WHAT? Indian turbinado. A dark, unrefined sugar, jaggery is used in Southeast Asia and India, regions where-we're told-sugar is considered good for you! Jaggery, which accounts for 50 percent of the sugar eaten in India, is made from sugar cane and is processed by a method not unlike that used to make maple syrup. The sweet sap from the sugarcane is boiled down while several people help stir the steadily thickening syrup. The finished product has a distinctive taste and can have a consistency as soft as honey-butter or as solid as fudge. India's epic narrative Mahabharata describes how jaggery (and gur, a sugar made from date palms) was used in sophisticated sweets at the time of Lord Krishna's appearance 5,000 years ago.
WHAT? Sweet peas. Although Republicans and Democrats still can’t agree on the effectiveness of President Reagan’s economic policies, no one can deny the positive effect he had on the economy of jelly beans. Reagan’s fondness for the 19th-century confection—he preferred the Jelly Belly brand—created a jelly-bean feeding frenzy in the early 1980s. The technique of thickening fruit juice with grain starch and coating droplets of the mixture with hardened sugar predates 1861, when an advertisement for William Schrafft of Boston suggested sending jelly beans to soldiers in the Union Army during the Civil War. Some confectionery historians link jelly beans to a continuum of jelled sweets that starts about 2,000 years ago with Turkish Delight. But jelly beans are as American as Reaganomics and apple pie.
WHAT? Biblical Bottlings. Wine bottles as we know them today are only about 300 years old. The "fifth" bottle, originally one-fifth of a gallon but now standardized metrically to 750 ml., is thought to have been one man's ration for dinner. But even back then, winemakers would often bottle their grape in impressive, oversize bottles to mark special occasions. Most of these bottle sizes were given the names of Biblical figures, like the long-lived Methuselah, and Jeroboam. "And the man Jerobo'am was a mighty man of valor: and Solomon seeing the young man that he was industrious, he made him ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph." (1 Kings 11:28). The jeroboam of the wine world is mighty, too. In Champagne, it's the equivalent of four bottles; in Bordeaux, five. There are nine different wine bottle sizes in all, with jeroboam falling somewhere in the middle. The split, holding about 1.5 glasses, is the smallest; nebuchadnezzar, the equivalent of 20 bottles, or 100 glasses, is the largest. The Old Testament often describes the worst doings of the kings as like unto the wickedness of Jeroboam, who caused Israel to sin (long story). Translation: Go easy with that jeroboam, or you could find yourself in heaps of trouble.
