Today, those who grow sorghum grow it in much the same way as their families did before the turn of the century. In early April, the ground is plowed and readied for planting the patch. Noel Moore claims that the soil the cane is planted in makes a big difference in the final product: gray soil for light, thin syrup; and red clay for thick, clear syrup. The seeds, which were saved from the crop the year before, are planted sometime between the middle of May and the first of July (often when the moon is in its growing phase, according to Noel Moore) so that it will be ready for harvest in mid-September—after the corn and before the first frost. It is planted in hills approximately a foot apart and with seven to twelve seeds per hill.
ILLUSTRATION 24 A horse-operated sorghum mill in the reconstructed pioneer settlement at the Cherokee, North Carolina, entrance to the Smokies.
ILLUSTRATION 25
When the stalks are up, the farmer cultivates the rows and thins the number of stalks per hill to five to prevent the cane from growing too tall and thin, thus making the juice watery for lack of enough sun.
All through the summer months, the cane grows. It is ready to be harvested when the seeds turn red and hard. Hopefully, this will be before the first frost, for even though the frost won’t necessarily destroy the crop, cold weather makes the plant turn tough and the leaves become harder to strip off. If wind, rain, or other bad weather knocks the stalks down before harvesting, some farmers just give the crop up and plow it under. Others, like Burnett Brooks, try to use it anyway.
At harvest time, the family goes through the field stripping off the stalks’ leaves and cutting off the heads (the large red seed pods at the tops of the stalks). The leaves can be mixed with the cornstalks and used as silage. Some of the heads are saved for next year’s seed, and the rest are fed to the chickens or put out for the birds.
This job done, the farmer cuts the stripped cane stalks off at the base, using a sharp hoe or mowing blade, and stacks them in piles to be picked up immediately by horse and wagon, or tractor and wagon. The stalks are rarely left for long after they’ve been cut, as they will dry out in a matter of a very few days. Also, the cut ends can start to rot, souring the juice and ruining it. The stalks are taken to the mill as quickly as possible for crushing.
This fall, we were lucky enough to find one family producing sorghum for themselves in the most traditional way of all. Tim DeBord and Shanon Jackson drove up with Margie to cover it.
After a short winding drive up a narrow, black-top road, we found the Brooks family hard at work making sorghum syrup. As we stepped out of the Blazer, we were greeted by a bunch of people—mostly kids.
They had saved a dozen or so stalks of cane and left Roxy, the nine year old horse, hitched up just to show us how the process of grinding the sorghum cane is done. The grinding had started at five that morning when one of their relatives, Lowell Buchanan, got up, hitched up the horse, and sat down in the dark to grind cane. Some people would think that’s a lot to ask but this man was not asked; he volunteered.
ILLUSTRATION 26 The cane is stripped and the tops removed. It is now ready to be ground by the mill.
ILLUSTRATION 27 Some of the sorghum seed tops are saved to start for the following year’s crop.
When we asked about another type of furnace, this same man loaded two of us in his jeep and took us several miles up the road just to show us one. On the way, he told us some good hunting stories.
Mr. Burnett Brooks was the owner of the furnace and boiler-box he built in 1969. When people stopped by to see how it was going, Mr. Brooks was always there to say hello, and found time to talk about groundhog hunting or bear season. People were just dropping in constantly. One man came by and skimmed the boiling juice for an hour and then left. He was “just a friend.” Another friend, Robert Sutton, came by and stayed all day—just helping out.
Mr. Brooks made small paddle-spoons to scrape down the sorghum from the bottom of the boiler. These were about eight inches long and made of wood. They were given to the children when the sorghum was finished, and were good for getting a sample of sorghum. We found the kids getting ahead of the rest of us—they would slip their spoons into the sorghum while it was still boiling hot. They thought it was good—hot or not. And Mr. Brooks had just as much fun as the kids did.
As the morning passed, the amount of boiling juice in the box diminished. We were invited to lunch at a table loaded with food—green beans, chicken, corn relish, creamed corn, pickles, potatoes, fresh garden tomatoes, light bread, and sweet milk. We were given plates and filed by the table filling them with a taste of everything—then headed for the back porch shade. We all sat on the cracked edge of the cool, moist back porch. As one of us was about to take a big bite of crisp chicken, Mr. Brooks said, “Yeah, I pinched the head off that ol’ rooster this morning.”
We changed the subject and got him to talk about sorghum. He explained the whole process to us.
When the cane is harvested, the mill is oiled and the wood gathered to make ready for the cane-grinding. The Brooks have two wooden barrels, one thirty-gallon and one fifty-five-gallon, to be used for collection of the cane juice. A few days before the grinding, the barrels are filled with water so that the staves will swell making the barrels water-tight. Poplar and oak wood are used for the fire under the boiler. By the time the juice is prepared and added to the boiler, the fire has burned down to a bed of coals. Then more wood is added to bring the temperature of the boiler up, or the fire is doused with water to cool the boiler when the juice is boiling too vigorously.
