History of Caramel in the Arab World

Why you can't be first in food

Writing food history can be quite difficult. Not in the sense that it physical hurts to rehash all the awful things humans do to each other, unlike the history of slavery or genocide or war. Or that no matter what you write it immediately becomes grist for the never-ending shouting match that is the “Culture Wars,” like the history of race, gender, or sexuality. No, its difficulty lays in the fact that food is often deemed unimportant, non-essential, not worthy of note. So finding sources upon which to base food history is harder than you’d expect.

Eating and drinking, something you typically do multiple times a day, are rather monotonous events. Even now, as humans (of a certain economic level) have access to more food than they ever had, keeping track of everything you eat is dull. Can you remember what you ate on Tuesday for lunch? How about the Wednesday before that?

If there is not some special event or preparation tied to it, it’s quite difficult to pick out meals from the morass of the things you ingest. That’s why doctors, allergists, dietitians etc. recommend you keep a food journal when they want to pinpoint where changes could be made. I guess I really am allergic to mango!

This indifference is not necessarily a bad thing, as there are many more important things to remember than you eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the 15th time in a row, but with raspberry jelly instead of grape.

But the mundanity of food has an impact on the sources historians can draw on. It’s the extraordinary that gets recorded, either as difficult recipes that need to be written down or notes of someone's fantastic gustatory experience. Having studied the history of alcoholic drinks, I’m quite aware of this phenomenon and how alcohol, or any other special drink, is overrepresented in the records. Over the grand span of human history, in all places and in all times, the thing people drank the most was water, no matter how many poems Abu Nuwas or Omar Khayyam wrote about wine.

The sources are also, like every other source, heavily gendered. The common, everyday meals were most often prepared by women for their families, and male writers deemed this work barely worth mentioning, never mind recognizing the skill or invention required for preparing daily meals.

The limits of historical food sources became clear when I was glancing at r/AskHistorians (ed. note, this subreddit is on the forefront of public history, in my humble opinion, and I frequent it to learn on how to write for a non-academic audience) and I saw a question about the history of caramel.

My first thought was: Is it pronounced CAR-mel or CARE-mel or CARE-A-mel? The second thought was: I bet I could find some record of it in the Islamic world.

My first internet search produced this little tidbit

Caramel candies have a long, though unclear, history. While some consider caramel a purely American-made confection, others believe that Arabs were the first to discover caramel around 1000 AD. They called it "kurat al milh" or "sweet ball of salt." This type of caramel, made by crystallizing sugar in boiling water, was hard and crunchy.

Grand! But then I went looking for this ball of salt and didn't find anything. Now that doesn’t mean that etymology is wrong, or that the year 1000 AD is an incorrect date, just that it warranted a little more digging. And when I did this is what I found (This is a condensed and slightly edited version of my Reddit answer)

To understand the history of caramel you have to first understand how it is made. That process is called caramelization.

Wikipedia is helpful here

The process of caramelization consists of heating sugar slowly to around 170 °C (340 °F). As the sugar heats, the molecules break down and re-form into compounds with a characteristic colour and flavour.

So to understand the history of caramel you have to understand the history of sugar. And the history of sugar in Europe is tied to the history of sugar in the Arab/Islamic world.

In the fields of the plains of Tripoli can be found in abundance a honey reed which they call Zuchra; the people are accustomed to suck enthusiastically on these reeds, delighting themselves with their beneficial juices, and seem unable to sate themselves with this pleasure in spite of their sweetness. The plant is grown, presumably and with great effort, by the inhabitants. . . . It was on this sweet-tasting sugar cane that people sustained themselves during the sieges of Elbarieh, Marrah, and Arkah, when tormented by fearsome hunger. (Sidney W. Mintz. Sweetness and Power. p. 80)

Sidney Mintz uses this Crusader's recollection about sugar in Tripoli to make a larger argument in his classic work, Sugar and Power, that says:

The Arab expansion westward marked a turning point in the European experience of sugar. Between the defeat of Heraclius in 636 and the invasion of Spain in 711, in less than a single century, the Arabs established the caliphate at Baghdad, conquered North Africa, and began their occupation of major parts of Europe itself. Sugar making, which in Egypt may have preceded the Arab conquest, spread in the Mediterranean basin after that conquest. In Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, briefly in Rhodes, much of the Maghrib (especially in Morocco), and Spain itself (especially on its south coast), the Arabs introduced the sugar cane, its cultivation, the art of sugar making, and a taste for this different sweetness. p. 73

Tsugitaka Sato in Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam confirms that it was the Arab conquests that brought sugar production from Iran and Iraq, which had come from India, to the Mediterranean and Europe. Egypt proved particular good for growing sugarcane and that legacy has remained to this day.

