In March 1672, the officials of the confectioners’ guild heard a rumour that the baker Josep Cortés, located at the Plaça Junqueres, was illegally making and selling melindros, light sponge biscuits made of flour, sugar, and eggs, and was thus in violation of the privilege of confectioners to sell sweets.Footnote 1 The guild officials sent one of their members to the baker's store to make sure that the rumour was true. Then, inspectors from the confectioners’ guild, along with the municipal authorities, visited Josep Cortés's bakery the next day, where they found a journeyman and one apprentice whipping mixing dough for melindros in two large vessels on the floor. Accusing the baker of encroaching on the confectioners’ privileges, the inspectors seized all the biscuits and imposed a fine of 10 lliures on the baker.Footnote 2 In response, Josep Cortés appealed to the Real Audiencia, the highest royal tribunal and an appellate court in Catalonia, with the support of the bakers’ guild, and petitioned for the suspension of the fine by alleging that he had not infringed the privileges of the confectioners, since melindros were baked goods and could thus not be understood as either confitura (confectionery) or dulces (sweets).Footnote 3
In a time of changing tastes and shifting costs, sugary sweets became more profitable commodities in late seventeenth-century Barcelona, as did the focus of the competition between guilds. Recent revisionist histories of European guilds have argued that fierce rivalry between guilds should be viewed as evidence of the dynamism and flexibility of craft economies in response to growing demand from consumers.Footnote 4 Few historians have considered, however, the vital role of food sellers and guilds in meeting the demands of the changing tastes of urban populations. For eighteenth-century Paris, Jennifer J. Davis noted that Parisian culinary guilds strove to control and regulate the prepared food marketplace in the name of public health and taste.Footnote 5 In addition, Emma Spary pointed out how the increasing demand for newly fashionable foods such as coffee and liqueurs resulted in disputes between limonadiers and rival guilds.Footnote 6 The case study of the production and sale of sponge biscuits in Barcelona exemplifies, instead, the significant material and cultural dimensions that sugar adopted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Substantial scholarship related to sugar, imperialism, and slavery has acknowledged the importance of sugar in shaping global economies and geopolitical conflicts in the early modern world.Footnote 7 Many scholars have linked the rise of colonial sugar consumption to the introduction of hot and bitter beverages such as coffee, tea, and chocolate, which were consumed as heavily sweetened with sugar from the seventeenth century onwards.Footnote 8 However, these authors only briefly mention the uses of sugar in the creation of the sweets that were served along with the new fashionable beverages in the context of changing patterns of sociability and consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on courtly cookbooks and the visual culture of nobility, scholarly interest in early modern sweets has mainly focused on the central role of these food products as markers of social distinction and conspicuous consumption in elite contexts of northern Europe and Italy.Footnote 9 These studies have shown that sugar banquets and collations of confections and sweet wines became popular as an expression of hospitality, luxury, and taste.
This article explores, instead, the ways in which sugar exercised its considerable economic, social, and cultural significance in other geographical contexts of sugar historiography: that is, in a non-courtly southern European city such as Barcelona. With no direct access to the Atlantic trade, Barcelona came to be the main centre of supply and redistribution of colonial commodities in Catalonia and an important part of a complex trade network with other European trade hubs. Less fully understood are the ways in which the increasing demand for colonial commodities – namely tobacco, sugar, and cocoa – informed their production and marketing at local levels. In turn, when we shift the focus of recent scholarship away from aristocratic circles and Atlantic trade routes and towards working people in a Mediterranean city, new narratives of sugar, labour, and eating emerge. The compelling legal case of the baker Josep Cortés can be a meaningful example of the economic, political, and social impact of global commodities on the configuration of local markets by the seventeenth century.
