Bittersweet Read Free Page B

lifetime’s neglect, sugar cane and bad care had finally done for my molar tooth, so in early 2001 it was coming out as well. Abscesses, root canal therapy, bad dentistry and capping had left just a remnant that must be removed, slowly and in very small pieces, so an implant could be inserted in its place.
    I am, let me admit it, a total coward around needles and dentists. Many years ago, I found that lying back and doing a complex calculation, like the cube root of seventeen, took my mind off sharp things being introduced to my mouth. There was a problem on this day, however, because after an hour or so, having got my answer to three decimal places, I found I was losing track of the numbers, and while the dentist had lost count of the tooth pieces he was by no means finished. So I cast around for something else to occupy my mind.
    I am also, let me admit it, a total slob around research, falling back on the methodology of New Electronic Brutalism whenever possible, using electronic assistants to find what I want. A few weeks earlier, I had been looking into the ways in which we use the word ‘pie’. I knew Shakespeare called a magpie a Maggot Pie, and while I was relieved to find that Maggot was an old form of Margaret (so Mag Pie was just the sister to Jack Daw), my curiosity had been aroused about pies in general.
    I had turned to one of my brutal tools, a monster text file of all of Shakespeare’s plays, to search out how the Bard used ‘pie’ at different times. That led me to The Winter’s Tale , and the plans the Clown lays to make a warden pie, for which he lists his needs:
    Let me see: what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice—what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on.
    As I lay back in the chair, having my mouth beaten into submission, trying to plan a light essay on the pies of various sorts, the Clown’s sugar came back to me. Sugar was the main source of my present dental predicament, but there was something odd about the Clown’s list. As I understood it, sugar came to England from the West Indies, and Britain colonised the islands after Shakespeare was dead. So how could there have been any sugar around in Shakespeare’s time? Didn’t they use honey?
    That set me wondering, and that was how this book came to be, because once I was out of the chair I went data-digging, and found that Shakespeare uses the word ‘sugar’ seventeen times in the plays and sonnets to mean sweetness, so his audiences must have understood the term. Still, sugar did not dominate, and ‘honey’ appears 52 times in his works in a similar role.
    In time I learned that by 1600, sugar from the Mediterranean, from Africa and from islands in the Atlantic was being traded all over Europe. Sugar had travelled a long way from a clearing in New Guinea, through Indonesia, into India, Persia, Egypt and Palestine. On its travels, people had learned how to work with it, even though they had no idea of where it originated, but sugar was by no means yet the maker and breaker of fortunes and empires that it would become.
    By Shakespeare’s time, people had learned that making sweet tastes is a marvellous way to gather the money that gives power. Ever since, the story of sweetness has been the story of money and power, and the special kinds of corruption that follow from money and power in large amounts. Here follows the story of sugar, what it made, and what was made of it.
    ANTI-GONORRHOEAL MIXTURE
    Take of copaibe 1/2 oz., spirits of nitric ether 1/2 oz., powdered acacia 1 drm., powered white sugar 1 drm., compound spts. of lavender 2 drms., tinc. of opium 1 drm., distilled water 4 oz.; mix. Dose, a tablespoonful three times a-day. Shake before using.
    Daniel Young, Young’s Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets , Toronto,