Golden Syrup - as a retail product rather than as a stage in sugar processing - is known from advertisements in the sugar-producing lands of the USA and Jamaica since the beginning of the 19th Century, and it appears to have been sufficiently well-known in the British Isles by 1845 for Soyer to include it in a pudding receipt.
The iconic green-and-gold label of the Lyle's brand of Golden Syrup carries the truly bizarre image of a rotting lion carcass with a swarm of bees coming out of it and the quotation from Chapter 14 of the Book of Judges in the Bible 'Out of the Strong came forth Sweetness'. The story is that Samson, travelling in search of a wife, killed a lion, and on his return journey saw that a swarm of bees had settled in the carcass. What on earth that has to do with sugar syrup is a mystery, but it presumably took the fancy of the deeply religious Abram Lyle. This classic design has hardly changed since the Scottish businessman started putting golden syrup in tins in London in 1885.
Captain Scott took Lyle's Golden Syrup on his 1910 polar expedition.
Golden Syrup Tin from Scott's Expedition, c1910
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