Ancient Rome’s artificial sweetener,Today artificial sweeteners have become a common item in m

Ancient Rome’s artificial sweetener,Today artificial sweeteners have become a common item in modern foods, especially with the rise of dieters and diabetics.  Take any diet, zero calorie, or sugar free item and odds are it has some type of artificial sweetener such as aspartame, saccharine, or sucralose. Mr. Peashooter is artificial sweetener intolerant, and as he types this a growing queasy feeling is developing in his stomach at the mere thought of aspartame.  While artificial sweeteners may seem like an invention of modern chemistry, in reality they date to Ancient Rome with three sweet concoctions; defrutum, sapa, and carenum. Defrutum, sapa, and carenum were boiled down reductions of grape juice, the more boiled down, the sweeter.  Sapa was boiled down to one third its original volume, and thus was the sweetest.  Carenum was boiled down to two thirds its original volume, and thus was the less sweeter of the three.  Defrutum was the most popular, boiled down to 50% of its volume, it was somewhere in between.  Once boiled down, defrutum had a thick syrupy texture much like maple syrup today.  It was used for a wide variety of uses.  Most popularly it was added to wine as a sweetener.  It was also used as a culinary sweetener, being used with meat dishes such as suckling pig and duck.  It was also used to preserve foods, and was commonly used by the Roman Army to preserve fruit.  Defrutum was perhaps the most popular sweetener in the Roman Empire, more common than honey, and certainly more common than sugar as sugarcane was unavailable.  A study of Roman cuisine finds that ¼th to 1/5th of all Roman dishes made use of defrutum in some way.  It was even used as a cosmetic, being used as an early type of lipstick by ancient Roman women.So what made defrutum so sweet? When boiling, the grape must was sometimes boiled down in a lead kettle.  The lead of the kettle bonded with the acetic acid of the grapes, forming a sweet substance closely resembling sugar called “sugar of lead”.  Modern chemists better know it as lead (ii) acetate.  While lead acetate was certainly sweet, it was also incredibly toxic, with lead levels at around 29,000 parts per billion.  By contrast, US water drinking standards limit lead levels to 10 parts per billion.  Considering that ancient Romans would drink around 1-2 liters of wine a day, not to mention the fact that Romans used lead plumbing and lead utensils, lead poisoning must have been common in the Roman Empire.  Some historians cite this as the reason for Rome’s fall, with lead crazen emperors like Nero and Caligula tearing the Empire apart as Roman citizens died or went insane from lead poisoning.  As compelling as this may seem, Peashooter doubts this theory, as other nations and other peoples have acted in an equally crazy, albeit lead free manner.  Not all forms of defrutum, sapa, and carenum were produced using lead kettles.  Often cooks would use bronze and copper kettles to produce different tastes and varieties of defrutum.  Regardless, the consumption of leaded defrutum would have surely had grave consequences on the Romans who drank or ate it.Today, defrutum, sapa, and carenum is available to modern peoples, produced as a by product of winemaking by various specialty food company’s.  However, modern defrutum is entirely lead free and safe.  -- source link

More pics about