by Holly Hughes
After returning from Brazil, Maybank tracked down a few folks in Reevesville, South Carolina, who made syrup the old-fashioned way, growing their own cane and cooking it down once a year, usually around Thanksgiving. They gave him some pointers and got him started. For him, it wasn’t about nostalgia but about taste.
“I actually just like to put it right on my grits,” he said, almost sheepishly, as if he were giving away a state secret.
Another senior syrup consultant, Stewart Walker, who occasionally contributed a blue joke to the fire, said, “Putting it on biscuits is heaven.” Hagood looked up from the kettle and said, “Well, Stewart, that’s as close to heaven as you’re ever gonna be.” (And the squirrels were gone.) Afterward, another senior consultant leaned in confidentially: “I cannot stand the stuff.” Maybank later told me that one of his best friends, Rufus Barkley, who was the leading force behind the Reevesville expeditions and getting the entire annual operation going, declared cane syrup on par with a really fine “axle grease.” So opinion is divided.
Cane “syrup” is another term (like “kettle”) that sets the mind off in the wrong direction. We think of maple syrup and that sticky texture and candied density. But cane syrup is naturally thinner and only mildly sweet. It doesn’t share with either maple syrup or Dixie crystals that tooth-aching bolt of super-refined sugar. The five-pound bag one buys in a store involves a series of processes required to extract and condense the sweet into those intense granules. But cane sugar syrup, the first boiling of cane juice, is where it all starts. “What molasses is,” Hagood said, “is the second cook. You cook it again to extract the sugar out, and that’s why molasses is not as sweet. And what blackstrap molasses is, is a third cook.”
The simplicity and naturalness of just boiling cane juice into syrup have begun to attract the folks promoting healthy foods. On various websites, you can already catch wind of a pro-syrup sentiment, noting that diabetics can allegedly consume cane syrup without a problem, while sugar crystals can set off diabetic shock. The century-old Steen’s syrup out of Louisiana has managed to still hold on, but so far, making cane hasn’t attracted a sizable artisanal crowd. There is no outlet to buy equipment, no Food Network series, no reality show (The Real Chefs of Lavington Plantation). Yet.
Not long ago, when an old but more powerful cane press came up for sale nearby, Maybank bought it even though it lacked one essential part: a mule. In the center of the gears was a pin that was to be attached via a long pole to a “sweep mule,” which would walk around in a slow circle to turn the gears. Instead, Maybank connected that part to a tractor motor, which has sped up the process considerably.
Once put to a boil in the kettle, the bubbling spume started to throw up the impurities that somehow made it through the T-shirt. “So we remove all that with skimmers,” said Hagood, who pulled a homemade sieve through the amber bubbles. It’s a tin bowl poked full of holes wired to a broomstick. Like everything else, the equipment is purely DIY because the Williams-Sonoma catalog doesn’t sell, say, three-hundred-dollar mahogany-handled syrup sieves.
“You can’t let the syrup get too hot,” Hagood explained, grabbing another homemade tool. He dipped in a five-gallon bucket—also poked full of holes and fastened to a broomstick—and then let the cooling juice rain back into the kettle. The juice was in a rolling boil, and just as boiling grits will foam up and spill over the stove, the juice can do the same.
“The reason you don’t want to cook it too hot,” Hagood said, pointing to the inside lip of the kettle, “is the juice can scorch right here where it meets the metal, and that later leaves a sediment in the syrup.” The chore for the afternoon was to keep the juice just at the boiling point before it foamed over. By late afternoon, the once-full kettle had dropped by two-thirds of its volume. Then that edge of the kettle, where the thickening syrup touches the air, started to change. Now the syrup lapping at the edge left smudges of light brown cream. Hagood snapped a small stick from some kindling and scraped some goo from the side.
“Don’t eat it yet,” he said. “It’s two hundred and twenty degrees. Let it cool.” A few minutes later, I was holding a Mary Jane–like candy hardened at the end of my stick.
