Take a look at enough centuries-old Christmas baked goods like lebkuchen and panettone, and you’ll see they make a big deal about including sugar or honey. Today, we think nothing of whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies on a Tuesday night or stirring a spoonful of honey into our morning tea. Sugar is everywhere. But this abundance of sugars is a relatively new phenomenon. As recently as the start of the 20th century, sweeteners were hard to come by. Given the expense of trade and travel, nearly all sweeteners were made locally. And more often than not, they were made with fruit.
This fruit-as-sweetener phenomenon pops up again and again all over the world.
For millennia in the Middle East, dates and pomegranates have been cooked down to make sugary-sweet date syrup and bright, juicy pomegranate molasses. Roman cookbooks dating from the turn of the 5th century CE include recipes for quinces stewed in honey, similar to modern day membrillo popular throughout Spain and Portugal. In southwest France around the town of Agen, they’ve been drying plums for centuries to make toothsome, craveable prunes (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but I promise, they’re fantastic). Around Modena, Italy, most grape juice gets cooked down for balsamic, but some becomes saba, a syrupy grape sweetener. Each autumn in colonial New England, apples would be pressed into cider. To preserve the cider before it fermented into alcohol, it was boiled down into puckeringly tart-sweet syrups and jellies.
Over the past century, as transportation has improved and global supply chains have become more efficient, sugar and honey have become cheaper and ubiquitous. We’ve moved away from local, fruit-based sweeteners. It makes sense. White sugar gives a simple, neutral sweetness that blends easily into whatever other flavors we cook with. If what you want is a plain pound cake, then white sugar is your best bet.
Fruit-based sweeteners taste like, well, fruits.
Sugar can’t provide the deep, caramelized richness of date syrup, or the bright-yet-smoky quality of cider jelly.
Fruit-based sweeteners have all sorts of uses in traditional cooking. In southwest France, most every pâtisserie offers pastries stuffed with Agen plum cream (see, I told you they’re delicious!). Pomegranate molasses gives a sweet kick to dishes like muhammara, a roasted red pepper and walnut dip from the Levant, and to fesenjan, an Iranian walnut and chicken stew. Iraqi and Kuwaiti children grow up eating dibis wa rashi – date syrup drizzled over tahini, eaten with flatbread like a Middle Eastern PB&J. Quince spreads are the classic pairing for salty Manchego cheeses in tapas bars across Spain, and cider jelly makes a great accompaniment for tangy cheddars.
Don’t let the traditional uses limit you. Fruit-based sweeteners can be used in just about any cooking project. Stir syrups into iced tea or cocktails. Mix a dribble into a vinaigrette or a marinade, or use as a glaze for roasted meats or vegetables. Blend them into a batter for muffins or quick breads. Or keep it simple, and use them on pancakes, oatmeal, or toast.