Sugarcane, with one of the most marvellous and efficient growth cycles when it comes to converting solar energy, grows and lives in lush and unspoilt tropical lands.
Since ancient times, sugar has been obtained by pressing sugar cane. Writings discovered in India, dating from 300 B.C.E., tell of a food called Sakkairia, meaning “honey without bees”. It is from this name that our modern term sucrose, meaning sugar, is derived.
More recent texts (1000 C.E.) document the cultivation of sugarcane in Sicily, Cyprus, Malta and Spain, the last in the exact same area of Grenada where the only sugar cane plantation in Europe exists today. The discovery of America, with its vast tropical regions, suggested to Europeans the possibility of cultivating sugarcane in the countries of Central and Latin America. It was, in fact, Christopher Columbus who, during his voyages, brought the first sugarcane seeds to these regions, where he found the terrain to be particularly well-suited to sugarcane cultivation. Christopher Columbus, himself, wrote, “I brought with me all the sugarcane plants I wished to have. I greatly desire for there to be an abundance of them. Here, there is land to make plantations of them.”
With these voyages of conquest, first the Spaniards, followed by the Portuguese and the British, introduced sugarcane cultivation to the West Indies, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the lands of Guiana and Guadeloupe.
The first sugar produced in Barbados was of the Muscovado variety, dark and moist, with a very strong flavour. Sugar processing techniques subsequently evolved, resulting in drier raw sugars. The first of these types of sugar is the one we still know today by the name of Demerara. Subsequently, following Captain Cook’s discovery of new lands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, sugarcane cultivation was introduced on those tropical islands where the climate was most favourable, in the Northern Hemisphere near the Tropic of Cancer, and in the Southern Hemisphere near the tropic of Capricorn.
Each place of origin imparts its own unique olfactory and taste properties to the raw cane sugar produced there, not to mention a variety of trace elements such as potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron and phosphorous, which contribute to supplying, in addition to the sweetness and energy that sugar provides, the essential nutrients that make up a healthy and proper diet.

 

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