This article engages with sweets as material objects, as well as the main subject of food discourses, in the disputes between confectioners and bakers in early modern Barcelona. To this end, it explores the changing material and cultural meanings of sweets and the ways in which these changes allowed the confectioners to defend their commercial interests at a time when markets were expanding and new consumer habits were emerging. The article begins by examining the shift from a generic idea of sweetness to one that was explicitly linked to sugar, which mirrored a material change in the confectionery trade during the seventeenth century. It argues that, when sugar supplies increased, new demands for sugary food expanded and reshaped the productive dimension of sweets’ markets. The second section addresses how confectioners and bakers materially and discursively defined their products in the context of fierce rivalry over the sale of melindros. The lengthy trial records of the Josep Cortés case have revealed the vigorous epistemological discussions over the nature and classification of melindros, a food item with an increasing demand that fell into two overlapping food categories: confectionery and baked goods. Although court records have rarely been explored by food historians of early modern Europe, this legal case provides more detailed accounts of the practices and interests of food professionals than we have for those working in noble households.Footnote 10 The third part focuses on how the two guilds scrapped over the definitions of their trades based on their materials, skills, and equipment to defend their commercial privileges. Herein, the analysis of the material culture of confectioners and bakers, which is traced in printed cookbooks, manuscript recipe collections, and inventories, provides evidence of the overlapping equipment and skills between the two trades, as well as the contradictions between real practices and the guilds’ discourses. As many social historians have acknowledged, the excessive attention paid to the analysis of the corporate regulations in the history of guilds has obscured the real dimension of guild activities in early modern economies.Footnote 11 In turn, a material culture approach helps to draw a more accurate account of the productive activities of food professionals in early modern Europe.Footnote 12
I
In early modern Europe, the growing complexity of urban economies and the intensification of trade supplies led to a specialization of trades in large cities, which resulted in an increasing overlap of guild jurisdictions, and encroachments between those guilds working with the same materials and offering similar services. Although guilds’ statutes carefully detailed their corporate privileges, rival competitors often manipulated and took advantage of gaps, overlaps, and contradictions within guild ordinances to produce and sell goods presumably belonging to other guilds. As Luis R. Corteguera has highlighted, craftsmen were familiar with the judicial system of early modern Spain and thus they frequently deployed royal courts to defend their economic interests in the face of the inadequacy of the regulatory apparatus of guilds.Footnote 13 By the late seventeenth century, the Col⋅legi de confiters i adroguers de Barcelona (College of Confectioners and Grocers of Barcelona) was involved in several lawsuits to enforce their trade privileges. The 1562 ordinances of the college described their trade as ‘scientia de drogues, salses e confitures y altres importants species’ (‘a science of drugs, spice mixtures, confectionery and other important spices’).Footnote 14 The members of the college were therefore entitled to practise both as grocers, dispensing drugs, spices, and other colonial goods, and as confectioners, making and selling sweets. In early modern Barcelona, the name col⋅legi (college) referred to liberal arts and high-value occupations as opposed to manual or mechanical crafts, which were considered less honourable and of lower rank.Footnote 15 The respectable social standing of adroguers confiters (grocer-confectioners) can be partly explained by their commercial activities, as they dominated an important retail market of costly and exotic commodities for local consumption. Some wealthy grocer-confectioners from Barcelona established partnerships and extensive trade networks across Catalonia and the main European trade hubs, including Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Cádiz. Their entrepreneurial trade activities played a central role in the recovery of the Catalan economy during the last third of the seventeenth century.Footnote 16
Despite the privileged position of grocer-confectioners, the wording of their ordinances was open to wide interpretation by other guilds in a way that would favour their economic interests. Specifically, the early modern Spanish terms dulces (sweets) and confitura (confectionery) generally applied to any food or drink having a sweet taste, including confections, fruit preserves, jams, biscuits, and syrups.Footnote 17 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the meaning of the term ‘sweet’ became more restricted and linked to the notion of sugar. As Sydney Mintz noted in his seminal work on sugar and power, the very idea of sweetness came to be associated with sugar in European thought and language when sugar became a more accessible commodity.Footnote 18 The 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish language) by Sebastián de Covarrubias described dulce (a sweet) as something ‘pleasing to the sense of taste; opposite to bitter flavour’.Footnote 19 However, one century later, the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary provided a new meaning that applied to ‘any sort of candied thing’, and, more specifically, described a sort of dried confection made of fruits boiled and coated with refined sugar.Footnote 20 Similarly, the same dictionary defined confitura as ‘a fruit or any other thing coated with sugar, and currently, it is commonly understood as all things made of sugar’.Footnote 21 The association between sugar and a sweet taste was also reinforced by the phrase ‘Es (como) un azúcar’ (something is sugary or like sugar), meaning a thing that, or a person who, is sweet and pleasant.Footnote 22 As seen, definitions of sweet food came to be closely associated with sugar with no mention of other traditional sweeteners still in use in the early eighteenth century, such as honey, grape syrup, or dried fruits (plums, apricots, and raisins).
