French Country · Encyclopedia · Wrought-Iron Tools
Sugar axe and sugar nippers
When sugar was sold in large cones, an eighteenth-century hatchet with a hammer head split it into blocks and then broke them. Later nippers, loose or mounted on a wooden base, cut the sugar into small lumps.
French: hachette à sucre, pinces à sucre · 18th–19th century · wrought iron
At a glance
- Period: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- Material: wrought iron, wooden bases
- Use: breaking sugar loaves
- Types: hatchet-hammer, hand nippers, bench-mounted nippers
Sugar loaves
Refined sugar was long sold as tall, hard cones called sugar loaves. Households had to cut them up themselves, and the job called for dedicated tools.
The eighteenth-century double tool in the book combines a small hatchet and a hammer: the blade split large blocks and the hammer broke them further.
Nippers
Later, sugar nippers, like strong scissors with sharp jaws, cut the blocks into small lumps for the table. Some were loose; others were mounted on a wooden base for more leverage. They remained in use until sugar was sold ready-cut in cubes.
Collecting and displaying them
Check that the jaws meet properly and that springs or pivots are intact. Bench-mounted examples with original bases are attractive pieces.
A set of sugar tools sits naturally on a kitchen dresser, beside canisters and coffee mills.
Source: Les Trésors de France: vieux métiers et objets d'autrefois (Éditions Rustica, Détours en France collection, 1995), pp. 120–123, with general background on the object. The book was published in 1995, so workshops, people and figures are described as they were then. Regional names and dates are given as the book records them; a style or a region of origin does not by itself date an individual piece.