Funny Culture

Before Sugar and Spice: What Were Medieval European Girls Made Of?

A nursery rhyme question spirals into history, chemistry, and masala chai.

· 7 min · Togetter

What's going on

The English nursery rhyme "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" has a clear answer: sugar and spice and all things nice. But someone pointed out a genuine historical wrinkle — before the early modern period, sugar beets hadn't spread across Europe and exotic spices were luxury imports from Asia, far beyond the reach of ordinary people. So what exactly were girls made of in pre-medieval Europe?

The thread drew in historians, trivia enthusiasts, and people who just wanted to make a joke. Answers ranged from bone marrow and animal fat to Adam's rib to the complete elemental composition of the human body. One commenter noted that the concept of "childhood" — and therefore "girls" as a category — wasn't invented until the modern era. Another made the more thought-provoking observation that in colonial-era Britain, sugar and spice arrived in the home at exactly the same moment childhood was being "discovered," which might mean the nursery rhyme was accidentally sound history all along.

Then someone noticed that sugar plus spice plus something nice equals masala chai. The thread never quite recovered from that.

Comments

It’s common knowledge that girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, but in pre-medieval Europe — where spices couldn’t be grown locally and sugar beets hadn’t yet spread — how exactly were girls made? (Sugar beets: the crop used to produce beet sugar, only widely cultivated in Europe after the 18th century.)
Prehistoric humans ate animal bone marrow as a prized, nutrient-rich food, and animal fat was similarly valued for its minerals. So in medieval Europe, girls were made from those plus sheer guts — producing sturdy, robust women valued for their vitality. (Very frontier-settlement energy)
According to Ariès, until the modern era there were no ‘children’ — only small laborers. (Philippe Ariès: French historian who argued in Centuries of Childhood (1960) that ‘childhood’ as a concept was a modern invention.) So of course they needed to be tough.
You’ve got it backwards. Pre-medieval Europe didn’t make girls FROM sugar and spice — they broke girls DOWN into sugar and spice and put them to use.
A time-altering girl was born. Because the Professor added something extra… (A nod to The Powerpuff Girls — in the original story, Professor Utonium accidentally added ‘Chemical X’ to the sugar, spice, and everything nice, creating the girls.)
They hung from trees as fruit. The fact that things growing on trees are still classified as ‘fruit’ and things from the ground as ‘vegetables’ is a remnant of that era.
35L water, 20kg carbon, 4L ammonia, 1.5kg lime, 800g phosphorus, 250g salt, 100g saltpeter, 80g sulfur, 7.5g fluorine, 5g iron, 3g silicon, and trace amounts of 15 additional elements.
If you keep something in your country for over three months it qualifies as domestically produced, so I think that’s probably how they did it.
Either the stork brought them, or they were born from the cabbage patch. Both methods can deliver cute girls, not just babies.
Sugar, like spices, was the spoils of colonization — it spread as an aristocratic privilege around the time of Queen Elizabeth I. So girls were ‘made by offering up war plunder.’ Probably defeated commanders’ heads and things like that.
Apparently they were made from the rib of a sleeping man. Because it’s not good for a person to be alone, and a fitting helper was needed.
Honey — which goes back to Greek mythology — could sub for sugar, but spice is trickier. If spice is what produces that alluring, intoxicating quality in girls, I wonder if wine or mead could fill in for it.
Mustard, caraway, silphium, and honey — something along those lines. (Note: in pre-sugar Europe, texts would describe sugar as ‘a kind of honey.’) Oh — silphium was a legendary spice beloved by ancient Romans. It went extinct. (Silphium: an herb from ancient Cyrene, now Libya, overexploited to extinction possibly as early as the 1st century AD.)
In Britain, sugar and spices only became widespread after 18th-century colonialism — the same era as the Industrial Revolution, also called the era of ’the discovery of childhood.’ So the concept of ‘girls (as cute and worthy of protection)’ was born at the same moment sugar and spice arrived in the home. The nursery rhyme turns out to be historically sound.
Until childhood was ‘discovered,’ children were just ‘small adults.’ So the correct answer is: girls didn’t exist.
There’s GARLIC! The definitive spice of the medieval European commoner: garlic from morning. Garlic in the soup. Garlic on the meat. Garlic on the bread. Anti-spoilage, antibacterial, anti-fatigue, cold prevention, demon repellent — a full feature set. ‘Your eyes are like the stars’ won’t cut it as a pickup line anymore. Try ‘Your breath looks plague-resistant’ instead.
In pre-medieval Europe, honey was probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting 🍯🐝 There are records of monasteries keeping bees and producing mead and other honey-based drinks 🍯🥂
Roses, honey, and the morning dew of spring ✨
Wait, just occurred to me — sugar, spice, and everything nice… isn’t that basically masala chai…?
If ’nice things’ = milk → masala chai. If ’nice things’ = wine → mulled wine. I feel like there are more options here.
Could also make carrot cake, pain d’épices, sangria, ginger tea, or chili prawns.
The original lyric is ‘and all that’s nice’ — meaning ’everything’ — so I think it becomes a masala chai-based free-for-all hotpot.
So that’s why the Age of Exploration set sail for India.
Mix it all together and you get an incredibly cute girl… or so we thought. What we actually made was chai.
Everything nice: Assam, second flush, Hatiari estate.
Wait… we were masala chai this whole time…?
Pfft lol — but wait, there was no black tea in medieval Europe, so it’d become herbal tea instead. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme ♪ (A reference to ‘Scarborough Fair,’ the traditional English ballad popularized by Simon & Garfunkel.)
So this is yatsuhashi. (Yatsuhashi: a traditional Kyoto confection made with rice flour, sugar, and cinnamon — one of Japan’s most iconic regional sweets.)
Yatsuhashi is also made of sugar, spice, and everything nice — so can we agree that yatsuhashi is also a girl?
There’s even a character named Yuko, so yes, that checks out. (Yuko is the girl mascot on Nishio Yatsuhashi packaging, a well-known Kyoto souvenir brand.)
Thanks for the info 🤝
I figured it was the original Coca-Cola — back when it still had coca leaf in it.
Damn it, now I can’t stop imagining a whole troupe of Indian dancers bursting out of masala chai at full speed… about as many as Buddha’s family had on staff, cycling through like a Bollywood sankin-kōtai. Help me, Lord Toshiie. (Sankin-kōtai: the Edo-period law requiring feudal lords to alternate residence between their home domain and Edo, involving massive ceremonial processions.)

My take

My real question is about the taxes. Spices in medieval Europe were expensive enough to launch an entire Age of Exploration — someone was getting very rich off the tariffs.

Comments loosely translated for tone.

Source https://togetter.com/li/2695682