In the program "Historically yours" on Europe 1, the journalist David Castello-Lopes returned to the origin of lump sugar.

If it was invented in 1840, it became the standard 30 years later, in the midst of Victorian England when lump sugar in a standardized form gave an image of modernity.

Although it may seem surprising, lump sugar has not always existed.

First sold in the form of large boulders, it was then cut into small cubes of standardized sizes during the 19th century.

In the program "Historically yours", David Castello-Lopes explained the different stages of this evolution, from the cones to break with a peak until the invention of a special press.

“Inventing lump sugar really sounds like 'inventing hot water' or 'inventing the big end of the egg': we don't really believe it. And yet, lump sugar has been invented! In the 18th century when you bought sugar it was in the form of big conical rocks weighing several kilos. breaking again with pliers, until it was time to get pieces of manageable size. It was long, physical and impractical.

>> Find the shows of Matthieu Noël and Stéphane Bern in replay and podcast here

Just enough for a cup of tea

From the 19th century, merchants began to sell sugar that was already broken, but in pieces of different sizes some of which did not fit in the cups, so it was still just as impractical.

But everything changed in the middle of the 19th century in Moravia, a region passed from hand to hand, but now located in the Czech Republic.

In the 1840s, a lady called Juliana Rad and married to Jakob, the manager of a sugar refinery, cut herself while attacking one of those big sugar cones with a pickaxe.

Juliana Rad then asks her husband why he wouldn't do individual doses of sugar, the size of which would be just enough for a cup of tea.

Jakob then got to work and made a special press.

The world's first uniform sugar cubes thus appeared between 1840 and 1843.

>> READ ALSO

- Sugar consumption: how to indulge yourself without excess?

Popularized thanks to Henri Tate

But the takeoff of cubed sugar did not come until 30 years later, with Henri Tate, the sugar tycoon best known for giving his name to the Tate Gallery in England.

In the 1870s, Henri Tate bought the patent for another method of making cubes into pieces which had been invented by a German, a method more reliable and less expensive than that of Jakob Rad.

From there, chunky cubes became the norm.

In the midst of Victorian England, there was for some something very decent, clean, and modern about having sugar cubes so perfectly shaped and so standardized.

Today, the trend is the opposite: the height of chic for a lump of sugar is precisely not to be standardized, to be irregular, that one feels on him the unpredictability of the human hand and the never quite tame chaos of nature.

In today's supermarkets, the most expensive sugars are the ones that are like this. "