The changing cultural meanings of sweetness mirrored a very material change of confectionery practices, in particular a more intensive use of sugar. The earliest Spanish printed cookbook entirely devoted to sweets, Los quatro libros del arte de la confitería (Four volumes on the art of confectionery), by the Toledo confectioner Miguel de Baeza, provided evidence of the prominent role of sugar in the art of confectionery by the late sixteenth century.Footnote 23 In addition to a long preface about the virtues and qualities of sugar, most of his recipes used sugar as the main sweetener, while honey was restricted to the preparation of a few fruit preserves. One exception is the recipe for turrón, a kind of hard nougat based on honey, beaten egg whites, and roasted nuts.Footnote 24 Sugar was regarded as a more efficient sweetener because it can be heated and crystallized at higher temperatures, thus providing a more intensely sweet taste and longer preservation. Handwritten recipes collected by some Catalan confectioners confirm that sugar prevailed over honey in the confectionery trade in Barcelona. Dating back to the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these manuscript confectioners’ books are some of the earliest examples of recipe collections written by guild confectioners in early modern Spain.Footnote 25 Although honey was virtually absent in these confectioners’ recipe collections, a few recipes used honey as their principal sweetener, as seen in the lengthy manuscript ‘Es de difarents gèneros de confitures tant de mel com de sucre’ (‘Of different sorts of confectioneries both of honey and sugar’), dated 1702.Footnote 26 As in the case of Baeza's work, this manuscript book contained a small group of recipes for preserved seasonal fruits and vegetables that were cooked in boiling honey syrup to be stored all year round.
As printed and manuscript confectionery recipes have shown, sugar had overtaken honey in the confectionery trade as a result of the increasing availability of sugar in Iberian markets by the seventeenth century. The successful acclimation of sugar cane in the Atlantic islands and, subsequently, in the New World increased sugar supplies and decreased their prices across early modern Europe.Footnote 27 For Catalonia, the Catalan historian Gaspar Feliu noted a dramatic decrease in sugar prices from 1596 onwards.Footnote 28 While important and informative, Feliu's research considers sugar as a sole commodity, with no attention given to the diverse qualities and prices of sugars in the Barcelona marketplace, which varied from sucre roig, the least refined sugar, which resulted in molasses, through muscovado sugar, a partly refined brown sugar, to pa de sucre, the most refined white sugarloaf. In addition to the diversification of sugar qualities, a diverse supply of colonial and domestic sugars guaranteed and expanded the local sugar market to a wider range of Barcelona's residents. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Iberian sugar industry declined in value and remained a minor supplier of domestic markets because the related soil deterioration, the poor profitability of domestic cultivation, and high taxes fostered the decay of the industry.Footnote 29 Cheaper unrefined sugars, including muscovado, molasses, and treacle, arrived from the domestic sugar industry, located on the Andalusian coast (Motril) and the Levant.Footnote 30 Between 1675 and 1712, Barcelona received refined sugarloaves and icing sugar mainly from Brazil through Lisbon, which enjoyed the monopoly of colonial sugar supplies in Catalonia.Footnote 31
An increasing availability of sugar supplies at a relatively moderate cost in the Barcelona marketplace helped develop a more diversified and accessible market for sweet products. For instance, a pound of candied fruits and confits fins (fine comfits) based on refined sugar cost between 15 and 12 sous, and jellies and sugar-boiled fruits (made of muscovado sugar) cost approximately 10 sous, while confits comuns (ordinary comfits) made of molasses and wheat starch cost 6 sous.Footnote 32 Honey sweets were much cheaper and generally considered of lower quality than those made of sugar.Footnote 33 In a favourable context for sugar consumers, grocer-confectioners benefited from the changing materials and cultural meanings related to sweet food in their attempts to monopolize the sugar market, from raw sugar supplies to the production and sale of small sugary food luxuries.
