| A Word Edgewise
by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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MOLASSES, A STICKY SUBJECT
How many gallons of molasses have you eaten in your lifetime? If you are of Depression Vintage, chances are you could count it by the gallons, or at least half gallons. That's the way it came, in buckets.
When I put molasses on my shopping list last week, I didn't have to put size or kind. Now, it comes in jars, quarts at the biggest, and no use being picky about the taste.
Talking about molasses almost requires a different vocabulary. I remember a dear uncle saying, as he poured a big dollop of thick syrup in his plate and cut the stream with a knife to keep from running down the side of the pitcher, "Them's sure fine molasses," as he turned his hot buttered biscuit, butter side down, in the sweet, sticky pool--with a glass of buttermilk to drink on the side. I reckon victuals such as sorghum molasses was like eating high on the hog.
I guess that thick cane syrup was one of our chief sources of vitamins and iron. I remember dad getting blackstrap syrup. (He said blackstrop.) According to my references, that is the third and final run, a very dark, almost medicinal tasting molasses commonly used in folk medicine to make spring tonics.
Ray can remembering dashing home from school, getting a cold biscuit, sticking his finger in it and filling the hole with molasses--and dashing outside before it dripped on his mother's clean floor. To eat at meal time, he mixed the butter in a plate of syrup to make "gray horse"--a name made up by his papa Seymour Clendenin, for some unknown reason.
I have two friends, Rachel Lange and Atha Dedmon who remember helping in the process of making molasses. Both of them remember stripping the leaves from the sugar cane in the field, and then cutting and stacking for someone to pick up in a wagon and take to the mill.
Rachel said that in their community a neighbor had the makings, and families took turns there, processing their sugar cane. They put helpings of cane in a press where mules were hitched to a turntable to go round and round to press the juice from the cane. It flowed to a vat for the cooking process. In spite of the hard sticky work, "It sure did taste good with hot biscuits and butter on cold mornings," Rachel said.
The process for her father was a little different for Atha. After the stripping and hawling, they fed about three canes at a time, big end first, into a rolling press. The press power was furnished by a very patient old mule. "Horses were not patient enough. I felt sorry for that old mule," said Atha.
The juice went directly into the first of three partitions of a vat where the cooking began. When the level of juice got a certain height in that partition, it was let into a second where cooking continued, and on to a third. The syrup grew thicker and thicker until after the third stage it was run into buckets and the lids pressed on.
Atha's really sticky part of the job came when she had to carry the pummis off, the canes after they had been squeezed. No way to do it except to hug them up to her. She was sticky from head to toe. She said, "Molasses pies are wonderful." Her mother used to make molasses taffy and let them help pull it.
Living out in the country, when we got hungry for candy, we had to make it ourselves. About five or six of us would find a mother, willing to risk her kitchen, and gather there, maybe one night a week, and make candy. Joe Hugh Smith, Estelle Dawson, Lorene Lucke, J Ed Fitzgerald, and I were the regulars with others occasionally. Sometimes we made molasses taffy, usually chocolate fudge, maybe divinity. Some would shell pecans, others would cook--but all of us had to make sure the kitchen was left clean.
Molasses Taffy
2 cups ribbon cane syrup, or molasses
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon soda.
Cook syrup in heavy skillet. Let come to a boil, then turn the heat down to moderate. Let boil 18 to 20 minutes. Candy is done when a drop in cold water makes a hard ball. (Candy thermometer, we didn't have one, 260 to 270 degrees. Add vanilla and soda. Spoon out on buttered platter or pan, and let cool a little. Butter your fingers. Take about 1/4 of mixture in both hands and pull, fold back, pull, fold back, until cream-colored and begins to harden. Form in rope, wind around in pan and cool.
Two of my favorite cookie recipes call for molasses, but we don't eat much with biscuits and butter for breakfast any more. I don't know why--except butter in some households is a dirty word--would be good with the other spread, too.
Before the days of refrigeration, instant food, and supermarkets, good food did exist. Don't know how we would have made it through the winters without molasses, oatmeal, sow belly, bread and gravy, but most of us were quite well nourished.