Was there sugar to eat in ancient times? What are some sugars you ate as a child?

I think there should be, or it can't be as sweet as honey.

The first is winter melon candy, but he is not really made of winter melon, but because the color is slightly like winter melon, so he gave a name of winter melon candy, generally because the original quality of life is not as good as it is now, and the material will be scarce, so you can eat some sugar during the New Year's Festival, this kind of sugar appears in our family during the New Year, especially grandparents especially like to buy this kind of sugar rent chaos, but this kind of sugar is really not delicious, according to my current taste, This kind of sugar is so sweet and so sweet that it makes people feel greasy in their throats and eyes after two bites. So when I was young, although I liked to eat sweet things, I didn't like to eat this kind of winter melon candy.

The second is lard sugar, I found that when the original material conditions were not very rich, everyone's snacks were basically made around sugar, maybe in ancient times, our productivity in China was not developed, so many snacks were naturally made of sugar. This kind of lard candy is really made of lard, because at that time our material was very poor, so the edible oil was not as diverse as now, and the most common oil eaten by every household at that time was still lard made from pork fat. But this kind of lard candy doesn't taste good at all, I feel like it's all oil, and although the name is sugar, it feels very greasy and greasy when you eat it in your mouth.

The third is ginger candy, which is also a favorite sugar for many older generations, which is made by slicing ginger and coating it with icing. I can often see this kind of ginger candy in my grandfather's place, my grandfather probably loves to eat it very much, and it hurts me very much, so when I was young, I often let me eat some raw ginger candy, but I especially hate the taste of ginger, I don't eat ginger at all, every time I eat it, I am very entangled, I can only secretly lick the frosting on the outside of the ginger candy and throw away the ginger.

The fourth is the dragon whisker crisp, this snack can be said to be not outdated at all, but now everyone has more and more snacks, so her status in the store is getting lower and lower, so many places can no longer buy it, in fact, this kind of dragon whisker crisp looks very good, and the taste is rustling in the mouth, but it is a little choking after eating too much.

As an indispensable part of human daily life, sugar is not only an important condiment, but also one of the main nutrients of the human body**. In ancient times, people already knew how to obtain sweets from natural substances such as honey, fresh fruits, and plants. However, due to the backwardness of technology, these substances are only natural substances and not processed products of human beings.

With the advancement of the times, the method of extracting sugar has become more specialized and mechanized. Human beings have mainly gone through three stages: early sugar production, handicraft sugar production and mechanized sugar production.

Every industrial advance has brought about a huge leap in the quality of human life, from the early extraction of sweets from nature, to the later production of sugar from cereals, and later to the production of sugar from sugar cane. With the gradual prosperity of sugar production, ordinary families have gradually become more affordable. China is also one of the world's earliest sugar producers.

Sugars mainly come from the following**. (1) In the early stage of sugar production, maltose and sucrose were the main components in ancient China, and the role of maltose was relatively more important. The so-called maltose is a food made from corn, barley and other grains through fermentation and saccharification.

In simple terms, it is sugar made by fermenting grains. As early as the Western Zhou Dynasty in China, there were records about maltose. "The Book of Songs: Big Tooth" wrote:

"Sweet tea", which means that the surrounding land is fat, and even wild vegetables such as violet and borage are as sweet as maltose. Li Zhou's "Tianguan Jiyi" lists "sweet is sweet" as the representative of "sweet" among the five flavors.

Maltose, also known as maltose syrup or maltose syrup, is a type of starch sugar. Regarding the production method of maltose, Jia Sixian, an agronomist of the Northern Wei Dynasty, recorded in the book "Qi Min Shu Jiao": "Those who use rice and millet are as pure as water.

In addition to caramel, sugarcane was also one of the important sources of sugar in ancient China. The ancients called sugar made from sugar cane "stone honey" and "powdered sugar". The so-called "stone honey" is a sugar cube.

Yang Fu of the Eastern Han Dynasty once wrote in "Liangzhou Foreign Matter Chronicles": "Stone honey is not a stone, it is also a fake stone. "It was fried in sugar cane juice and exposed.

It resembles a stone, but it is light, so it is called stone honey. This means that sugarcane, after being processed into sugarcane juice, is exposed to sunlight and condenses into lumps, known as "stone honey". China and India were the first countries in the world to grow sugarcane and are also important sugarcane producers.

Honey is usually collected by bees or refined by sugar cane, and after collecting such things, they can be processed into a variety of desserts.