When we try to find the connection between sugar to caramel in the Arab/Islamic world, Mintz remains helpful

The sugars of the Arabs were no single homogeneous substance; from the Persians and Indians, the Arabs had learned a variety of sugar types or categories. We know about these various sugars and even something about the processes of their manufacture, but the details remain vague. ” Mintz p. 78

We are lucky to have a fantastic translation of a tenth century cookbook of Ibn Sayyar by Nawal Nasrallah. If you look at what type of sweeteners the medieval Muslim was using in the we find

Sugar, bees’ honey, red sugar, and honey ('asal) made from sugar... p.91

“Red sugar” and “honey from sugar” each seems like possibilities

Nawal Nasrallah provides the following notes on this honey from sugar

asal qasab (عسل قصب) sugarcane honey, which is molasses produced in the process of making cane sugar, as follows:
Sugarcane juice is strained, boiled down into thick syrup then drained and filtered in cone-shaped clay vessels. Cane syrup will drip down through three holes in the bottom of the vessels, leaving unrefined crystallized cane sugar in the cones. This dripping syrup is asal al-qasab, also called qutara (ُقطارة), which is molasses (al-Hassan and Hill 222).

asal al-sukkar (عسل السكر) syrup made from cane sugar pp. 594-5

This seems most likely molasses

And this is what she says about red sugar

Sukkar ahmar (سكر أحمر) literally ‘red sugar,’ it is unrefined crystallized brown cane sugar, sometimes used instead of white sugar because it is stronger in properties (hotter and moister). The darker it is, the stronger these properties are. p.601

So, maybe? But if we look at other entries in her glossary we find something that looks even closer:

fanidh (فانيذ) fanid (فانيد) pulled taffy, chewy sugar-candy, usually shaped into small discs. Medieval sources briefly describe it as cane juice boiled down to thick syrup and then made into fanid. Besides enjoying it as candy, it is used as a substitute for sugar as in some wine recipes. For medicinal purposes, it is mixed with different herbs and spices and chewed to cure coughs and cold-related ailments (Ibn Sina 342) p. 596

This is also a maybe, but probably our best bet.

That was my answer and it seemed pretty good, but what followed showed the power of public history and what I hope this little newsletter will prompt.

A user asked a follow up question about another etymology of caramel that came from the Turkish: karamelas, (kara(black) + melas(sweet thing)= dark sugar). The question brought me to the work of Mary Işın who writes on Ottoman cuisine and I found this

Called by the Persian names fânîd or pânîd it was introduced into Spain by the Arabs and by 1500 had reached England, where it became known as phanid, penid or pennet. Peynir şekeri is identical to what in Britain we know as ‘Edinburgh rock’, which, like fondant, made a sudden appearance as a supposedly new invention in the nineteenth century." Mary Işın A KING’S CONFECTIONER IN THE ORIENT: Friedrich Unger, Court Confectioner to King Otto I of Greece p.xi

From wikipedia on pennet: "it can be similar to hard caramel candy"

I also found this in that same book

4. Guwarlack Akide
Boil a quantity of sugar to cracking point, colour red with cochineal just before removing it from the heat, or leave it white, and pour the caramel36 on the marble slab. Cut it in pieces and roll into balls and you have the guwarlack akide."Mary Işın, A KING’S CONFECTIONER IN THE ORIENT p.66

Now we have another contender, akide, with a European even calling it caramel.