II
By the seventeenth century, sugar was increasingly consumed in larger quantities in different forms and uses. Among other things, it created new possibilities for the making of sweet breads, cakes, and biscuits. The Catalan melindros and bescuit d'ous (egg biscuits) fall into a broad category of small cakes that are made of flour, sugar, and beaten eggs and baked in the oven, and that first appeared by the end of the sixteenth century. Known in different countries as biskets, Savoy biscuits, biscotti, or bizcochos, many varieties of sponge cakes gained popularity across Europe, as suitable accompaniments of sweet wines and other fashionable beverages during the dessert course or served with breakfast or as an afternoon snack.Footnote 34 Originally, the Spanish term bizcocho and the Catalan bescuit applied to ship's biscuit, hard, twice-cooked bread made of flour and water, which served as the staple food for sailors and soldiers. This term comes precisely from the idea of being cooked twice (bes or bis, and cuit for cooked). By the turn of the seventeenth century, the same term was also used to refer to vizcochos regalados (‘pleasant biscuits’), made of ground flour, sugar, and eggs, as Sebastián de Covarrubias highlighted.Footnote 35 One of the earliest printed recipes for sponge biscuits was Baeza's recipe entitled bizcochos altos (tall biscuits), referring to their spongy and raised dough.Footnote 36 Egg whites were vigorously whisked with a wooden whisk until foamy, as foamed eggs acted as a raising agent when heated, resulting in a light and moist biscuit. The beaten eggs were mixed with refined sugar and flour to make the batter and then shaped with a spoon and placed in paper cases. Before baking, these biscuits were usually sprinkled with icing sugar. The author considered them to be medicinal confections as they were very good for both the ill and the healthy. Francisco Martínez Montiño's 1611 cookbook entitled Arte de cozina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería (The art of cooking, pastry-making, bakery and preserving) contained up to ten varieties of bizcochos in different forms and flavours, revealing the great popularity of these small treats in the period.Footnote 37
The development of fine bakery and the increasing demand for sweet baked goods created new business possibilities for confectioners, bakers, and related food trades across Europe. Scholars of early modern history have highlighted that urban bakers usually engaged in the making of cakes and pastries rather than only selling regular bread, and they were thus often accused of encroaching on the trade privileges of related guilds.Footnote 38 As James R. Farr showed, the bakers of Dijon trespassed on the pastrycooks’ territory by making unleavened cakes and ‘flans, tarts and cakes’ in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 39 Another contemporaneous dispute involving bakers was sparked in eighteenth-century Paris, when the bakers were accused of encroaching on the exclusive rights of the pastrycooks to mix flour with eggs and butter, as the products were considered cakes.Footnote 40 Unlike French cities, we do not know whether pastrycooks (pastissers), confectioners, and bakers vied for the control of fine bakery in early modern Barcelona. Pastrycooks were established in the same guild as cooks (cócs) and innkeepers (taverners) and they sold savoury and sweet pastries, pies, tarts, and refined meals so as to cater for large weddings and other events in elite households.Footnote 41 On the other hand, the Confraria de Sant Miquel de flequers i forners (Saint Michael's Confraternity of Bakers) grouped together flequers (bakers), who kneaded dough and made bread for sale, and forners (oven owners), who only cooked bread, pies, or any baked food brought by particular individuals.Footnote 42 Guild bakers held the rights to pastar and obrar de farina (to knead and work with flour) and coure al forn (to bake in the oven), yet their ordinances gave no mention of the production of other baked goods.Footnote 43 Additional archival documents have revealed that bakers prepared and sold pastes maurades, enriched bread dough mixed with eggs, sugar, honey, and oil, such as tortells, cocas, bescuyt, and pa beneït (holy bread).Footnote 44 By the 1670s, the bakers had presented a petition to overturn the city council's prohibition of making pastes maurades, claiming that these mixed products did not fall into the category of bread and were therefore beyond the control of the annona frumentaria, a system of tax and supply that applied only to wheat and bread regulated by the city government.
