honey and maple and palm sugars, and for one
basic reason. Bees and tree tappers begin with
an isolated plant fluid that contains little else
besides water and sugar. But the raw material
for table sugar is the crushed whole stem of
the cane, or the whole root of the beet. Cane
and beet juices include many substances —
proteins, complex carbohydrates, tannins,
pigments — that not only interfere with the
sweet taste themselves, but decompose into
even less palatable chemicals at the high
temperatures necessary for the concentration
process. Cane and beet sugar must therefore
be separated from these impurities.
Preindustrial Sugar Refining From the late
Middle Ages until the 19th century, when
machinery changed nearly every sort of
manufacturing, the treatment of sugar
followed the same basic procedure. There
were four separate stages:
clarifying the cane juice