Sweetened Condensed Milk — Addition oe Sugar 59 



has more than trebled within the last ten years. In 1901 it amounted 

 to one hundred eighty-four thousand tons and in 1911 it was six 

 hundred six thousand and thirty-three tons. Again, 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 seaboard refineries as "pure cane sugar." It is 

 not improbable, therefore, 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, manu- 

 factured 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 Sta- 

 tion^ 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 erom 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 properties. "By no chem- 

 ical test can the pure crystallized sugar from these two different 

 sources be distinguished."^ 



Quality of the Sugar. — Since the sugar, sucrose, is added for 

 the purpose of preserving the condensed milk, it is obvious that none 

 but the best quality of refined sucrose is admissible. L,ow grade 

 sucrose is a product dangerous to the condensed milk business. It 

 is apt to contain sufficient quantities of acid and invert sugar, to give 

 bacteria and yeast an opportunity to start fermentation. When 

 once started, the destruction of the product is almost inevitable. In 

 years of failure of the cane sugar crop, when the prices of sucrose 

 soar high, condenseries yield frequently to the temptation of buying 

 lower grades of sugar. The result invariably is an abnormally large 

 output of condensed milk that "goes wrong." 



1 California Agricultural Experiment Station, Circular No. 33. 



' United States Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin No. 535, 1913. 