For the sponge biscuit market, Catalan confectioners’ books have shown that melindros were well established in the confectioners’ domain. For instance, the early eighteenth-century manuscript recipe collection titled ‘Tractat de diferents confitures y drogues que han de tenir per ser bonas’ (‘Treatise of different confections and drugs one should have because they are good’) listed glazed melindros, sugar- and cinnamon-coated melindros, and melindros sprinkled with sugar and almonds, among others.Footnote 45 The same manuscript notebooks confirm that confectioners also used top-quality white flour and starch mixed with refined sugar, spices, nuts, and rose water so as to form other flour-based sweets, including marzipans, bocadillos (cake bites), mostatxons (biscuits made of almonds, flour, sugar, and spices), rosquilles de yema (ring-shaped pastries made with egg yolk), and neules de sucre (sugar pirouettes), that is, rolled thin wafers made of flour, sugarcane molasses, and eggs cooked on iron platters.Footnote 46
Guild records provide no evidence of other bakers undertaking the sale of these biscuits except for the baker Josep Cortés. On 26 June 1672, Cortés asked the bakers’ council for their support in his claim for the restitution of the fine and the merchandise seized by the confectioners. The bakers’ officials agreed to provide their endorsement and ‘lend the name’ of the guild (prestar el nom) on the condition that the lawsuit expenses were paid by the baker.Footnote 47 Guilds spent considerable sums of money on hiring lawyers and notaries to appeal to the royal justice, to the extent that their members usually paid additional taxes to defray the lawsuits’ fees. The decision of the bakers’ council would suggest that overall they were not interested in controlling the biscuit trade at that time. When Cortés appealed to the royal tribunal with the support of the guild, the judge decided to return the fine, on the understanding that the baker would refrain from making melindros. However, Cortés ignored this sentence, and he continued selling biscuits in his shop. As a result, the inspectors of the confectioners’ guild penalized him several times during the following months. On 11 August 1673, tired of the recurring fines and the imposed seizures, Cortés appealed again to the royal judge to request that the confectioners’ officials cease their punishments against him. On the basis of the guild ordinances, Cortés and the bakers laid claim to their right to produce and sell melindros and qualsevols coses de pasta (‘any other sort of pastry’).Footnote 48 Additionally, they claimed that confectioners should be prevented from using flour and cooking in the oven, as these activities infringed on the bakers’ privileges.
Although guild records did not record any other bakers’ encroachments until 1679, there may well have been bakers following Cortés's example of selling melindros in their bakeries. In 1679, the confectioners’ officials increased the number of their inspections of the bakeries and fined the bakers Jaume Horts, Josep Malla, Antoni Vives, and Pau Planell for selling melindros.Footnote 49 For instance, officials visited the shop of Antoni Vives, where they found a man who was beating melindros dough while Vives baked the biscuits in the oven.Footnote 50 A few minutes later, the officials ran into a woman carrying half a pound of melindros, and she admitted to having bought them at the baker's shop. The next day, the same officials visited the shop of another baker in which they found two earthenware bowls containing dough for melindros on the floor. A customer confessed that the baker's wife had sold him some melindros that same day. Nevertheless, the council of the confectioners’ guild decided not to impose fines on those bakers, as these punishments would only have lengthened their conflict against the bakers.Footnote 51
The efforts of the baker Cortés to gain the right to sell melindros collapsed on 3 November 1679, when Francisco de Ribera, the judge of the Real Audiencia, ruled in favour of the confectioners, thereby reaffirming their monopoly over the melindros trade. The sentence explicitly alluded to ‘egg biscuits or melindros, marzipans, bocadillos, and any other sweet pastry belonging to the confectionery trade’ because they were made primarily of sugar.Footnote 52 The bakers then appealed the judge's sentence, arguing that melindros could not be understood as pasta de sucre (sugary pastry) or confectionery. Carles Prima, a doctor of law who represented Josep Cortés and the bakers in the lawsuit, presented an elaborate legal brief discussing the different nature of confectionery and melindros based on common law, as well as contemporary and classical authorities.Footnote 53 In his Manifiesto de la verdad, Prima asserted that melindros were made substantially of flour and that sugar was merely an additional component. In addition, he argued that the terms dulces (sweets) and confitura (confectionery) applied exclusively to sugar-coated fruits and vegetables, as follows:
