Home Grown Molasses

On his last visit to Memphis my father in law brought me a quart of real sorghum molasses.  Not the fake kind you buy in the stores in little jars that contain additives and other garbage, but the real kind.  The kind that is pure sorghum juice cooked down into a rich syrup over an open fire in large molasses pans, stirred constantly by Mennonite farmers, who take great pride in what they produce.
And I remembered growing up down on the farm in Mississippi and how the back of our kitchen used to look when it was almost piled to the ceiling with  metal buckets filled to the brim with that rich, slow running sweetness.
Daddy didn't plant sorghum cane every year, but when he did it was a major job to get it cut and taken to the sorghum mill to be processed.  We had to take long sticks and go down the rows and knock off all the leaves, and then someone would come behind and cut the long cane poles. Occasionally we would break off a part of the stalk, we called it a joint, and chew it to taste the sweet juice on our tongues.  The cane would then be stacked and piled into the back of the pick up truck for the journey to the mill.  I remember when I was about six or seven years old there was a farmer who had a processing mill he would bring to your house and cook your sorghum for you for part of the yield.  I'm not sure how much he got but I think it might have been a third.  One year his workers brought the sorghum press and the long pans for cooking and set them up in a field to the side of the house we called the strawberry patch.  It was named that because once it had been planted in strawberries.  The press was interesting, too.  It was a huge grinding apparatus that had a long pole extending from it to which you hooked a mule.  The mule would make endless circles around the press and then the juice from the sorghum would flow freely into long, narrow pans, under which a slow burning fire was keep going.  Someone with long paddles would walk the length of the pans and stir the bubbling mixture constantly to keep it from burning.  It as a long drawn out process that took all day, the best I can remember.  And it required great skill because you had to regulate the temperature, not to hot or too cold, you had to judge when they had cooked down enough, and you had to be diligent to prevent the molasses from getting too thick or from tasting burnt.  If you didn't do it just right, you could ruin a whole year's crop.
That particular year we had the mill at the house, I remember buckets and buckets of the rich syrup being stacked in the back of our kitchen.  One morning at breakfast we had Mama's homemade biscuits and our new molasses.  I was anxious to get some on my plate and my Daddy told me to just take a little and see if I liked it
"Oh, I know I like it, I chirped. "Give me another big spoon full."
I totally ignored his warning and Mama heaped two big serving spoons of molasses on my plate.  I had under estimated the fact a little molasses goes a long way.  After one bite I had enough and started to leave the table.   He made me come back and eat the rest of what I had on my plate.  Tears and begging did no good.  They fell on totally unsympathetic ears.  I sat and cried and gagged and finally got the rest of it down.  And then I learned a valuable lesson.  Never bite off more than you can chew.  It was years before I wanted any more sorghum molasses.
Real molasses is something a great many people will never taste.  They think they know, but in effect they only have a facsimile.  They will never experience going to the breakfast table on a cold winter morning and having hot biscuits right out of the oven and having to wait what seemed like an eternity for your home made molasses to finally drop from your spoon to your plate.
Molasses do grow sweeter in Mississippi.  Some people say it's the soil in Tishomingo County and I think they are probably right.  They taste like none I've ever tasted.  I've wondered if it's just my memory or were they really that sweet.  Sometimes I think it probably is a little bit of both.
Just another memory of my Mississippi childhood.  Sweet, sticky syrup.   Home grown.  Like no other.