Mr. Brooks has a three-roller mill. One of the rollers is stationary, the second is set at one-eighth inch, and the third at one-sixteenth inch from the stationary roller (Illustration 28). As the horse turns the mill, the sorghum is fed into one side of the mill. The bright green juice drops into a trough and down to a burlap-covered barrel. It is then taken to the boiler where it is poured through several layers of cheesecloth into the boiler. The boiler is filled to within two inches of the top for each batch. No more juice is added after that until that batch is completely cooked down and poured into containers for storage.
ILLUSTRATION 28 Mr. Brooks’s mill has three rollers (one is concealed in this photo).
When the juice begins to boil, a dark foam forms on the top. A handmade tool called a skimmer is then used. The skimmer is an eight-and-one-half-inch-square piece of metal attached to a broom handle. It is perforated so that the juice will run out and leave the foam on the skimmer. The skimmings are discarded into a hole nearby and later the hole covered with dirt. Usually the dogs get to the skimmings before they are covered and really enjoy this treat. We have been told that the skimmings were used at one time to help sweeten moonshine.
The juice has to boil for three to four hours. It is kept at a rolling boil by controlling the heat of the fire as mentioned. The boiler-box holds about eighty gallons. From this eighty gallons of juice come eight to ten gallons of syrup. The juice turns from bright green to a rich caramel color as it is cooked and thickens. When the syrup has cooked long enough, the boiler is lifted from the firebox and placed onto two logs, so that one end of the boiler can be tilted up and the syrup scraped to the other end with a long wooden paddle, about two feet long and flat on one end, made by Mr. Brooks. It is then dipped out of the trough with a small boiler (or saucepan) and poured through several layers of cheesecloth into five-gallon lard cans. After it cools, it is stored in smaller containers—quart jars or gallon cans.
After all the sorghum is finished, and all the syrup cooked and poured into containers, the boiler-box is washed thoroughly and mutton tallow is spread on it to keep it from rusting. After the tallow hardens, the boiler is stored upside down in a shed or barn. The barrels are washed and dried and stored away. The boom pole, which is attached to the mill, and the lead pole, which is attached to the boom pole, are taken down and stored until next year. The mill is covered with a tarpaulin and left for the kids to play on.
ILLUSTRATION 29 As th
e horse turns the mill (top), cane is fed through it, several stalks at a time (bottom).
ILLUSTRATION 30 The mill pulverizes the cane, leaving it dry and flaky on the inside. The pulpy ground cane will be spread on fields as mulch. The extracted juice runs into a burlap-covered barrel.
ILLUSTRATION 31 The burlap bag spread over the barrel serves as a strainer. This is the first of three strainings during the entire sorghum-making process.
ILLUSTRATION 32 The furnace is prepared for lighting (top). More wood is added to the furnace (bottom).
ILLUSTRATION 33 The juice is poured through a cloth (strainer) into the trough, or boile-box (top), until it is filled to within two inches of the top (bottom).
ILLUSTRATION 34 The juice is brought to a boil. Some evaporators are slightly different than the Brooks’s (top). Another example is shown as a diagram; numbers 1 through 6 indicate the sequence of the flow of the juice, number 7 refers to the boiler (bottom).
ILLUSTRATION 35 Robert Sutton skims the foam off the boiling juice.
Some evaporators are slightly different from the Brooks’s. One variety is shown in Illustration 34. The syrup enters from the storage barrel at (1) through a valve that allows the operator to admit it at a controlled rate. The evaporator is tilted slightly (the exit end is about ⅜ of an inch higher than the entrance end) and gates in the bars which divide it into sections allow the syrup to pass from one compartment into another. The arrows show the direction of flow of the boiling syrup which is slowly forced to the higher end by the pressure of the incoming syrup and the heat.
The cane juice is heated to the boiling point in the first two compartments (2) and (3). In the third compartment, the impurities left in the juice are forced to the surface where they are skimmed off by a man with a wooden strainer-paddle that has a long wooden handle.
In the fourth compartment (5) the juice is brought to the proper thickness for syrup. A cut-off gate at the entrance to this compartment allows the operator to admit the juice at a controlled rate. The syrup is ready to be drawn off (6) when the bubbles that rise from the bottom are about two inches in diameter and burst in the middle. If the bubbles are tiny, the syrup is still not ready to be released.
Ready syrup is drained off at (6). It proceeds down a trough, through another strainer, and then into the clay jugs that were used to store it for use during the winter.
Often the skimmings would be saved, boiled separately, and then worked into candy at a “candy pulling” which was one of the social events most looked forward to in the fall. “The candy,” said Bill Lamb, “tasted pretty well, but mostly people came for the fun of it.”
ILLUSTRATION 36 Mrs. Brooks holds the skimmer. Note the holes in its bottom—juice runs through them but foam doesn’t.
ILLUSTRATION 37 The boiler-box is removed from the furnace.
ILLUSTRATION 38 The sorghum is scraped down to one end of the boiler-box (left) and is then dipped out of the boiler-box with a small saucepan (right).
ILLUSTRATION 39 Finally, the sorghum is poured through several layers of cheesecloth into five-gallon cans (the Brooks use empty lard cans), where it cools before being stored in smaller containers.
Pickling and Preserving: The Foxfire Americana Library (3) Page 5
