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Kitchen Chat, I posted a recipe to make your own cream Soda. It is out of an old cook book from the 1800s.
Grelo what's loaf sugar? I've never heard that term before?
I'll like the post here so folks can click over..
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Susan, when I was a "wee" one, 82 yrs ago my father still got sugar in "Loaf" form. It was actually a cone about 16" high. wrapped in strong blue and white paper. You could still get it in Germany in the 60s. It was very clear sugar and mostly used for making jelly., They also called it "canning sugar". Canning sugar could still available in the form of granulated sugar but is more coarse than regular granulated sugar and I am sure it is also sweeter.
Canning sugar was still available in US supermarkets in the late 50s and early 60s but I have not seen it since.Could be you can still get it in specialty stores (at a high price, of course) .On cooked cereal I like to use Turbinado sugar, it is coarse,golden in color, not t refined and retains a slight molasses taste from either cane or sugar beets. Expensive,yes, but not too bad and one does not need much because of the nice flavor from not being refined and bleached
In our bakery we used to get what we called "Candiszucker" (candy sugar). This was in the 1930s, It came in huge lumps weighing 12 to 20 lbs and looked like a coarse but translucent amber colored rock. My father would take a hammer to it and break off large and small pieces. Some of the small pieces he gave to children who came into the bakery like you give a piece of hard candy. Most of the larger pieces were hammered more and then put into a huge granite mortar and ground down into pieces the size of hail stones (pearl sugar). It was used to sprinkle on certain cookies and on honey cakes.
I think you can still buy small lumps of the amber, unrefined sugar in specialty stores. Russians used to put a piece into their mouth to hold while they drank tea, that way their tea was sweetened as they swallowed it instead of putting refined sugar into their tea-cup. I have seen wooden stir sticks sticks with a small lump of white or this amber sugar on one end, wrapped attractively, sold as small gifts in health food stores around the holidays. You gave them together with specialty teas, each stick to sweeten one or two cups of tea.
It is already past my bedtime. Sweet dreams to you.
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I have a nice bag of unrefined sugar in my pantry, I use it to top baked goods because it doesn't melt in the oven.
Would you have to dissolve the loaf in order to use or grate it some how?
The cone was granulated sugar, jut packaged in tight, cone shaped bags. Only the lump unrefined amber colored sugar came in very large odd shaped lumps (10-20 lbs)Have to look up what it was like way before my time.Might find it in my grandfathers German 1870 large recipe book for pastry bakers and confectioners.
Maybe when refined sugar first came on the market it came in hard, cone shaped lumps. One of the German sugar companies still uses the sugar cone as a trade mark. (sugar loaf = like the Sugar Loaf Mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
White Pearl sugar will also not melt when sprinkled on goods before baking. We called it "Hagelzucker" or hail stone sugar because the granules are the size of small hail stones.
I have enjoyed the "sugar lesson"--I find it very interesting.
Thank you for sharing gr_elo.
Lori
sstetzel I have a nice bag of unrefined sugar in my pantry, I use it to top baked goods because it doesn't melt in the oven. Would you have to dissolve the loaf in order to use or grate it some how?
Susan, I did explain in my long post how they reduced the LARGE10-15 lbs lumps of "rock" sugar (white or unrefined
They hammered it, then put the smaller pieces into a huge mortar or used marble rolling pins on a slab to crunch it into pearl sugar or even finer. The last time I saw the amber colored raw lumps was in 1939.
Somebody else on THO must be old enough to remeber off shaped small lumps of "Rock Candy", even if they never saw the huge lumps it came from. If not, I guess I am the only old fossil who does because I grew up in a family bakery where everything was still made from scratch until in the late 1950s.
I'm glad I opened this post because I enjoyed your explanations of the loaf sugar. My grandparents are no longer living, but they came here from Germany as babies in the early 1900s. I am going to print out this post and share it with my mom. She loves hearing this sort of thing and telling me what she remembers from her parents and grandparents.
(I don't care for cream soda, so I passed by this post until tonight when I had time on my hands. LOL So glad i found it.)
Avidcook,where from in Germany did your parents come from???