Ancient people used grains to make wine and sugar. In the early days, the sugar was mainly starch syrup, which is a kind of sugar made by saccharification and boiling of rice (starch) and malt, which is viscous and commonly known as maltose.

As far back as the Western Zhou Dynasty, caramel has been made, and it is believed to be the earliest sugar in the world. Since the creation of the Western Zhou Dynasty, it has been widely spread among the people and widely eaten. Jia Sixian's "Qi Min Yaoshu" written by Jia Siqian of the Northern Wei Dynasty is the most detailed, and the methods, steps, and key points of making starch sugar are described in the book, which has been used for a long time by future generations.

China also has a long history of using sugarcane to make sugar. Sugarcane is produced in the south, from the Warring States period to the end of the Han Dynasty, sugarcane has been grown, and its berry juice is drunk. In the Han Dynasty, people were able to use sugar paste made from cane syrup to mold the shape of various animals, although the product was still low-grade, but compared with the Warring States Period, people ate cane syrup, it was a great progress.

From the Eastern Han Dynasty to the early Tang Dynasty, the quality of sucrose in China was not good, so the Tang Taizong sent people to Magadha in India to learn sugar making technology and introduce new sugar making methods, and since then, China's sucrose production has entered a new stage.

According to the records of the Tang Huiyao, the production of white sugar began in the Tang Dynasty. In the Ming Dynasty, Song Yingxing's "Heavenly Creations" has a detailed record of handmade sugar, and this method of handmade sugar has been used until the establishment of New China. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, sugar beet was used to make sugar in the northeast of China.

My answer was limited to a supplement to the comrade upstairs, after all, he was already very detailed. As for the raw materials for sugar production, as the comrade upstairs said, more sugar beets and sugar cane are used, sugar beet is mostly used for sugar making in the north, and sugar cane is mostly used for sugar making in the south. Of course, sugar beets have not been used in sugar production since then.

Beets are an imported product, which was introduced from Arabia 1500 years ago, and it is only wild, and it is known that there were only sugar beets dedicated to sugar production in 1906. As for sugar cane, its preparation method is very troublesome in written terms, of course, if you want to know, you can ask me, but in simple terms, it is to use a juicer to squeeze the juice, and then evaporate and crystallize. At that time, the juicer was two cog-like cobblestone mills, squeezing the sugar cane in the middle to get the juice.

Of course, the sugar industry at that time was not very developed, so the sugar produced was usually yellowish, and the white sugar seen on the market today is obtained by adding a small amount of lime milk and filtering it with diatomaceous earth, and then decolorizing it. In ancient times, sugar was not as sweet as it is now, because now sugar is also added with honey and saccharin or something, note that saccharin is not sugar, but a chemical synthesis, I myself do not recommend eating. The above are the few additions that I can recall, I hope it will be helpful to you, and if I still have something in mind, I will come back to add it later.

Sugar was called syrup and syrup in ancient times.

In the Book of Songs of the Western Zhou Dynasty in China, there is a verse that reads, "Zhou Yuan is full of flesh, and violis is like a syrup", which means that the land of Zhou is very fat, and even violets and endive are as sweet as starch sugar. It shows that there was caramel as far back as the Western Zhou Dynasty. Caramel is believed to be the first sugar to be manufactured in the world.

Caramel is a starch sugar, so it can also be said that starch sugar has the longest history.

In ancient times, it mainly referred to the finished products of maltose. Comparatively speaking, "饧" refers to a slightly harder "饴". When plant seeds germinate, saccharifying enzymes are usually produced to hydrolyze starch into maltose.

Maltose is less easy to crystallize, but it is easy to make into a gel-packed substance. It is the earliest sweetener made by the ancients.

In the "Seven Distinctions" written by Zhang Heng of the Eastern Han Dynasty, there is a sentence of "sand and stone honey". The word "saga" here refers to the fact that the prepared sugar has tiny crystals, which can be regarded as the prototype of granulated sugar.

In ancient times, because there was no sugar technology, it was very difficult for ancient people to eat sugar, but in the pre-Qin period, there was a kind of "syrup", that is, maltose. It was not until the Western Han Dynasty that there was the emergence of sugar, and this sugar making technology was transmitted from India, and China had sugarcane sugar production technology. But the sugar products of this period were something that only the noble upper class had money to enjoy.

At that time, the process of making sugar was very simple, and it took a lot of raw materials to make some sugar, and the sugar produced was not pure, so it was difficult for ancient people to eat a mouthful of sugar.

I don't know how hard it is, but it's hard anyway, because you can't extract sugar crops if you don't grow them