Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 April 1883 — Looking Up Glucose. [ARTICLE]

Looking Up Glucose.

A correspondent recently wrote to ns inquiring what kind of stuff was glucose. We didn’t know. We had heard a good deal said about glucose, and somehow we had imbibed the impression that it was some kind of a newly-dis-covered glue. However, being anxious to please our readers, and give universal satisfaction all around, we started out to investigate the subject. A Saginaw man once told ns that brewers put glucose in lager beer, so, in the interest of pure science, we bought a glass of beer, and while waiting for the sea foam to cool off a little we remarked casually: “Of course, you put plenty of good, pure glucose in your beer, don’t you?” And may we be blessed if that bar-tender didn’t come round the end of the counter as mad as a hornet and as red in the face as a boiled shrimp, with a big, brass fauoet in his hand, and tried to tap us on the nose, but we fled with a mocking laugh. A Wisconsin school-marm had hinted that she labored under the impression that the candy manufacturers used glucose in the preparation of caramels, butter-scotch and sugar monkeys, so we went in and asked a candy-butcher if he had any vanilla larrycodope breaded with glucose, and the man looked so bad for a moment that we were sorry we had. said anything about it, and then he pitched his coat into the coal box and his hat into an apple barrel, and came for us on the dead run, and we had to out and seek further in the pursuit of the desired information. We spoke to a retail grocer about buying a barrel of standard “A” coffee sugar, and told him that of course he would see that there was the right quantity of glucose in it, and we are a ghost if he didn’t try to stab us with a buttertester. Then we went home. We are obliged to give up the conudnrum. If the correspondent could only ask us an easy one, a little one for a cent, we would try and wrestle with it. But there is every appearance just now that we shall have to acknowledge ourselves stumped. Every day we hear of some town or community which wants to establish a glucose factory, but what is the use of starting a manufactory to turn out something which nobody wants, or knows anything about, and which seems to drive people into a frenzy when you speak to them about it? No, we don’t know what glucose is, and, what’s more, we don’t care a continental.— Cheek .