‘Sweets’ is a nutritious, filling historical grab-bag

Once upon a prehistoric time, it wasn’t easy to savor the pleasure of intense sweetness unless you were lucky enough to live under a date palm or willing to brave the wrath of the honeybee.

Of course, sugar in its various forms (lactose, fructose, glucose and sucrose) is an essential component of the human diet. It is part of mother’s milk and can be found almost everywhere in the vegetable kingdom -- fruits, blades of grass and most vegetables -- albeit in healthily modest quantities.

The much sweeter form we commonly think of as sugar, the product of sugar cane or sugar beets, became a dietary staple only in the last three or four centuries. If we are instinctually programmed to crave sweetness, it is an instinct that probably served us better in the days before sugar was so instantly, concentratedly and ubiquitously available in soft drinks, cookies, ice cream, cake and candy.

Candy is the form of sweetness closest to the heart of British journalist Tim Richardson, the son of a dentist and grandson of a toffee maker. Whether called “candy” by Americans or “sweets” by the British, the category includes toffee, fudge, caramels, chocolates, nougat, pralines, peanut brittle, marzipan, halwa, mints, pastilles, licorice, lollipops, jelly babies, chewing gum and more.

Richardson excludes cookies, cake, puddings and ice cream: along with intense sweetness, the essence of candy is that you can eat it as a snack between meals. Candy is (relatively) hard, with a high concentration of sugar that makes it last indefinitely without spoilage. But as Richardson repeatedly remarks in “Sweets,” his international candy-seeking odyssey, candy is even more irresistible when it’s freshly made.

An unabashed candy-lover, Richardson waxes lyrical -- or perhaps one should say “syrupy” -- at a whiff of roasting chocolate, the taste of Turkish Delight or the mere idea of actually working at a candy factory. He is also a staunch defender of candy, which he believes has been unfairly demonized by certain nutritionists and health-food advocates.

Richardson concedes sugar may cause tooth decay, but so can starch, which converts to sugar in the mouth. He would remind us that fats are the culprits for heart disease and obesity, which means (alas for chocoholics!) that chocolates (which contain fat as well as sugar) are the more dangerous sort of candy. Yet, as Richardson also shows, chocolate has nutritional value, not to mention the rich complexity and nuances of its flavor and texture (its more than 1,200 chemical components make it a more complicated taste experience than wine).

Richardson would probably have been happier had he been born during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, when, as he tells us, sugar was not only considered to be healthful, but also a medicine: a cure for sore throats, indigestion, eye trouble and countless other ailments. These were the times of preserves, pastilles, gums and comfits, as fruits, seeds, flowers and roots were encased in sugar or syrup to sweeten and preserve them.

Far from supposing that preservatives were bad for you, earlier ages arrived at the opposite conclusion, as reflected in this old English proverb: “That which preserves Apples and Plumbs, Will also preserve Liver and Lungs.” Which only goes to demonstrate the weaknesses of analogical thinking!

But perhaps an even more appealing gastronomical “home” for Richardson might have been India, the civilization that first invented sweets: milk-based confections featuring countless combinations of honey, sugar, syrup, rosewater, nuts, grains, flours, spices. Curiously, while Indians were concocting one milky-sweet-spicy delight after another, the other great and ancient civilization to their north, China, exhibited very little interest in sweets (or in milk products, for that matter). To this day, Richardson informs us, Chinese “sweets,” such as they are, taste unpalatably sour to most outsiders.

The Persians, the Arabs, the Armenians and the Turks also made major contributions to the realm of sweets, including baklava, candied citrus and sherbet. Nor does Richardson neglect the sweets of the rest of the world, from Poland to the Philippines, from Russia to Japan. Rather less interesting are his breathless accounts of his visits to candy factories and candy-makers’ trade shows.

Although Richardson has an almost proselytizing passion for sweets (he seems to love the cheap, nasty, mass-produced ones even more than the voluptuous handmade variety), he takes due note of the problematic relationship between sweets and slavery. In centuries past, sugar cane was harvested by slaves.

Nowadays, in cacao-growing places like Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, he tells us, low “cacao prices and deregulation of the market have made farmers unwilling or unable to pay their workforce, and some of them have resorted to coercing children into slavery.... The director of Mali’s Save the Children Fund ... said: ‘People who are drinking cocoa or coffee are drinking their blood. It is the blood of young children carrying six kilos of cacao sacks, so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders.’ ”

Still, as Richardson details, many of the best-known manufacturers of chocolates -- Suchard of Switzerland, the Quaker-founded British firms of Fry, Rowntree and Cadbury -- have a venerable history of humanitarian concern for their labor force (Cadbury even established a utopian village, far from the urban pollution, for them to inhabit). Milton Hershey of Pennsylvania took a paternalistic interest in his workers, and the Mars company is known for its relatively egalitarian organizational style.

For all its excessive enthusiasms and unresolved issues, “Sweets” is an informative and generally entertaining grab-bag of personal opinion, anecdote and culinary history.

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Sweets

A History of Candy

Tim Richardson

Bloomsbury: 288 pages, $24.95