The real trick to making cane syrup is figuring out just when it is approaching the perfect thickness. “In the old days,” Hagood said, “they would dip a pan into the syrup and watch how it dripped—looking for what they called scaling.” It’s an inexact science, best left to very experienced syrup cooks. A few years ago, Maybank decided to upgrade by buying a hydrometer. It looks like a jumbo thermometer, and it gauges specific gravity. “What it really measures,” Hagood said, “is viscosity.”
To test for that quality, we needed to pull out some syrup so that we could drop the hydrometer in. Its ability to float in the liquid gave us a number. In one test, it was thirty. “The magic number we want is thirty-two,” Hagood said. The container used last year had broken, so Maybank found an old but enormous campfire coffeepot, one that held more than a gallon, easy. “We practically have to empty the kettle to measure it,” Hagood said.
The crucial point arrived at the end of the day, and it happened fast. As the liquid boiled off faster and faster, we approached that special moment. A tension filled the air. From a nearby bench Maybank watched. “If you pull it off the fire too early, it’s too watery,” he said. “But if you pull it off too late, you end up with candy.”
“When it gets to thirty-two, we want to pull the fire,” Hagood said, “and then at thirty-four we transfer it from the kettle to that container and then let it cool down for jarring.” The trick is to get it off the heat just before, so that the hot syrup will continue to cook to precisely the right consistency. “I had this one guy here once,” said an anxious Ferguson, “and he knew everything. He watched us, and he never said a word—so I’m assuming we were doing it just right.” But he sounded less like a man reporting a truth than one trying to convince himself of it.
The consultants stood back as Hagood and Ferguson roamed the kettle’s edge, nervous. They dipped a pan into the syrup old-school and looked for scaling, called for another hydrometer measurement, tasted the edge of the syrup. They sampled another smear of Mary Jane candy. The two paced about like expectant fathers. The consultants crossed their arms in deep concern. Melville’s ghost reappeared. There was lots of talk: I’m not sure it’s ready. I’m pretty sure it’s ready. I’m not sure it’s ready.
At a certain point the anxiety in the air became overwhelming, and, suddenly, Ferguson cried out, “I’m calling it! Pull the fire!” His son kicked open the hearth door and began raking about a bushel of flaming heart pine out from under the pot. That’s the other thing. You cannot take a three-hundred-pound kettle off the fire, so you have to pull the roaring fire out from under the three-hundred-pound kettle.
The eight gallons in the kettle were quickly ladled out by bucket brigade and poured into a fresh cotton sheet stretched over a steel box, drizzling through like a tin-roof rain. At a far corner of the box was a spigot, and not long afterward, we had jarred thirty-two quarts of cane sugar syrup.
Maybank produced a plate with a few pieces of cornbread on it and poured hot syrup on top of the small squares. Everybody sampled, and even the most skeptical consultant saw that it was good. In fact, the batch was declared the best batch they’d ever cooked—a realization that, according to Hagood, miraculously got realized at the end of every batch.
The next day, Hagood and I met in his kitchen and decided to try the syrup in every possible configuration we could come up with. His mother-in-law had earlier made some peanut brittle from the syrup for us to sample. We cooked skewered shrimp brushed with syrup on a grill, and made a salad dressing from syrup. We improvised a bourbon cocktail we christened a Lowcountry Pomegranate Smash. We grilled some elk and some duck breast as well as pheasant and dove that Hagood had shot earlier.
The meal was extraordinary, and it underscored what has been lost in the four-century-long race tow
ard sweeter and sweeter sugars. I’m not knocking sugar crystals. But the more-is-better pursuit of sweetness has driven us to forget the virtues of the milder sugars back down the sweetness scale. I especially found this with the meat and the booze.
Our Pomegranate Smash was fairly tasty, but that was probably because Hagood made it with Pappy Van Winkle. Later I tried the syrup in several variations of julep. All my life, a julep was made with a simple syrup derived from boiling sugar crystals in water. My guess is that somewhere in the past, the original addition was cane syrup. A julep made this way is not as sugary, but it complements the natural smoky sweetness of a good bourbon—and is a drink with numerous, layered flavors. I’ll plant my flag here: The modern julep—made with lots of granulated sugar—is, frankly, a grown-up’s substitute for a college kid’s bourbon and Coke. I still have to work on the color because cane syrup can be dark or light, depending on the batch, and so sometimes the resulting julep looks muddy. Maybe the answer is to stick to the old-timers’ insistence that all juleps be served in cotton-napkin-cossetted silver goblets or not at all.
