantic nature paintings. Woloson is at her best, I believe, when she analyzes the context of consumption, both social and physical. Her descriptions of children loitering in candy stores, how class distinctions revealed themselves to the youngsters who were divided between the haves and have-nots, and how these distinctions foretold their adult behavior are especially compelling.
At the end of each chapter, the...