Rusty Wheels Make Zip

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Mill

In the days of the self-sufficient farm, 'sweetnin'' usually didn't come from store-bought sugar. You had to rely on honey, maple sugar or sorghum molasses. Honeybees and bee trees were only for the dedicated few willing to mess with the sharp-tailed little critters. Maple sugar came only from places with lots of maple trees. That left, for most of us, molasses.

'Lasses. Zip. Long sweetnin'. In the Ozark mountains, molasses had many names and it always was referred to in the plural -as in 'making 'em' - despite the combined efforts of many a conscientious school teacher. I guess anything with that many sees in its name just had to be plural.

If you buy molasses at the supermarket, look for the word 'sorghum' on the label. Otherwise, you are getting 'blackstrap' molasses, also called New Orleans molasses, which is a by-product of refining cane sugar. Good for cooking but awful disappointing on a biscuit.

'Pure sorghum molasses' is expensive and if you ever make a batch, you'll know why. Sometimes you find some that has been cut or 'stretched' with corn syrup, and that is less expensive.

Before World War II, almost every Ozark community had a few families who made molasses. I say families because it took a lot of people to make a batch, and it was an awful lot of hard work.

Today, Rusty Wheels of North Arkansas, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is 'to preserve the sights, the sounds, the tools, the tractors, the machines, engines, cars, trains, crafts and antiques of yesteryear,' occasionally still makes molasses the old-time way. It's a team effort - a bunch of old boys going down a cane row, loading bundles or feeding cane stalks into the mill, cooking up the syrup and bottling it. More often, you'd find them overhauling an old engine or showing off their antique tools.

The history of sorghum traces to Africa, the plant's native home. Over the years, different types and countless varieties developed. Grain sorghum, raised for the seed, is the most common form.

'Sugar cane' is the plant from which molasses is made, and the bottom line is that if you want to raise cane for syrup, shop around and get a good variety intended for that purpose. Seed is often hard to find and if you're going to do all that work, you want a productive, user-friendly variety.

Next, you'll need the tools, and you'd better start with a plow. That's where the business begins in raising cane. Planting and taking care of the crop is very much like raising corn, and the same tools will work.

Old timers opened a furrow with a mule and a plow, dropped the seed by hand and covered it with their foot or a hoe. You can do that too, if you want, but it's a lot more fun and productive to use a corn planter and a tractor. Then you cultivate, fertilize and maybe irrigate, just as you would for corn. Sorghum stands dry weather better than corn, but it appreciates a little water now and then, too.