The other lost flavor was found in the meats. Brushed on, the syrup nicely enhanced the sweeter meats, especially the fowl. Modern efforts to work with the natural sweetness of some meats typically involve dry rubs with brown sugar added. (Brown sugar, by the way, is white granulated sugar cooked in molasses.) I experimented with a number of approaches.
I slathered a beef tenderloin in cane syrup and improvised a rub made out of fine-ground espresso beans, chile powder, paprika, dry mustard, salt, pepper, ground ginger, and garlic powder. Normally, these dry rubs include a hefty shot of brown sugar. I skipped that part because I had coated the meat in syrup. I heated up an empty cast-iron skillet until it was smoking hot and seared the tenderloin. I moved it to my grill, where a really hot charcoal fire was already glowing. I threw a handful of pecan shells on there every few minutes, creating a dense pecan fog. After a few minutes on each side, in direct heat and full smoke, I pulled the tenderloin off when the internal temperature hit 125 degrees—super rare.
The thing about the syrup is that it held the rub onto the meat so that a hairline crust had formed, redolent of coffee and spices combined with a distant hint of sweet and very prominent pecan smoke. The folks who ate this went berserk.
Two days after that first batch at Lavington, we reconvened in the woods to make a second. This one would be different because it would include some sour cane.
“If you cut the cane after the first frost,” Ferguson said, “then the cane is a bit sour.” He offered a jar of the juice alongside some pre-frost juice, and the difference was remarkable. But once it started cooking and by the end of the day, I’m not sure I could tell the difference.
One of the consultants, Charlie Ratliff, decided to solve the hassle of pouring gallons of liquid into a coffeepot every time we wanted to use the hydrometer. In the intervening forty-eight hours, he had manufactured a perfect aluminum viscosity ladle. It’s a long metal pole ending in a metal cylinder about two inches in diameter—just big enough to let the hydrometer bob without requiring a lot of liquid.
I was sitting on the bench when Hagood and Ferguson were trying to remember another tiny detail of the cooking procedure and, what the hell, they just decided to wing it. “That’s part of the fun of cooking cane syrup,” Maybank said. “You can never quite remember all the things you learned the last time you made it.”
Someone’s in the Kitchen
THE LEADING LIGHT OF PASTRY
By Alex Halberstadt
From Food & Wine
Let the West Coast have its $4 toast; in New York City, 2014 was the year of the Cronut™, and who better to wax eloquent about it than music writer Alex Halberstadt (check out his bio of the great songwriter Doc Pomus), a savvy judge of pop trends—or at any rate, a man with a sweet tooth.
The next time you read about Dominique Ansel, the pastry chef of the moment, don’t envy him. During the several days we spent together, I began to think of him as a kind of confectionary Van Gogh—a pioneering artist molested by a capricious destiny. Over the course of our brief acquaintance, Ansel taught me about the quickening power of the Internet, perseverance and the passive-aggressive behavior of the first couple of France.
I first scoped out the Cronut™ frenzy in front of Ansel’s eponymous Soho, New York, bakery on an early morning in October. At 6:45 it was still murky, but the line had wound its way along the chain-link fence of the Vesuvio Playground and around the corner, onto Thompson Street. Among the youngish, drowsy Cronut™ hopefuls, the savvy had brought friends, and lounged in folding chairs or on discreetly placed cardboard; others stood, drawn up in the chill, their downturned faces lit by the bluish glare of smart-phones. The reason for the commotion was, of course, Ansel’s croissant-doughnut hybrid—laminated, glazed, heightened to beehive-hairdo proportions, fried in grapeseed oil and injected with a filling of the month, like Tahitian vanilla cream and caramelized apple.
