It’s Sorghum Making Time 1990

As is usual at this time of year we visited the sorghum mill last week to get a year’s supply of the delicious stuff.  John can’t make it without Sand Mountain sorghum (and hot biscuits) – or so he thinks.  The syrup is dark in color, strong tasting and somewhat sharp.  I’ve heard people say you have to develop a taste for it, but since we grew up eating it. . . .

A long time ago (isn’t this the way all my articles start?) the juice was squeezed from the cane stalk by a mechanism powered by a mule walking round and round.  Today this is done with a tractor motor.  All my life I thought the spent cane stalks were called “plummings”; however, in recent years I’m told the word is “pummies”.  It may well be that, but my old Webster’s does not carry such a word.

We go up the mountain to get our sorghum and would you believe my Georgia friends do not understand “going up the mountain”.  They visualize us climbing up a steep mountain when we mean we’re driving north on this plateau called “Sand Mountain.”  Anyway the mill itself has a ground floor and the walls are screen wire from half way up to the roof.  The juice is transferred to the cooker via an underground pipe.  It’s cooked in a long pan maybe twenty feet long, divided into sections and fired by butane gas.  In years gone by it was fired with wood (and I do believe that kind tasted better than the kind fired with butane).

Cane juice cooks

Each section of the pan has a little slot in it so the juice can slowly move on along and become the finished product.  Cooking is a long process and it takes some training to know just when the sorghum is ready to put in containers.  To move the juice along they use a rake of a sort – the small rake does not have prongs, but is solid so the juice can be raked along.  When it’s ready to take off the fire, it’s thick and darker in color.  At the finish point there is a faucet that is opened allowing the syrup to fill the containers.  Today they use quart jars; however, in years past we got our syrup in gallon buckets with bails (for totin’).  Another difference in the syrup of day is the price.  When we bought it in gallon buckets we could get a gallon for fifty cents.  Today its $12 a quart, but we enjoy expensive food.

Sorghum to containers

I remember cakes made with sorghum, which my mother called “sponge cakes.”   She baked them on the hearth with hot coals and in a cast iron skillet with legs and lid.  I meant to share her recipe with you and would you believe I can’t find it.  Ugh!!  Now I’ll have something to search for.  I remember putting it somewhere “so it wouldn’t get lost.”  Yeah!!  That happens at this house too often, but it’s how it is with country living.

Cane being squeezed