The sugar cube's many forms have always reflected how we think about the sweet stuff.
In 1840, sweetening your tea was a complicated affair. To the cone-shaped loaf of refined sugar you'd bought from your grocer, you'd take a sugar nipper—a pair of sharp-edged cast-iron pincers—to twist off a fist-sized chunk. If you were cooking, you’d then shave it down into powder, but for beverages, it was much easier—if not tidier—to simply dunk the chunk in your drink, let it dissolve to your taste, then fish it out and let dry for the next cup of tea.
But refining sugar was a long, hot, time-consuming process—even when produced by slave labor —and its results were costly. To show off their status, Renaissance-era aristocrats commissioned grand sugar sculptures called, mimicking the massive bronzes of historic and mythic figures that were dominating the art world.
Victorian industrialism sought to control the natural world at all costs, and sugar—a gleaming white crystal derived from messy plant matter—was the ultimate proof of that mastery. Sugar marketing of the time highlighted its purity, a delivery method for unadulterated food energy, and the cube was a visual indicator of sugar obeying the laws of science, unlike the hand-hewn cones of loaf sugar or artistically rendered sugar models of the past.
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