2007oct14. Excerpts from the book Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America by Wendy A. Woloson.
Consumer insensitivity or naïveté about the larger political issues engendered by labor and production realities characterized sugar’s presence in the marketplace throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Notwithstanding the pleas of abolitionists, people on both sides of the Atlantic continued to consume sugar in ever-increasing quantities. The abolitionist newspaper the Pennsylvania Freeman, for example, carried many advertisements for stores selling “Free Groceries” (i.e., produced with free rather than slave labor) in the late 1830s. Robert M’Clure’s was one among a number of enterprises that offered such staples, and his stock included “Double Single and Lump Sugar, Canton Sugar in bags and boxes; old and green Java Coffee, St. Domingo, Laguira, and Jamaica do. [ditto]; Eastern Island and N. York sugar-house Molasses; East India rice; Free Chocolate, made from St. Domingo Cocoa, &c.” These shops, however, were short-lived; regardless of conscience, people’s desire for and consumption of refined sugar and the products made with it continued unabated throughout the rest of the century. (pg 25)
Significantly, penny candies counted among the first things that American children ever spent their own money on, since merchants offered these treats in their shops long before other marketplace diversions appeared. But penny candies remained attractive to children even decades later, at the turn of the century, when other cheap entertainments like arcades and movie theaters were available, especially in the urban landscape. Candy shops became places where youngsters gathered and socialized among themselves, away from parental control, where “they were allowed, even encouraged, to act more grown-up than was good for them.” The pragmatic retailer understood that his financial success relied on the patronage of children; he was at their mercy. “A Curious Candy Store Boycott” took place in a rural Pennsylvania town at the turn of the century, for example, because the sole candy shop proprietor forbade loitering. “The children are organized, and have held several torchlight processions,” the Confectioners’ and Bakers’ Gazette noted uneasily. (pg 44)
Temperance workers kept stressing a connection between liquor and candy. In 1906, a writer in the Ladies’ Home Journal invokved scientific and moral theories that warned women against letting their children eat candy, saying, “The first craving from ill feeding calls for sugar; later for salt; then tea, coffee; then tobacco; then such fermented beverages as wine and beer; and lastly alcohol.” (pg 62)
Many fountain devices incorporated nude female figures, glass domes with spurting jets of water, and gas lights. Fountain manufacturers took advantage of people’s fascination with the triumph of technology that miraculously delivered fizzy water to beverage glasses by offering other gadgets that used water in novel ways. For example, the countertop Revolving Tumbler Washer and the Crystal Spa, both illustrated in Charles Lippincott’s 1876 trade catalogue, washed and rinsed dirty tumblers right in front of the customers. The drudgery of cleaning dirty dishes, usually hidden in the private back room, became a public attraction performed in plain view. The Crystal Spa, topped with a gas light, cleaned tumblers “inside and out.” The ad copy continued, “its novelty and beauty must be seen to be fully appreciated ... the value of an article like the Crystal Spa can only be justly realized by regarding it as a thing of beauty merely, apart from its mechanical character.” (pg 92)
Prescriptive literature aimed at late-century soda fountain operators continually emphasized eye appeal as a way to communicate more abstract ideas to women, like cleanliness. “Daintiness” served as a common euphemism for cleanliness. “Thin, sparkling glasses, bright, shining silver holders, new daintily designed spoons, clean tables, spotless jackets, immaculate serving counter” – all contributed to a successful fountain. Yet the clear message was this: “You may talk to a woman until you are blind about Pure Food beverages, about chemically pure carbonic acid gas, about ice cream made from rich cows’ cream and nothing else, and you may give her all these, but if you do not serve them daintily – you lose.” (pg 95)
Later in the century, when manufacturers began making chocolates and bonbons on a grand scale, advisors’ warnings gained stridency as they clarified the interconnection between food, sexual appetite, self-gratification, and “self-pollution.” Masturbation in the nineteenth century threatened the social fabric because people considered it “the ultimate symbol of private freedom and atomistic individualism,” Karen Lystra points out. Eating alone and reading alone, then, were both deemed unhealthy solitary pursuits because they quickly led to the sin of onanism. The popular and prolific nineteenth century health and diet guru J. H. Kellogg shared with Slyvester Graham the belief that “self-abuse” in women was expressed through “dreamy indolence” and gluttony. Outside temptations led women to “perdition” “Candies, spices, cinnamon, cloves, peppermint, and all strong essences powerfully excite the genital organs and lead to the same result [vice].” (pg 139)
Sweets had become so prevalent in the culture that they registered not just eating habits, but reading habits as well; people well understood the comparisons men like Alcott were making. William Greenleaf Eliot, another popular advisor, wrote: “One might as well expect to gain strength to his body from sweetmeats and confectionery, as for his mind from works of fiction.” Joseph P. Tuttle took the comparison one step further, suggesting that a life of luxury for a young boy, expressed by sweet-eating or book-reading, would irreparably feminize him, alleging that a boy living a life of “luxury” and “indolence,” “ends up being effeminate,” and “daintily avoids all unnecessary exertion.” Putting a finer point on it, he wrote: “You cannot develop a vigorous manhood by stuffing a boy with confectionery and deforming him in a rocking-chair.” Women were not supposed to engage in novel reading or bonbon eating because it was indulgent and sinful; boys were not supposed to engage in these activities because it made them like women. (pg 140)
Even though home production helped democratize ice cream, class distinctions associated with it remained; even versions of homemade ice cream differed in appearance and quality depending on one’s particular class. The middling classes most likely “put up” their ice creams in ubiquitous steel melon molds. In contrast, the rich served their homemade ice creams in fanciful shapes formed using elaborate molds of tin-plated copper or cast iron. Often imported from Britain, the molds enabled the rich to emulate the professional confectioner’s product. (pg 201)
