Molasses, Treacle, And Sirup

Molasses and treacle are products incidentally formed in the process of crystallising and purifying cane sugar. Treacle is the waste drained from moulds used in the refining process, and it contains, besides sugar, acids, extractives, salts, and more or less dirt. Like cane sugar, molasses constitutes a very desirable food, and is highly nutritious. Its use, both for cooking and to add to farinaceous food and enhance its flavour, is too well known to require description. Molasses, according to Konig, contains acetic and formic acids, which impart their reaction to it. It also contains cane sugar and 30 per cent each of invert sugar and of water.

Both treacle and molasses, owing to impurities, are more laxative than refined sirup, and the effect, as an aperient, of plain gingerbread made with good brown molasses is due to this property. For young children from six to ten years of age molasses sometimes operates very well in keeping the bowels open.

Plain molasses candy is a wholesome form in which to give sugar to growing children, if they are not allowed to eat too much and spoil their appetite for other foods. It is mildly laxative. Walker says that " good candy is good food." Candies are often made too rich with butter, chocolate, and other ingredients, when they disagree.

Molasses, like sirup, is a good preservative. It has been used to preserve potatoes in layers. An old-time custom among soldiers in the field is to fill a canteen with two parts vinegar and one part molasses as an emergency sustaining drink.

Glucose

Grape sugar is present in almost all fruits, in the sweeter varieties of which it exists in large quantity. In peaches, pineapples, and strawberries it is found with cane sugar, and in grapes, cherries, and honey it occurs in connection with other varieties of sugars. In dried fruits, such as raisins or figs, glucose is present in a gummy form. It is commonly manufactured from starch.

Although prepared for immediate absorption from the stomach and intestine and assimilation, glucose is of little service for flavouring other articles of food, for when so used it is apt to produce flatulent dyspepsia with acid eructations. Moreover, it has less strength of sweetness than cane sugar, and, as it is more difficult to crystallise, it is much less convenient and desirable for general use.

Sucrose and maltose can only be absorbed by alteration into glucose. If glucose be eaten as a food, in form of candy or otherwise, it overloads the system by being too promptly absorbed. Malt extracts, sirups, and preserves adulterated with glucose easily ferment, for nothing ferments more promptly than such combinations with the bacteria present in the stomach.

Lactose

Lactose, or sugar of milk, is taken as a food in some quantity with ordinary milk, and forms a very important ingredient of the diet of the growing infant, who is unable to digest much starch during the first year of life, and yet requires an easily assimilable form of carbohydrate. Cow's as compared with human milk is deficient in lactose, and the latter should therefore be added in proper proportion to the milk of bottle-fed infants. (See Milk Composition, p. 52.) It might be used for sweetening various articles of food, but it possesses no advantages over ordinary cane sugar, and is in fact more expensive and less sweet. It is mildly diuretic.