Sorghum Molasses

“This nippy Fall weather reminds me of the good old days when times were hard. When I was growing up folks didn’t have a sorghum cooking apparatus, but one traveled around and would set up at one farm or another..You hauled your sorghum  to the Mill.I suppose the farms owner got a small portion of the sorghum…and probably got to run his through first. Wood supplied the heat but I don’t know who supplied that.

We grew the sorghum like corn, and in the fall cut it down after the men had gone through each row and knocked off all the leaves with a sort of wooden sword. . Then they went back through and cut it all down with a blade on a long handle..Then it was piled up at the side. I can remember cutting off sorghum heads when I was real little..maybe 7 years old. It was SO cold I was crying…remember cutting nicks out of my knees with the big Butcher knife Daddy made from a saw blade.

The sorghum was loaded onto a wagon ..all straight and nice, and hauled away. We took some of the seed heads to the house to feed the chickens, but I don’t remember Daddy saving all the heads for winter. A mule pulled the long handle{sweep }  that was attached to the crusher, and an elderly man sat up under that long sweep and fed the cane into the crusher. The juice came out one side and crushed stalks came out the other..Bagasse, I think they call it. The juice is poured into a big flat pan that has a fir burning under it. Men stir the syrup as it cooks till it get thick. Once Daddy was helping a neighbor make up sorghum and he brought home a quart jar of the golden foam that they had skimmed off.

That pan they cook the syrup in has always fascinated me. They keep on adding fresh syrup to it on one end , and it is stirred, stirred , stirred! The heat from the fires burning under it and the men’s paddles causes the liquid to thicken and is moved from one end of the ‘pan’ to another. It is then  drained out into glass jugs or jars and sold or used in the  home kitchen as ‘ Long sweetnin’..

On cold winter mornings the delicious thick syrup flowed slowwwllllyyy over the rim of the syrup jar ..It had beautiful amber bubbles in it and they would stretch out like a rubber balloon.  Folks said kids were as slow as Sorghum molasses… Sure tasted good when we mixed molasses and butter on our plate, and sopped it up with one of Mama’s big flaky biscuits”……Jeannie T.