In colonial British America people commonly used molasses as a sweetener in “hasty pudding”—a combination of oatmeal and porridge that served with butter, milk, and molasses. Molasses consumption indicated that a person was a commoner or is some scholarship as described from the time, member of the "baser sort." An anonymous observer wrote around 1730, “Molasses is generally used throughout all the Northern Colonies, and at our fisheries, in brewing their beer, and the poorer Sort, who are very numerous, eat it with their Bread, and make Puddings of it, Ec [sic].”