Customer Reviews

Sugar-Plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets (None)

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3 star:		(1)
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Sugar-Plums and Sherbet is not a quick read, but it's a fascinating one. The author goes into the history, chemistry, and early manufacture of sugar candies in Britain, and even includes a few recipes for unusual treats. This book is full of facts you probably never knew. (For example: Sugar was considered a medicine when it first arrived in Britain. Or: some people boycotted sugar when slave labor was used to produce it.)

Anyone who is interested in food history will love this book.

This is for anyone who is interested in how we got from there to here; in other words the history contianed in this beautiful book is still connected to our current consumption of sweets and our not-too-distant-memory of the neighborhood candy store and variety store. A wonderful journey back in time that of course does mention R. Dahl and the Willi Wonka era. a must read for cooks, writers, artists; in fact anyone not interested in the homogenized, mundane or commonplace. buy this and you will be amused. entertained and enlightened.

I liked that the author separated sugar types by topics. However I found the chronological ordering within each chapter to be a bit confusing. The author seemed to jump back and forth in the time line in several chapters, stringing together unlikely groupings of subtopics. I was hoping for more historical accounting and recipes. I would say this is a good primer for an introduction to sweets, but is not very in depth.