Rachel Laudan:
Over the course of her lifetime, my great grandmother would have seen the price of sugar and flour fall in absolute terms, enabling her to make white bread spread with jam an everyday affair and a cake quite possible for special occasions.
My grandmother and her brother and sisters would have experienced the falling prices and ingenious new techniques when they made trips to the sweet shop, which by the end of the nineteenth century were opening on every street corner in Britain, a phenomenon as dramatic as the spread of hamburger joints would be in the United States following World War II.
Fascinating.