| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America. By Wendy A. Woloson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv, 277 pp. $44.95,ISBN 0-8018-6876-9.)

Given the disdain with which many Americans view sugar today—a fashionable disdain that defies our gluttonous, unhealthy levels of consumption—it may come as somewhat of a surprise to readers of Refined Tastes that two centuries ago sugar was a rare commodity. Its high price made it a luxury item consumed only by, and serving as a status symbol for, the wealthy. Wendy A. Woloson provides a history of its democratization, but her more important contribution is in showing how, at the same time that sugar was becoming more ubiquitous, Americans endowed it with cultural meaning that transformed it from an item associated with male economic prowess to its being associated with femininity.

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