Usos, consumos e relações simbólicas do açúcar : trajetória ibero-americana do alfenim (da Idade Média à contemporaneidade)

Abstract

Fanid is a dry, hard and crumbly white mass of sugar. Popularly considered a confection, or even a sweet, it is a type of «pulled sugar», initially categorised as a quality of sugar, and nowadays understood as a confectionery product. This thesis investigates the trajectory of fanid from a long-term historical perspective and highlights the uses, consumption, meanings and significance attributed to sugar and to this confection over time. The chapters of this study present the fanid as materia medica in medieval times, its introduction into cuisine as a foodstuff, as evidenced by culinary recipes, and as part of the confectioner’s trade in the modern period, as well as its aesthethic and decorative use on the Renaissance table, in socializing practices and in religious celebratory rites. In present times, the fanid continues to play a role as a ritualized food-artifact and is recognised as cultural heritage. How has the fanid made this journey? How has it passed through time? How has this product transformed from a medicine in the Middle-Ages to a devotional sweet recognised as food heritage in the present day? Based primarily on historical sources from the tenth to the twenty-first centuries, this thesis historicizes the fanid with the aim of understanding how societies have conceived and idealised the uses and consumption of this item, in a long journey of constructing signs of healing, luxury, pleasure and celebration, evidenced by its morphologies, iconographies, aesthetics, and symbolic and ritual functions. Although the research covers several centuries in order to locate the origins of the sweet in the East, the thesis reconstructs one side of the history, from the perspective of its trajectory in the West, with a greater focus on the Ibero- American world in the modern and contemporary periods.