64 SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK ADDITION OF SUGAR 



from the soil to the finished sugar. It is possible, however, that 

 the standard of refinement of American beet sugar, during the 

 earlier days of its manufacture, was low and that some of the 

 beet sugar on the market may have contained small amounts of 

 acid, invert sugar and other impurities, ingredients of such a 

 nature as to render the sugar prone to give rise to fermentation 

 and, therefore, condemn its use in the milk condensery. 



While the beet sugar on the market today appears to have 

 reached a very high state of refinement and is, according to the 

 best authorities, equal in purity to cane sugar, it is still shunned 

 by the American condenseries, which insist that nothing but 

 cane sugar will do. However, whenever a shortage occurs of the 

 sugar cane crop in the West Indies, raw European beet sugar is 

 imported into the United States and it all emerges from* our sea- 

 board refineries as "pure cane sugar." It is not improbable, there- 

 fore, that the sugar supply of many American condenseries today 

 consists at times largely of beet sugar, though it is purchased 

 under the name of cane sugar. 



There is no good reason why the best refined beet sugar, 

 manufactured today in this country and elsewhere, should not 

 give fully as good results for condensing purposes as the same 

 quality of cane sugar. Tests made at the California Agricultural 

 Experiment Station 1 led to the conclusion that the two kinds 

 of sugar, cane sugar and beet sugar, were equally valuable for 

 canning and identical in their behavior when of the same fineness 

 of crystallization. 



Beet Sugar Cannot be Detected from Cane Sugar. While 

 the raw sugar from the two different sources, the sugar cane 

 and the sugar beet, takes on the character of the impurities from 

 which it has not yet been freed (the raw product of the sugar 

 cane is pleasant in flavor, the raw product from the sugar beet 

 is acrid and disagreeable in flavor), the sucrose or so-called pure 

 cane sugar, can be and is crystallized out, and in every case the 

 sugar is identical in chemical composition, appearance and prop- 

 erties. "By no chemical test can the pure crystallized sugar 

 from these two different sources be distinguished." 2 



1 California Agricultural Experiment Station, Circular No. 33. 



2 United States Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin No. 635, 



