Northeastern Sweeteners

Background

Federal dietary guidance estimates that added sugars account for more than 13% of calories consumed in the United States.¹ A separate USDA supply measure shows that, in 2021, about 55% of the caloric sweeteners available for consumption were refined cane and beet sugars, about 43% were corn sweeteners, and about 2% were honey and other edible syrups.²

But highly refined sugars and corn syrup are recent inventions – most cuisines began developing far earlier. So, how did cuisines sweeten before? It was varied. In Korea, cooked rice was saccharified with malt to create syrup, ssal-jocheong;³ a similar malted syrup, mizuame, was used in Japan; in the Andes, yacón was traditionally eaten as a sweet, juicy root;⁴ in parts of Africa, sweet-stalk sorghum was chewed for its sugary juice or used in confections;⁵ in the Middle East, there was date syrup and pomegranate molasses; in the Mediterranean, there was honey – pick up an Ancient Roman cookbook, Apicius’ De Re Coquinaria, and you’ll realize quickly that honey was the sweetener; in Southeast Asia, there was palm jaggery and coconut sugar; in New Guinea, then India, then Persia, there was cane sugar, which Christopher Columbus carried to Hispaniola in the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493;⁶ in Biblical accounts, there was manna – some sort of tree syrup, perhaps – a sweetener of even more ancient times.⁷⁸

U.S. per capita caloric sweetener availability, 1970-2021, USDA.

Humans have a broadly shared, evolutionarily rooted attraction to sweetness, although preference varies by person and concentration.⁹ When sweetness comes with flavors – the malty richness of ssal-jocheong, the acidity of pomegranate molasses – cuisines develop to accommodate these flavors; they become characteristic. Even in an age of abundance, these historical limitations persist. While Pad Thai was invented long after the introduction of refined sugars, its taste is often defined by its use of palm sugar. Try to make Pad Thai with refined sugar, and see how much of the taste is lost – not just in flavor, but familiarity.

A Brief History of Sweetness in the Northeast

Before the U.S. was colonized, Native American tribes in the Northeast had a few options for sweetness – that is for sure – though we have limited records of the cuisine. Without a doubt, they used maple sugar and syrup.¹⁰ Accounts also describe other tree saps and, elsewhere in the Americas, preparations made from the sweet juice of young corn stalks.⁸ Of course, there was also naturally occurring sweetness in fruits and tubers, some of which may have been cooked or concentrated. English colonists first imported European honeybees to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1622; historical records imply separate introductions to Plymouth in the 1630s and Long Island in the 1670s.¹¹ The bee was later described in some accounts as the “white man’s fly.” These early colonists had the aforementioned sweeteners, such as tree syrups and fruits, as well as the newly introduced honey.⁸

Maple sap buckets at Beaver Meadow Audubon Center in western New York. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But around the same time, sugarcane-derived sugar imported from South America (Brazil) and the Caribbean (Barbados) was becoming popular ‘at home’ in England. As of around 1650, it became a household item.⁸ Soon, the same trend followed in the colonies, and sugar – especially, molasses, for the lower class – became the standard sweetener. Over the course of just a century and a half, from when Columbus first brought sugarcane to the Americas on his second voyage (1493), it had begun to transform the agricultural landscape of the Caribbean and parts of South America.⁷ As demand increased in Europe and the nascent United States, production dramatically increased. By the 1850s, the New York Times described sugar – also becoming increasingly refined – as second only to salt as a necessity for the American people.⁷ For the Englishman, as of 1900, it was about a fifth of their caloric intake.⁸ Poor people continued to rely on molasses; along with bread and tea, it formed the bulk of the diet of the lower class.⁸

Cane sugar was not without competition. Around the mid 19th century, two primary alternatives became popular: beet sugar and sorghum syrup. Spreading from Prussia, to France – where sugar production was a formative industry – to the Americas, sugarbeets began to be cultivated as a cheaper alternative to cane sugar. An unsuccessful Philadelphia factory produced a few hundred pounds of beet sugar in 1830; the next major experiment began in Northampton, MA, in 1838.¹² These efforts were driven both by a desire for independence from imported sugar and a drive to find sustainable methods for growing sugar without reliance on slave labor, especially the notoriously harsh slavery found on sugar plantations.⁷⁸ The Northampton operation shut down around 1840, and sugar beet production moved first to California and then the Midwest. Today, sugarbeets account for more than half of U.S. sugar production, though a smaller share globally.¹³ Sorghum followed a somewhat similar path. It was first introduced in the Northeast; the horticulturalist William Robert Prince distributed sorghum seeds – originally from China and Africa – in Flushing, Queens.⁸ Methods for sorghum syrup manufacture improved in the U.S. by virtue of government subsidy and out of interest for additional sugar alternatives; its production, like the sugarbeet, soon left the Northeast, however, for the Midwest and Southern United States. In the mid to late 19th century, when corn syrup – produced by acid hydrolysis, literally the cleaving of starches into simple sugars using acid, usually hydrochloric acid – was invented, sorghum molasses became largely a cottage industry; beet sugar production, on the other hand, remained purely industrial.⁸

All the meanwhile, sugar refineries become of increasing economic and political importance. At this time, New York, the nucleus of sugar production, had ten refineries and had achieved relative independence from foreign refined sugar producers.⁷ Techniques for refinement continued to improve – a far cry from sugar refinement using ox blood, the primary method, in the decades and centuries prior.⁸

A look inside the Domino (Havemeyer) sugar refinery, Scientific American.

Present Sweeteners in the Northeast

While the sugar industry is no longer the dominant chunk of the economy – and tax revenue – that it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Northeast retains a history of refining imported raw sugar. Domino (previously W. & F.C. Havemeyer Company) operated its Yonkers refinery until the end of 2025, when owner American Sugar Refining closed the facility.¹⁴ Some corn syrup may be produced in the Northeast; Karo, a major retail corn-syrup brand, is produced and packaged in Summit, Illinois, fewer than 15 miles from Chicago.¹⁵ But neither corn syrup nor granulated sugars – though they may be refined in the Northeast – are generally made from Northeastern produce. Sugarcane comes largely from the Southern states, especially Florida and Louisiana, as well as from foreign suppliers. Sugarbeets are grown in the Midwest, Great Plains, and West, while corn production is concentrated in the Midwest. Due to cost, it seems to me unlikely these industries will ever thrive in the Northeast.¹³

The Domino (Havemeyer) sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the present day.

So – in our unique place and time – what do sweeteners of the Northeast look like? I’ll give an introduction to the types we think about without going into too much depth:

• Sap syrups (maple, birch, etc.) and hickory-bark syrup
• Honey
• Sorghum (grown in NY, notably by Empire Syrups, though primarily in the South)
• Fruits (and fruit syrups, such as apple cider syrup)
• Naturally sweet produce (such as root vegetables, or sugary grain like sweetcorn)
• Starch-derived and enzymatically produced sweeteners
  • Industrial starch sweeteners, made by hydrolyzing starch into glucose and, for high-fructose corn syrup, enzymatically converting some glucose to fructose; amylase treatment can likewise increase the sweetness of oat milk.¹⁶
  • Culinary saccharified sweeteners, using enzymes from koji (Aspergillus oryzae), tempeh-related Rhizopus molds, or malted grain to release sugars from starch (cf. amazake, Korean rice syrup, or beer wort).¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

Each of these sweeteners – like palm jaggery or date syrup – has a unique flavor that demands creativity; in other words, it pushes us to consider cuisine. These are the primary sweeteners we experiment with.

If you have corrections, comments, or additions to the above information, please send us a note at info@northeastlarder.com.

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