Hand made candies....

 

The people of New Guinea were probably the first to domesticate sugarcane, sometime around 8,000 BC. After domestication, its cultivation spread rapidly to southern China, Indochina, and India, where refining the juice into granulated crystals developed. By the sixth century AD, sugar cultivation and processing had reached Persia, from where it was carried into the Mediterranean by Arab expansion. Wherever they went, the Arabs brought with them sugar, both the product itself and the technology of its production.

 

Sugar eventually made its way to Western Europe as a result of the Crusades in the 11th Century AD. Crusaders returning home talked of this “new spice”, with sugar first recorded in England in 1099. Subsequent centuries saw a major expansion of Western European trade with the East, driven in part by the demand for sugar.

 

In the 15th century AD, Columbus sailed to the “New World” and, in 1493, he took sugar cane plants with him to the Caribbean, where the climate was so advantageous for the growth of the cane, that a massive global industry quickly flourished.