The Evolution Of The Sugar Cube

As far back as the 1700s, Europeans bought their sugar in brown loaves that needed to be hacked, pounded and smashed into smaller pieces. According to Elizabeth Abbott, the author of “Sugar: A Bittersweet History,” people were resigned to the fact that “in order to use sugar, you had to go through all this physical trouble.”

“The big surprise is that there wasn’t a sugar cube invented much earlier.” By the 1800s, stores were already selling sugar already broken up into random-size pieces. Still, these chunks proved to be inconvenient at teatime. They often had to be dunked doughnut-style as they wouldn’t fit in the cup. When the tea was finished, you were left with a sticky clump to dry out for future use.

In the 1840s, progress happened when Juliana Rad, wife of the head of a sugar refinery in Moravia, cut a finger while chopping sugar. She complained to her husband and ranted about why there were no units of sugar that would come perfectly sized for one cup of tea. Jakub Krystof Rad’s response was to create a press to make the cubes, and he soon presented a box of them to his wife.

He patented this specialized press in 1843.

It took decades before the sugar cube became widespread in Europe. A German by the name of Eugen Langen reinvented the cube for the factory of the 1870s — the molten sugar was spun in a centrifuge and then sawed into small pieces. In the late 1800s, “processed food and refined food all became in vogue,” Abbott says.

According to Abbott, Victorians loved how clean and neat — how manufactured — the sugar cube was. “It’s only today that we’re trying to make everything look homemade, natural,” she says. “The pendulum is swinging back again.”