Today sugar is cheap and manufactured sweets have
become everyday, casual pleasures, affordable
and entertaining morsels. Some are soothing classics, cream and sugar cooked into rich brown caramels, or clear sugar tinted to look like a shard of stained glass. And others are provocative novelties with glaringly unnatural colors, whimsical shapes, hidden pockets of hissing gas, and burningly excessive doses of acidity or spice.
In the kitchen, sugar is a versatile ingredient.
Because sweetness is one of a small handful of basic taste sensations, cooks add sugar to dishes of all kinds to fill out and balance their flavor. Sugar interferes usefully with the coagulation of proteins, and so tenderizes the gluten network of baked goods and the albumen network of custards and creams. If we heat sugar enough to break its molecules apart, it generates
both appealing colors and an increasing
complexity of flavor: no longer just sweetness, but acidity, bitterness, and a full, rich aroma. And sugar is a sculptural material.
Provide it with some moisture and high heat, and we can coax from it a broad range of shapeable consistencies, creamy and chewy and brittle and rock hard.
The story of sugar is not all sweetness and light. Its appeal was a destructive force