Cultural and historical curiosities about sugars and sweets

SUGAR

“One can already talk about an historical Brazilian sense of taste and, possibly, also tropical or conditioned ecologically; and, as such, apparently susceptible to appreciating sweets, and even abuse them. This taste for sweets is, for other European senses of taste – Nordic, boreal, Mediterranean, Greco-Roman, Calvinist, classic – excessively sweet. A sweet – the one preferred by Brazilians – is as if Baroque, and even Late Baroque, were transferred from the arts and music to perhaps the more sensual art of dessert (p. 18).”

Gilberto Freire. Sugar: a sociology of the sweet, with recipes of cakes and sweets from the Brazilian Northeast. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997, 215p.