Mary Işın has this to say about akide

The word akide derives from akîda, meaning boiled grape juice or sugar syrup in Syrian Arabic dialect, and faith or loyalty in Classical Arabic, both having the original meaning ‘to knot’ or ‘to thicken’. See Andreas Tietze, Tarihi ve Etimolojik Türkiye Türkçesi Lugatı (Istanbul and Vienna, 2002), pp. 110, 126–7." Mary Işın, Bountiful Empire: A History of Ottoman Cuisine p.229

If we follow akide to Syria, we are in luck because there is a 13th century Syrian cookbook called “Scents and Flavors the Banqueter Favors (Kitāb al-Wuṣlah ilā l-Ḥabīb fī Waṣf al-Ṭayyibāt wal-Ṭīb)” (ed. note, the translation was put out by the Library of Arabic Language which is doing fantastic work. Chip Rosetti, a fellow Penn PhD, is playing a big, awesome part)

‘aqīda very dense sugar syrup used to make incense cakes that seem to have the consistency of a brittle candy (cf. Turkish akide), so it is presumably boiled to the hard-crack stage (300–310 °F, 148–153 °C). The recipe mentions that it might be boiled even more, which would result in caramel at 320–360 °F, 160–182 °C.”

Charles Perry, “Scents and Flavors.” p. 698

And this on scalded syrup

scalded, or perhaps burnt, syrup, presumably caramel (320–360 °F, 160–182 °C).”

Charles Perry, “Scents and Flavors.” p. 736

This scalded syrup is the 10th and thickest syrup that Perry provides in his typology of sugar syrups that 13th century Syrians was using. With that many syrups you know the Arabs were definitely messing around with sugar.

So, it looks like we have a pretty good answer. And yet, no answer on any etymology, either karamelas or kurat al-milh.

In a last ditch effort, I found this in an online etymology dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=caramel

1725, "burnt sugar," from French caramel "burnt sugar" (17c.), from Old Spanish caramel (modern caramelo), which is of uncertain origin, probably ultimately from Medieval Latin cannamellis, which is traditionally from Latin canna (see cane (n.)) + mellis, genitive of mel "honey" (from PIE root *melit- "honey"). But some give the Medieval Latin word an Arabic origin, or trace it to Latin calamus "reed, cane."

And so we are returned to korat al-milh. Bummer.

The fact of the matter is that we may never know. There was some uknown person in the Arab world, or maybe in India or Persia, who burnt up sugar and decided that it added something to the flavor. And then experimented, adding other things and finding ways to use it. And sometime after 1000 it transferred through the interactions between Europe and the Arabs/Muslims. And then they passed it on and so it continued without anyone making a note of who “invented” it. Why would they? The purpose of food, and food invention, wasn't to own and hoard it, but to share it and eat it. And this is true of most “old” foods, there is no inventor, no first, just the social memory of the food passed through oral and more rarely written sources.

And it would have just kept floating around with a folk etymology except you have capitalism, the industrialization of Europe, and then the industrialization of caramel making. Now that you could make money off of it or even patent and make the recipe proprietary, it became important to be the first, the inventor, the one who reaps the profits.

But history shouldn’t abide by those rules and be reduced to a mechanism for confirmation of the TRUTH.

When I send this out there, someone may find different sources and argue every assumption I made was wrong. I will then evaluate their assumptions and agree or disagree or will meet them somewhere in the middle or will become their mortal enemy. No matter the outcome, it won’t be an invalidation of this tiny work but rather the historical process in action. That’s why the obsession with monographs, single authored works by geniuses, is detrimental to the layperson’s understanding of history. And of course capitalism exacerbates that because having proprietary rights to some new discovery (so you pay to access it) is, unfortunately, how the sausage is made.

But as I said in the subtitle, don’t let the desire to ascribe an inventor to every food make you forget what history can be.

Click the pic for a recipe for Salted caramel apple cake

Sources

• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power : the place of sugar in modern history, Viking 1985

• Nawal Nasrallah ed. trans. Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens:Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook, Brill 2007

• David Waines, FOOD CULTURE AND HEALTH IN PRE-MODERN ISLAMIC SOCIETIES, Brill 2011

• Tsugitaka Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam, Brill 2015

• Charles Peey, ed & trans. “Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook, New York New York University Press, 2020