honey

Honey, the ripened nectar of Apis mellifera, is used once in this library: a teaspoon (5 ml) in the Japanese curry, added to the pot with the soy sauce and tomato paste once about 2 cups of hot broth have been whisked into the roux. The same recipe grates an apple into the stock. The Journal's note on Japanese curry records that in 1963 House Foods launched Vermont Curry, sweetened with apple and honey so that children could eat it. Retailers refused to stock it at first, on the grounds that a sweet curry could never sell, and it became a runaway hit within months.

Honey is also the extreme case in the Journal's note on preservation, which measures keeping quality by water activity, the ratio of the vapour pressure above a food to that of pure water. A 2025 study of Greek monofloral honeys reports cotton honey at 15.85 per cent moisture and water activity 0.53, thyme honey at 14.60 per cent and 0.53, and heather at 18.10 per cent and 0.60. Peanut butter has essentially the same water, fifteen per cent, and sits at 0.70 in an FDA table.

The water in honey has not gone anywhere. It is spoken for. Honey is mostly invert sugar, glucose and fructose at a molecular weight of 180, so a gram of it carries roughly twice as many dissolved particles as sucrose does. The note puts honey comfortably under 0.85, the line below which a food falls outside the United States rules for low-acid canned food, and it got there without salt, heat or acid. The note closes on the jar in the cupboard, which still holds a sixth of its weight in water.