Sugar bowl in 18th century style
Not on view
Europeans not only used sugar to sweeten coffee, tea, and chocolate imported from the Americas, India, and East Asia, but also to complement savory dishes and flavor fruit and desserts. The taste for sugar drove a rapid expansion of enslaved labor in the Caribbean.
Crystallized sugar was shipped in hard, paper-wrapped cones which had to be broken or cut into small pieces. Served in a bowl, small lumps of sugar were offered with tea and coffee, the hot liquids quickly dissolving the lumps of sugar. Alternatively, the imported sugar was refined in France and crushed into a fine powder for use as a condiment during the meal. This required a different type of serving vessel: either a caster with an openwork lid for sprinkling, or a lidded bowl with a pierced spoon for dusting.
By the middle of the 18th century, sugar bowls in the form of small, lidded tureens became fashionable. Presumably, this diminutive vessel would have had a matching tray, now missing. The bowl and cover are decorated with spiraling fluting, rocaille motifs and floral swags, elements of the Rococo style. The finial is formed by a cluster of strawberries, their sweetness indicates the tureen’s function as a container for sugar. This sugar bowl is believed to have been made in Paris during the 19th century as a revival of an earlier style.
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