Chapter 203: Brown Sugar

Half a shichen later, Yang and Yue each held a clay bowl filled with greenish-yellow sugarcane juice. Though some unfiltered impurities still floated in it, the two little ones didn't mind at all — they sipped slowly while watching the grown-ups fiddle with the contraption before them.

After the men from outside helped move the stone roller to the back courtyard, they took their leave and departed. Heifu, his elder brother Zhong, and their paternal aunt's son Yan — the three of them, along with the newly purchased black donkey — began tinkering with the stone roller.

"This thing was made by brother-in-law after the wooden roller used for pressing sugarcane juice at the county artisan's home. It's been scaled up two or three times, more durable, and can press more at each go."

The shores of Cloud Dream Marsh are one of the original habitats of sugarcane. The officials of Nan Commandery also inherited the customs of the Chu nobility — every autumn and winter, they would press out some sugarcane juice.

Just as the *Songs of Chu* sings: "Stewed turtle, roasted lamb, with some sugarcane juice." The juice was mainly used for seasoning turtle and lamb dishes, limited to wealthy households and never in large quantities. Someone like Heifu, who had harvested over a thousand jin of sugarcane, stored it in the cellar, and planned to press it all — that was truly unheard of. In fact, had two months not already spoiled a good portion and the cellar run out of space, he could have had three to five thousand jin.

But no one in the household raised any objection. Over the past two years, Heifu had mysteriously tinkered with quite a few things, and each time it brought them pleasant surprises. Besides, the family was no longer what it once was — Heifu alone held over a hundred thousand in cash. With both leisure and money, fussing over some food was no big deal.

The stone roller's operating principle was as simple as its appearance. The black donkey walked counterclockwise, pulling the wooden beam. Driven by the beam, the left stone roller would turn, and through cleverly placed gears, it also drove the right stone roller to turn.

A suitable gap existed between the two stone rollers. Heifu had the hired farmhands and servants helping at home feed peeled sugarcane into the spinning rollers. The sugarcane was crushed and flattened with a crisp cracking sound. The pressed juice flowed downward into clay jars placed ready below — and just like that, the raw sugarcane juice was extracted...

Heifu himself ladled a bowl of the juice to taste. Only a faint sweetness — as expected, two years was nowhere near enough to complete selective breeding and improvement. This level of sweetness probably couldn't even reach a quarter of what later generations would have.

Still, having some was better than none. With so much sugarcane, their family couldn't chew through it all in one winter anyway. After setting aside a hundred or so jin as seed sprouts for next year, they simply pressed the rest. Heifu also wanted to try whether he could produce cane sugar from it.

One shichen later, every container in the household was filled to the brim. The main battlefield shifted to the kitchen. After settling and removing the fibrous impurities from the cane juice, they poured it all in one go into a newly forged iron cauldron.

"Yan, you sell malt sugar in the township. Follow the method for making malt sugar and try boiling this big cauldron of cane juice dry."

Yan was their paternal aunt's son, a year younger than Heifu. His family held merchant registration and normally worked as peddlers in the township market, blowing on pipes and flutes along the streets to hawk malt syrup for a living. These peddlers braved cold and heat for their trade and had to make their own goods — that was precisely why Heifu had sought him out.

Yan was a bit nervous. After all, Heifu's status was no longer what it once was — he was already a Grandee Official. Yan first demurred, saying malt sugar was made from grain and he had never seen anyone use sugarcane juice as the raw material; he feared he couldn't manage it.

"The principles are the same. Just give it a try. Even if it doesn't work, it's no matter."

Heifu, however, was certain. Though he had never witnessed the process of making cane sugar either, he could roughly guess the principle — wasn't it just removing the water so the sugar in the cane juice would crystallize out?

Yesterday afternoon, he had personally gone to Cloud Dream Township to watch Yan make malt sugar. Setting aside the complicated early steps, just the final stage was also about drawing the sugar liquid from the grain, simmering it in an iron cauldron over a gentle fire, stirring constantly until it thickened, then stopping the fire. Once cooled, it became the hard malt sugar his nephew and niece loved to eat. There was also soft malt sugar, which tasted somewhat like the sorghum syrup candies of later times.

Urged on by Heifu, Yan could only steel himself and get to work. On the two stoves in the kitchen sat one wide-mouthed large iron cauldron and one small bronze cauldron. The first stove burned with sun-dried sugarcane leaves, flames roaring. The cane juice boiled in the iron cauldron — at first the liquid was very thin, but once it had boiled down to a quarter of its volume, it began to show signs of thickening...

Yan then ladled the cane juice from the large cauldron into the small one and simmered it slowly over a low fire. The juice grew thicker and thicker, gradually taking on a beautiful amber hue...

"The key to boiling sugar is heat control."

