Just as I was under the mistaken impression that coffee cultivation and consumption for Europe was a New World discovery, I was sure that the same was true about sugar—thinking of the cane-breaks of Caribbean islands and sprawling plantations.
The confection’s introduction to Europe, like many other commodities, however, experienced centuries of delay, with not all Western palettes ready to taste this exotic import, along with the range of culinary spices that the Crusaders adopted when they went more or less native. Europeans were altogether repulsed by some of the indulgent habits that generational pilgrims had adopted—like regular bathing, and the public was not sold of sugar, as with coffee, tea, cotton, said-spices and tobacco—until colonialism necessitated markets and consumers needed to be conjured up. As somewhat of a coda to the spice wars of the Far East traders, France was willing to drop its claim to Canada in exchange for keeping its Caribbean cane-growing islands, and the Dutch relinquished their title to Old New York (then Nieue Amsterdam) once it was decided they could retain its plantations in South American Suriname.