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The Imperiia Project

confection

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Sweet Things: Confectioners, Chocolatiers, and a Spoonful of Economic Geography 114 Because everyone should know where to find the gingerbread-bakers. plain 2025-03-19T14:35:27-04:00
It isn't easy to find chocolate in the archives.
Then again, it wasn't easy to find chocolate in the Russian Empire. Access to sweets has always been a function of social status. And religious beliefs. And cultural practices associated with health and family. And location. And soil quality. And the availability of steam engines. (You didn't see that one coming, did you!)

Most people see confections as a sidenote in the broader history of production, which focuses on the heavy-hitters of the economy: iron, steel, and textiles. But sweet things, filled as they are with cream and sugar and butter and fruit, matter. As Darra Goldstein points out in the introduction to the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, "sugar was once rare, prized not only for its sweetness but also for its preservative properties." To desire sugar is to be human, but for most of history its consumption was a practice of the wealthy. In Europe, the ability of the lower classes to satisfy their craving is the story of the 19th century boom in sugar beet production. Until then, most people consumed sweets made with honey or fruit. They prepared them at home and served them on plates at the holiday table.
A Slice of History: Industrialization in the Russian Empire
In 1887 the Department of Trade and Manufactures, part of the Ministry of Finance, published an index of factories operating in what was known as European Russia and the Kingdom of Poland. The bulk of the volume is devoted to textile factories. The sections on timber goods, chemicals, and machinery/metals compete for a distant third place. But second place (in terms of the sheer number of factories) goes to the production of foodstuffs.

If you are researching the history of confectioners and chocolatiers, or generally interested in the sweets revolution of the 19th century, this is a great place to start. The volume organizes foodstuffs into subsections for 1) flour milling, 2) cereals, 3) butter, 4) starches, 5) treacle, 6) malt, 7) pasta, gingerbread, and confections, 8) coffee and its surrogates, 9) preserved meats, 10) cheese, 11) yeast, 12) vinegar, 13) artificial mineral water and sparkling beverages. Data collection across the provinces was inconsistent, but each entry includes some combination of the following:
- factory owner by name and social status
- factory location by town and (sometimes) street
- annual production measured in weight and value
- number of workers
- number of steam engines and mechanized parts
- the type and quantity of goods produced.
Thanks to this source, we know there were 162 confection factories spread across 41 towns in 22 provinces. Together they produced well over 11,000 tons of confection on an annual basis: over 11,000 tons of cake, candy, caramel, chocolate, and cookies. (The numbers are approximate because the Index included only factories producing goods worth more than 2,000 rubles per year: countless small shops produced confections in addition to those documented here. Moreover, many entries lack data on production quantity or value.)
Get Acquainted with 19th Century Confections
The only thing better than tasting them is looking at them! Take a moment to flip through our gallery of confection illustrations. (Curious how we built it?). Rest your cursor on the confection name displayed on the left to learn more.
Ready to explore?