Cookies: Sweetening of America

Americans inherited their well-known sweet tooth from the English, and even the first colonists had sweetening agents. They used honey and molasses, and Native Americans taught them to use maple sugar, which was less expensive and more plentiful than imported sugar. Nevertheless, America’s first cookies called for conservative amounts of sugar compared with what was to come.

The discovery of America by Europeans had its roots in explorers seeking faster routes to the Far East, the heart of the lucrative spice trade, but it soon was discovered that highly prized sugarcane could be grown successfully in the Caribbean. New England became pivotal in the triangular trade of the day, turning sugarcane, which was shipped from the West Indies, into molasses. Rum was then produced with the molasses and used to buy slaves in West Africa for deployment in the cane fields of the Caribbean. Because refined white sugar remained expensive, American cooks supplemented it with molasses and sorghum.