By now Yan was not so nervous. He spoke thus to Heifu and Zhong while deftly scooping up the syrup with a spoon and pouring it back into the pot, judging the sugar's doneness from the way it strung.

That said, boiling sugar from cane juice was after all somewhat different from malt sugar. The first time, Yan failed to master the heat and scorched it...

"Grandee Official... I..."

Yan was flustered, thinking he had ruined it. But Heifu picked up a piece of the blackened stuff stuck to the bottom of the pot, put it in his mouth, and his eyes immediately lit up.

"A bit of a burnt, bitter taste — but there's sweetness too!"

The direction was right, so Heifu told Yan to keep at it. On the second attempt, Yan was even more focused and absorbed. He turned the fire lower, scooped up the thick syrup with a dagger-shaped spoon, held it to the sunlight, and squinted to observe how the syrup strung as it dripped down naturally.

At last, when he determined it was ready, the fire was stopped. Inside the cauldron was a thick, golden-red syrup, steaming hot and fragrantly sweet. It was ladled into clay bowls, and in the cold weather, it gradually set into reddish lumps...

At that moment, Yang and Yue, who had been smelling the sweet aroma outside and could no longer contain themselves, squeezed in. Heifu cut two pieces of sugar and popped them into their mouths. A sweetness slid down their throats, mingled with a unique caramelized fragrance...

"Second Uncle wasn't lying — it really is sugar!"

"So you really can boil sugar out of it!"

Yan also cautiously tasted a piece and couldn't help but be overjoyed. To be honest, aside from the first attempt where inexperience led to over-boiling, boiling sugar from cane juice was far simpler than making it from grains like wheat or sorghum!

"But why is this sugar red?" The malt syrup and sugar he usually made was mostly white or pale yellow.

"Because it's called brown sugar!"

Heifu decreed the name for this sugar. He also licked a piece — the familiar taste seemed to carry him back to his previous life, to the days of caring for his girlfriend during her period and brewing brown sugar in hot water...

The past was like smoke — not just a lifetime away, but truly two lives apart.

But then another question arose: they had only made large chunks of brown sugar. How were snow-white rock sugar and white sugar produced?

Heifu rolled his eyes. How would he know?

Brown sugar was red precisely because it still contained many impurities from the sugarcane itself. How to remove those impurities on this basis, how to crystallize out granular white sugar? Those processes would probably require finding someone to slowly figure them out — and the Yan before him was an excellent candidate.

First, he was the son of their paternal aunt, a relative Heifu could trust. Second, he held merchant registration, so even selling brown sugar at the market wouldn't be illegal.

According to Yan, if they could make more brown sugar, there was still profit to be made. Compared to malt syrup, which "turns the fruits of the field into sweetness," this stuff was cheaper in raw materials and simpler in process.

However, after they had pressed and boiled all the thousand-plus jin of unspoiled sugarcane from the cellar, Yan was less optimistic — because after busying themselves for the better part of a day, they had only produced about twenty jin of lump brown sugar...

"We still have to improve the sugarcane. The sweetness is far too low — it needs to be at least two or three times higher."

Heifu was quite vexed. After a day of trial and error, the sugar-boiling process was fairly mature, but the raw material simply wasn't up to standard. The real problem was that this couldn't be solved in a year or half a year — they'd have to keep tinkering slowly.

Heifu decided that next year, on his own land, he would start by planting a full hundred mu of sugarcane!

As for the twenty jin of brown sugar produced today, they'd keep it at home for their own consumption first. Perhaps he could ask his eldest brother's wife to try making a sweet-and-sour fish to taste?

Vinegar had existed since the Zhou dynasty, where it was called *xi*, and was a household essential. The *Analects* even contains a story about a neighbor borrowing vinegar...

Just as Heifu's appetite was stirring, a sharp female voice came from outside.

"What's that smell, so fragrant?"

Yan stuck out his tongue. "It's my mother."

Sure enough, Zhong outside also laughed. "Aunt has come at just the right moment. Yan has made some fine sugar — Aunt, please have a taste."

"So sweet... Yan made this? Wrap a few jin for me to take home and try."

Heifu and Yan exchanged a glance, neither particularly eager to leave the kitchen. Yan had been afraid of his mother since birth, and Heifu found it rather hard to endure this aunt's matchmaking and marriage urging. He had only been back three days, and his aunt had already recommended five local girls to him...

As expected, the aunt's sharp voice had already moved into the courtyard, heading toward where Heifu's mother sat doing needlework. She reported her achievement: "Elder sister-in-law, the matter you entrusted to me is done! Today I've inquired about another fine match for Heifu! The daughter of the village Bailiff, surnamed Sun, just sixteen, good-looking, with a figure well-suited for bearing children — a perfect match for Heifu!"

(End of chapter)