Because these terms dulces o confitura embrace only two sorts of foods, those with hard peels, such as almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts, etc., and others with soft peels, such as cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, apples, pears, quinces, melon, pumpkins, lettuce stalks and so on, and all contain stone, grain or seeds.Footnote 54
Some of the witnesses called to give oral testimony in favour of the bakers reinforced the views of the lawyer, as, for example, the shopkeeper Pere Alzina, who stated that the word confitura embraced ‘candies, comfits, and other things mainly made of sugar’, in contrast to melindros, made of flour mixed with eggs and sugar.Footnote 55 The guild of confectioners countered with another legal brief designed to enforce the observance of the royal sentence pronounced by the judge, in which they claimed that melindros were part of the confectioners’ domain ‘because they were made primarily of sugar’.Footnote 56 They also contended that the bakers could not pretend to control the use of flour as it was an essential ingredient for melindros, marzipan cakes, wafers, and other confections sold by them.Footnote 57
The substantial amount of sugar and flour contained in melindros would have therefore determined their classification as either confectionery or baked goods. Confectioners’ recipes showed that the basic recipe for melindros was fairly standardized and contained the same amount of flour and sugar, although flour was occasionally replaced by fine starch (flor de midó), a refined component of flour, which resulted in a lighter biscuit. For instance, the recipe from the manuscript book ‘Es de difarents gèneros de confitures’ called for twelve eggs, one pound of sugar, and one pound of starch, while another seventeenth-century recipe called for twelve eggs, one pound and twenty-six ounces of sugar, and one pound and thirty-six ounces of wheat, half in the form of starch and half in the form of flour.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, little is known about whether considerable differences in qualities existed between the confectioners’ biscuits and those made by the baker Josep Cortés. No considerable differences in the prices existed, as the Cortés melindros cost 9 sous and those from the confectioners cost 10 sous.Footnote 59 According to the testimonies in favour of the bakers, Cortés's melindros substantially differed from those sold by the confectioners, which could be recognized by their distinctive quality, form, taste, and ‘way of making’ (modo de fer).Footnote 60 The witness Madrona Martí reported that she had seen Cortés making melindros out of flour, starch, eggs, and sugar and confessed that these biscuits were much tastier than those sold by the confectioners. When asked by the judge about the differences, she explained that the baker made them wide and round-shaped, whereas those from the confectioners were long-shaped. She admitted that there was one single exception, a confectioner called Pasqual who made exactly the same melindros as Josep Cortés, and she accused Pasqual of stealing the recipe. Cortés's biscuits must have been very similar to those sold by the confectioners, although the insistence of confectioners on fining Cortés suggests that the baker would have been a serious competitor in the sponge biscuit market.
III
In their attempts to defend their rights to make melindros, the confectioners and bakers focused on the definitions of their trades by naming the materials, skills, and techniques featured in their activities. The lawyer Carles Prima stated that the making of melindros belonged to the arte pistoria, as the related ingredients and methods coincided with those of many baked goods that were legally allocated to the bakers, such as bocadillos, rosquilles, cocas, encasades, tortades and panandes (pies).Footnote 61 In particular, he observed that crostes, a type of biscuit made with wheat flour, sugar, and aniseed, had been sold by bakers for a long time with no complaints from the confectioners’ guild.Footnote 62 In his view, the fabrication of sweet baked goods greatly differed from the making of confectionery, which could be understood only as ‘the fruit or vegetable cooked in sugar syrup in pots and pans made of copper, iron or any other metal’.Footnote 63 With the statement ‘Remember, confectioner, you are dust, not dough’, the lawyer asserted that working with sugar was the main occupation of confectioners, with no manipulation of flour dough.Footnote 64 Here, Prima articulated the ideals of the confectioners’ domain based on the normative literature and did not consider the rich variety of ingredients, utensils, and cooking methods used by confectioners in their daily practice.
