In Schœlcher's France, the upper middle class gradually abandoned "French-style service" (all dishes placed together) for "Russian-style service": dishes arrive one after another in order — soup, relevé, entrées, roast, sweet entremets, coffee. Lunch and dinner are the two structured meals of the day, taken at fixed hours, accompanied by wine. But Schœlcher's life also took him to the West Indies and the Americas, where he shared the Creole table: salt cod fritters, punch, and cane sugar — the very sugar whose producers he sought to liberate.

No ingredient tells Schœlcher's story better than cane sugar. A sweetener of the bourgeois table, it is also the bitter fruit of forced labor in the colonies: it was for the men and women who cultivated it under the whip that he fought. Finding it in a Parisian charlotte as in a West Indian punch is to hold both ends of his struggle.