Ansel chose pastry making because he’s always enjoyed the scientific rigor of the craft, and emulsifying custards and laminating paper-thin doughs afforded him opportunities to calculate and measure. He’s worked at Fauchon, the Fabergé of sweets on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris, and for six years was the executive pastry chef at the restaurant Daniel. Ansel—who is 36 but looks 28, with milk-chocolate eyes and a forehead of professorial elevation—sleeps barely five hours a night and is happiest tracing precise vectors with a bag of ginger-infused crème anglaise. He is soft-spoken and mild and organically averse to notoriety. Which is why there exists considerable irony in Ansel becoming the custodian of the world’s most viral dessert, a situation that has forced him to hire Johann, a security guard shaped like a Coke machine, to discourage line-cutting, peddling and scalping outside the shop. The Cronut™ has impelled him to submit to thousands of personal questions, and to be photographed surreptitiously on the premises of Manhattan dry cleaners, and to be told by glucose-addled strangers, on an almost hourly basis, that he has changed their life. You have to feel for the guy. It’s as though Henrik Ibsen had written Fifty Shades of Grey.
The Cronut™ cult, like Presbyterianism, has spread rapidly across the land. For Ansel, who grew up poor in France, counting coins on the floor of his apartment, the culmination of his unbidden fame was a recent visit from Valérie Trierweiler, the soignée girlfriend of France’s president François Hollande, who swept into the bakery with a detail of bodyguards and consular workers. She wanted to meet the chef she’d been hearing so much about in Paris. She handed Ansel her phone. “It’s the President,” she said. On the other end, Hollande told the dumbstruck Ansel how proud France was of his accomplishments. Trierweiler also expressed pride because “the Cronut™ is French.” Ansel began to say that his invention was as much American as French, but she interrupted. “It’s French because you’re French,” she said, bringing their confab to a close.
At this juncture, I’d like to address a possibly distracting typographical issue about Ansel’s best-known creation. He introduced the Cronut™ on May 10, 2013, and nine days later, on the advice of his attorney, filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO has since received 12 applications—from parties other than Ansel—attempting to trademark the indelible name, and his attorney has been busy mailing cease-and-desist letters to supermarket chains, industrial bakers and other entities that have attempted to bask, extralegally, in the croissant-doughnut bonanza. In any case, the spelling of Cronut™ is no longer a lexical whim but a matter of international law, enforced in more than 30 countries under the Madrid Protocol by the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva.
Little about Ansel’s biography foretold his present eminence. He grew up an unlovely hour north of Paris, in Beauvais; with its hives of public housing and teenage gangs, it’s almost certainly the single most blighted city in France. Three siblings, his parents, grandmother and a cousin shared two rooms with him in the local pr
ojects. Ansel let on that his mother wasn’t the thriftiest with the family budget, and by month’s end, he would sometimes dine on stale bread soaked in milk and heated in the oven. At his first job—the 16-year-old Ansel washed dishes and swept floors at a family restaurant—a sous-chef heated a metal spatula over the gas range and used it to brand Ansel’s forearm. The only cooking classes he could afford were offered by the city and entailed preparing food in the kitchen of a nursing home. His ticket out of Beauvais was the mandatory draft—he enlisted a year before it was abolished—and he spent a year at the Republic’s least popular military outpost, in the humid rainforest of French Guiana. He said his quick way with the regional dialect and a job in the kitchen were all that averted the death threats that greeted him at the army base; nearly every enlisted man was a local of African descent, and some weren’t too keen on their colonial masters. “But when you work with people’s food,” Ansel added, “they generally don’t mess with you.”
Back home, he traded his savings for an elderly Renault coupe and drove to Paris, where he knew no one. He worked his way up from a neighborhood bakery to a holiday-help stint at Fauchon; only one of the 32 seasonal workers would be offered a permanent job, and Ansel won it. He went on to hold nearly every position at the Parisian institution, eventually opening new shops abroad when the company decided to expand. In Moscow, he single-handedly trained a group of novice bakers to make some of the world’s most filigreed pastry—speaking Russian. His interpreter disappeared on the second day, so Ansel bought a dictionary. One morning, he noticed several young cooks in his kitchen wearing particularly vivid makeup; they said they had applied it the previous night, before heading to their other jobs as strippers.
