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| quote: | Most modern recipes for apple pie require an ounce or two of sugar, but the earliest recipe does not. There are two possible reasons for this.
Cane sugar imported from Egypt was not widely available in fourteenth-century England (costing between one and two shillings a pound — one source claims that this is roughly the equivalent of US$100 per kg in today's prices [1]).
On the other hand, the absence of sugar in the recipe may indicate that, because refined sugar was a relatively new introduction from the orient, the medieval English did not have quite as sweet a tooth as their descendants; honey, which was many times cheaper, is absent from the recipe, and the "good spices" and saffron, all imported, were no less expensive and difficult to obtain than refined sugar, and despite the expense refined sugar did appear much more often in published recipes of the time than honey, suggesting that it was not considered prohibitively expensive. [2] With the exception of apples and pears, all the ingredients in the filling probably had to be imported. And perhaps, as in some modern "sugar-free" recipes, the juice of the pears was intended to sweeten the pie. [3] |
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