This article appeared in Mail Today on February 17, 2014.
To check out the original, click on http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1622014.
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.
Link to my previous Mauritius story:
http://indianrestaurantspy.blogspot.in/2013/12/mauritius-diary-rhythms-of-creole-music.html
To check out the original, click on http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=1622014.
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.
Link to my previous Mauritius story:
http://indianrestaurantspy.blogspot.in/2013/12/mauritius-diary-rhythms-of-creole-music.html
By Sourish Bhattacharyya
HAD Michel de Nostradame, who
attained eternal fame as the seer Nostradamus, not written down his prophecies,
generations would have remembered him as a pioneering confectioner. For, it was
he who explained to the world, in his lesser-known work, Traite des Confitures (Treaty of Jams), how sugar can be used to
preserve fruits, thus giving birth in 1555 to the business of making jams,
jellies and marmalades. Nostradamus was an apothecary (or pharmacist) and in
those days, candy used to be made by people who dispensed medicines.
 |
| New Grove is a delicious rum, best drunk with just ice, produced at the first sugar factory of Mauritius. At l'Aventure du Sucre, you could pick up bottles of the cognac-like rum made from first-crush sugarcane juice, known locally as fangourin. |
For a lifelong collector of
useless information, this was my a-ha moment at L'Aventure du Sucre -- the famed
sugar museum, and high point of my visit to Mauritius. The Indian Ocean nation,
which exists in our imagination as a green ideal with sun-kissed white beaches
and aquamarine seas, has beauties tucked away everywhere. And these may not
always be of the kind gifted by a bounteous nature. L'Aventure du Sucre is one among
them.
At first sight, it may appear like
any other reconstituted sugar factory -- Mauritius had 259 of them in 1858, but
today, just five produce more sugar than all of them combined -- till you
notice the 35m chimney towering over it like some phallic ode. Look around, and
treat your eyes to a vast expanse of dense greenery and sugarcane plantations,
swaying in the gentle breeze, overseen by a wind-sculpted hill in the distant
horizon that stands wrapped in a quilt of flitting grey clouds like a forlorn
sentinel on a sleepless vigil since the Jurassic Age.
You're in Pamplemousses, one of
the oldest and greenest districts of the island, not very far from the Port
Louis, the national capital, and named after the tree that bears a fruit that
looks and tastes uncannily like grapefruit. I owed this bit of general
knowledge to the glass of pamplemousses juice that I had at breakfast. I had
loved the symphony of fruit and acid, sweet and sour -- it was a like a concert
by nature to liven up jaded palates.
Pamplemousses is famous the world
over for the Sir Seewoosagar Ramgoolam Botanical Garden, the oldest in the
Southern Hemisphere, and best known for its humongous Queen Victoria water
lilies. Not being botanically inclined, I did not visit the 37-hectare park -- just
as well, because there was so much to learn about Mauritius and the sugar
economy at the sugar museum.
The museum's marketing manager is
a young Mauritian of Indian origin, who, like his other compatriots, spoke in
Creole and English, listened only to Bollywood music, and had a foggy idea of
India, created in his mind by the playlist of the FM station he heard on his
way to and back from work, and yet he nurtured the dream of visiting the
country of his forefathers. "Aap
Bharat ko mera salaam dena," he
said with a natural-born exuberance and not because of what he had learnt from
the correspondence classes in marketing management that he took from an
Australian university. Back home, the line may have sounded corny, but when you
hear it in rain-washed Pamplemousses, you feel your eyes turning moist and you hear
the rustle of the Tricolour flying in full mast.
The Dutch introduced sugarcane in
Mauritius, the French and the Brits exploited its commercial possibilities, and
Indian indentured labourers slaved away in the plantations on five-year contracts.
The men were paid five rupees a month and the women, four, and of this paltry
sum, one rupee would be held back, ostensibly to pay for their return journey.
They were lured by the promise of finding gold in the isle, but instead of
digging for gold, they worked as coolies in sugar plantations.
The first Indians officially
arrived on November 2, 1834, at the Immigration Depot, or Aapravasi Ghat, a
UNESCO World Heritage Site tucked away in one corner of the chic Caudan
Waterfront in Port Louis. Eventually, 450,000 of them arrived till 1923, the
year when indentured labour was abolished, and once the five years of their
contracts got over, they and their descendents chose to stay on to build a
multi-ethnic society where four distinct communities -- Indian, Chinese,
African and French -- stay in complete harmony with each other. Sugar today
contributes to a third of the export earnings of the country and is grown on 80
per cent of the arable land. I looked at the man taking me around with renewed
respect. His ancestors, and those of other young people like him I had got to
meet during my stay, had built a thriving sugarcane economy literally in the
middle of nowhere.
One sugarcane, the marketing
manager said, has a life span of eight years, and each time it is cut, it
produces 20 litres of juice, which in turn converts into two kilos of sugar.
The bagasse left behind in the crushing process provide green fuel for
gas-based turbines producing electricity, the waste is turned into fertiliser, the
molasses are processed to make industrial rum and methanol, and the leaves are
dried to produce the ubiquitous decorative roofing material that you'll find
across the island.
The first-crush sugarcane juice, fangourin, also goes into the making of
Mauritian agricultural rum (rhum agricole)
-- and the museum's shop has one of the finest, New Grove, a heady liquor
bursting with floral aromas and tropical fruit notes, all jasmine, lychee and
honey, made at the island's first sugar mill and rum factory. It also has a selection
of 12 kinds of sugar, so I had to find out the difference between the demerara
and the muscovado, which were among the six at my hotel's breakfast buffet. I
learnt that both are brown sugar, or raw sugar crystals, with different levels
of molasses content and different production processes -- in the case of demerara (best for coffee), the raw molasses
crystals are dried in a centrifuge, but the muscovado (perfect for baking) is
dried in natural heat, sometimes in the sun.
Did someone say Mauritius is only
about the sun, sea and sand? Add a fourth 's' -- sugarcane -- and you'll see
another side of the emerald isle.
