The Sugar Bowl

The Sugar Bowl is an aptly named college football game that was first played in January 1935, during the depths of the American Depression. For 40 years the game took place at the old Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, near the site of the sugar plantation of Étienne de Boré (1740–1820), where cane sugar was first successfully granulated in 1795. To make sugar syrup crystallize, de Boré combined a vacuum-pan process with Spanish molasses-making methods. But he did not invent this process; de Boré’s accomplishment was making sugar profitable as a commodity crop, and his entrepreneurial success made him famous.