Sugarcane Juice: A Fresh Drink from the Markets of Mauritius
A single plant tells you you're in Mauritius. The road from the airport - cane. The switchbacks inland - cane. The turnoff to the beach - cane again, ankle-high in one field, towering over the roof of the car in the next.
Sugarcane juice (French: jus de canne, Creole: ju kann) is a freshly pressed drink made from the stalks of a giant grass that gave Mauritian cuisine its sugar, its rum, its electricity and most of the landscape outside the car window. All it takes is a stalk, a motorized press and a cup of ice.
What Ju Kann Means and Who Else Presses It
Mauritian Creole ground the French jus de canne down to a brisk ju kann - two syllables, and at a stall you don't need any more than that. And let's be clear right away: fresh cane juice belongs to Mauritius no more than it does to the rest of the tropics. In India they season ganne ka ras with ginger, Brazil pours garapa from street carts, Vietnam chills nước mía with ice, and in Madagascar they might drop mint and salt into yours. With neighboring Réunion, Mauritius even shares the word vesou - what they call fresh juice set aside for rum. Every corner of the tropics has come up with its own name for the drink; what they all have in common is the press and how fast it has to be drunk.
From Batavia to Most of the Island's Farmland
Cane was brought to the island in 1639 by the Dutch governor Adriaan van der Stel, who came from Batavia, today's Jakarta. The first thing the colony made from it wasn't sugar but rum; the mills only got going at the end of that same century. In the 19th century Mauritius ranked among the world's leading sugar producers. What knocked it off the throne was, among other things, the plain European beet: the root that tractors scatter along country roads back home in Czechia every autumn drove the price of sugar down and pushed the cane islands aside. Today Mauritian sugar accounts for a fraction of a percent of world output, yet cane still covers most of the island's farmland. Few defeats look so much like a win from a car window.
How a Grass Turns into a Cup, Rum and Electricity
Only thick, ripe stalks get cut. Before the harvest the fields are traditionally burned so the fine leaves go up in flames and the bare stalks are easier to cut - the practice is used wherever cane grows, and everywhere it's slowly giving way to machines. At the market the vendor then runs a peeled stalk between two steel rollers and greenish juice streams into a cup, most often with a slice of lime. Fresh juice is only about 10 to 15 percent sugar - the rest is water, so it tastes milder than the name promises. It doesn't keep: within two days it ferments. That is exactly what the makers of Mauritian rum turn to their advantage, distilling some of their output from fresh juice the same way as Caribbean rhum agricole - they just aren't allowed to put that protected name on the label. And nothing is wasted at the other end either: bagasse goes off to the power stations and gives the island roughly a seventh of its electricity.
You drink the juice standing up, right at the press, ideally in the midday heat, when a few minutes turn the crushed ice into slightly cooler water. Remember one rule: ju kann only makes sense straight from the press - the juice oxidizes fast, which is why it is never sold any other way than hand to hand. And if you want to know what this grass has done to the island, there's a museum in a former sugar mill in the north, L'Aventure du Sucre - three centuries in which sugar was Mauritius and Mauritius was sugar.
A Cup at the Market in Port Louis
I drank my cane juice in Port Louis, at the Central Market, on the same ground floor where they mix alouda. A big cup over crushed ice cost 100 MUR (2 EUR). I was expecting liquid sugar and got something far gentler: a cold, only faintly sweet drink with a green, almost grassy note that did more for me in that heat than anything out of a fridge. Rum from the same stalk will wait years in a cellar. The juice barely lasts until evening. So I didn't wait either.