The material culture of confectioners and bakers has revealed that the productive activities of both trades were much more diversified and indistinct than the reading of their trade privileges would suggest. The confectioners’ recipes for flour-based sweets corroborate the idea that flour work called for diverse apparatuses and skills, which greatly differed from the rest of the fruit confections. To make sugar-boiled fruits, jams, and preserves, fruits were parboiled in water and then boiled in sugar syrup in a caldera (copper pot), which was an operation that was repeated up to nine times until the syrup became of high density and temperature. For comfits and candied fruits, these sweets were energetically stirred and coated with successive layers of boiling sugar syrup in the payla, a balancing copper pan suspended from the ceiling by two chains.Footnote 65 These copper utensils and recipients were suitable for withstanding the high temperatures reached by sugar syrup during the boiling and candying procedures. Furthermore, seventeenth-century inventories of confectioners confirm the panoply of instruments used in the confectioners’ daily activities, including confectionery pans, skillets, pots, ladlers, mortars, and sieves made of iron or copper. Some of these artefacts were limited to a single operation, such as a skimmer used to clarify sugar, small pots used to boil sugar, a copper cauldron used to make confectionery, a comfit pan, a big pot used for candying confections, pots used for sugar-coating, and a skillet used to ‘pearl’ or coat comfits.Footnote 66
Interestingly, the same inventories registered a set of objects specially designed for making melindros, such as egg whisks, mixing bowls, wooden beaters, iron spatulas for removing the biscuits from the oven, paper cases, and a sort of wooden worktable to knead and shape the melindros dough.Footnote 67 These documents also record portable metal ovens in which the confectioners would bake biscuits and other small treats at cooler temperatures.Footnote 68 In their recipes, the confectioners warned not to overcook the melindros and to cook them with gentle heat, just as in the case of marzipans, cake bites, and small almond cakes that were cooked in the oven at a very low temperature.Footnote 69 The confectioners’ recipes suggested baking marzipans only until they started to turn golden brown and that pinyonada, a flourless sweet made of pine nut and sugar, should be cooked in a cooler oven so that ‘your hand can tolerate the heat for a while’.Footnote 70 The portable metal ovens found in confectioners’ shops were limited to baking at cool temperatures and could not reach the high temperatures that larger pastries and cakes required. The technological limitations of the confectioners’ apparatus can partly explain why they were restricted to the manufacture of small biscuits such as melindros.
Conversely, bakers’ shops would have had the economic and technological capacity to easily produce bread and all sorts of sweet baked goods. The bakers’ inventories did not mention any specific utensils for making melindros, partly because these preparations used the same utensils and skills as the enriched breads and unleavened baked goods that they sold. Importantly, the probate inventory of the baker Josep Cortés only mentioned a wooden peel for putting the bread into the oven, along with one pastera or kneading trough, with no mention of utensils used for making sponge biscuits.Footnote 71 Another inventory of a baker from Barcelona listed a broader range of specialized utensils found in his baking room, some of those intended for specific baked products, such as kneading troughs of different sizes, an iron peel to make biscuits, a mat for making biscuits, a stone mortar to grind sugar, two iron peels to bake pa beneït, and three peels to bake small bread rolls that were used to insert and remove these breads from the oven.Footnote 72 The same equipment, therefore, could be used to prepare yeast and sweet breads alongside unleavened baked goods. With regard to their ovens, the bakers owned large and extremely hot brick ovens to bake bread loaves at high temperature. Once the bread was cooked, the residual heat remained for a long time, and it was employed to bake other food products cooked in cooler ovens, such as pies, cakes, pastries, and casseroles. As melindros are cooked in cool ovens, these sponge biscuits were highly profitable commodities for bakers because they could be easily produced using the ordinary equipment, ingredients, and cooking techniques of their shops.
