According to Jean Nicolas, desserts were relished by the upper classes and the sugar habit was well entrenched from the late 1600s through the eighteenth century. Besides being, as Nicolas puts it, a “physiological necessity,” sugar was often used as a gift or exchange item. In daily life it was sprinkled directly on soft white cheese and used in large quantities to prepare all sorts of preserves—the famous confitures. Confitures are still in style; modem markets still display a whole array of elegant jars, sealing paraffin cakes and, nowadays, self-sealing jars. Even today, receiving a gift of homemade confitures is a sign that you are a true friend. The only thing one can do is to reciprocate, so the same old jar has been traveling back and forth between Georgette and me for the last six years; she gives me plum jam or quince jelly and, once it has fallen victim to my bunch of forever hungry fellows, I return the jar filled with marmalade in the Anglo-Saxon manner.