IV
In light of the delays in the legal proceedings, Josep Cortés addressed the court of Madrid in September 1680, when he appealed to the Real Consejo (the Royal Council) for an individual privilege to produce and sell melindros.Footnote 73 The Real Consejo could not revoke the high court's sentences, but it could grant privileges and licences to individual manufacturers. On 25 October, Charles II of Spain granted Cortés the privileges of a confectioner, which entitled him to freely sell melindros in Barcelona. In turn, the confectioners’ officials petitioned the king for the annulment of this licence, claiming that a simple unskilled baker could not exercise the skilled art of grocer-confectioners. In this second lawsuit, the lawyer Carles Prima sharply replied that the confectionery trade did not fit the description of arte liberal (liberal art), as it was a ‘sordid and servile trade’ merely based on ‘boiling sweets in pots and pans on a stove’, and, as he referred to the grocers’ trade, ‘just shaking drugs, cloves, cinnamon, pepper, rice, almonds and other supplies by hand’.Footnote 74 Josep Cortés died in 1693 without a definitive judicial sentence, although his inventory identified him as both a grocer-confectioner and a baker.Footnote 75
But this single legal case developed into a major dispute between confectioners and bakers in the ensuing years. In 1693, confectioners’ officials visited the baker's shop located in the convent of the Trinitaris Calçats in which the confectioner Antoni Garau presumably produced sucre candi (candied sugar), melindros, and other confections. Garau admitted preparing all these sweet products in the bakery because there was not enough room in his shop to produce them.Footnote 76 Having larger and better ovens and affordable ingredients, a growing number of bakers followed the entrepreneurial example of Cortés and began to sell melindros in the city. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the master confectioner Mariano Casalins presented a formal complaint to the college council that bakers had sold melindros for such a long time that the citizens of Barcelona regarded it as a well-established custom to go to the bakeries to buy these biscuits, which caused great damage to all the confectioners.Footnote 77 In the face of expanding markets and competition, the confectioners’ council prohibited the confectioners from buying melindros from the bakers’ shops and from baking their own biscuits in the bakers’ ovens.Footnote 78 In their continuing attempts to fight the bakers’ competition, the confectioners established a unique recipe for melindros in 1744 that was to be followed by all members of the guild. The guild consuls urged all the members to observe the unique recipe to ensure high standards of quality and to prevent bakers from alleging that their melindros were of better quality.Footnote 79
This case study has highlighted that a growing taste for sugar conferred new meanings and values to sweets and reshaped the configuration of the Barcelona marketplace. It was not until the 1670s that sponge biscuits became a subject of guild rivalry as the economic, political, and social circumstances of the market changed. When sugar in the form of sweets became increasingly consumed by larger numbers of people, new business possibilities emerged for food professionals, who strove to meet the demands of the changing habits of consumers. Although historical accounts of sugar have focused on its role as a sweetener of new colonial beverages, namely, coffee, chocolate, and tea, this article has demonstrated that the making (and eating) of sweet foods should not be neglected in the global history of sugar. The wider trend of serving fashionable beverages along with melindros and other sweet pastries in new spaces of sociability can partly explain the commercial success of melindros in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In their attempts to control the biscuit market, bakers and confectioners alike defined their commodities both materially and discursively in ways that would favour them. The changing materials and cultural meanings related to sweets, which moved from a generic idea of sweetness to one that was explicitly linked to sugar, permitted the confectioners’ justification of securing their monopoly over sweet products. Rather than being meaningless debates, guild discourses demonstrate how shifting ideas about sweetness and sugar inevitably informed and challenged the definition of food categories and food trades. In this way, guild disputes allow us to build up a vivid and more nuanced history of food production and marketing in the early modern urban landscape.
