April 1, 2008
Syrup-makers Seek To Preserve A Sweet Tradition
By Leslie Kimel
Willard Smith, founder of the Southern Syrupmakers Association, shows off a patch of sugarcane at the Panhandle Pioneer Settlement in Blountstown. Each November the settlement hosts a traditional sugarcane grinding and syrup boil that is open to the public.
It takes a while to make pure sugarcane syrup. Boiling a batch requires the better part of a day, but that’s just a small part of the process. Waiting for the sugarcane to ripen takes at least nine months.
“Making syrup sounds complicated, but it’s not really,” said syrup-maker Richard Harrison of Altha, Florida. “Mainly it’s just time-consuming. And that’s the reason people stopped doing it.”
Syrup-making usually starts early on a frosty morning in the late fall or early winter, with freshly harvested sugarcane being fed stalk by stalk through a mill. Maybe the mill is powered by a mule or a horse, or maybe it’s powered by a tractor—or even a lawnmower these days. The mill crushes the cane and squeezes out the juice, which is gray-green and cloudy and lightly sweet. The juice is poured into a giant iron kettle and cooked over a fire for hours. All that time it has to be tended. Leaves, dirt, and other impurities have to be skimmed out. You can’t let it burn. As the juice boils down and becomes syrup, it changes texture and color, turning bubbly and thick, a rich dark gold. The kettle steams, and a subtle scent of caramel hangs in the air. In the end the hot, finished syrup is poured through a bed sheet or some other clean cloth to filter it one last time. Then it’s poured into individual bottles or jars, which are usually given away to family and friends.
These sweet gifts are cherished—because pure cane syrup is tough to find in stores.
“Syrup-making is something that as a commercial enterprise has practically disappeared,” Harrison said. “And as a cultural way of life it’s almost disappeared. A lot of people today have forgotten about it or they never knew about it, but we feel it’s a tradition that’s worth carrying on.”
When Harrison says “we,” he’s talking about the Southern Syrupmakers Association, a non-profit group working to ensure that the slow, painstaking art of syrup-making survives the fast-food age. Harrison is vice president of the Blountstown-based organization, which was founded in 2005 and includes syrup-makers from Maryland to Texas.
Willard Smith of Blountstown is the group’s founder. “I knew there were a lot of syrup-makers around,” Smith said. “But each one of them sort of stuck to himself. I wanted to bring everybody together so we could learn from each other and not have to reinvent the wheel.”
Harrison added, “We believe it’s important to teach the younger generation how to make syrup, and how to make it properly, the best we know how. We don’t want to lose what we’ve learned over the years.”
The Southern Syrupmakers Association promotes traditional syrup-making with public syrup-making demonstrations, and cane syrup tastings at county extension offices throughout the Florida Panhandle. The organization puts out a quarterly newsletter and an email newsletter to keep members in the know about upcoming events and activities. It also helps members buy, sell, and trade traditional syrup-making equipment—cast-iron kettles, horse-drawn cane mills, motor-powered cane mills, bottles, jars, and more. It encourages interested people to take up syrup-making and pass it on.
“Most people don’t even know what the taste of pure cane syrup is anymore these days,” Harrison said.
Yet before the end of World War II, it was one of the rural South’s defining flavors. Cash-poor farmers often couldn’t afford store-bought white sugar, but they could make their own syrup. A syrup-drenched biscuit at breakfast was cheap and filling and provided the necessary energy for a morning of hard work in the fields.
“Used to be syrup was a staple,” Smith said. “There was a syrup pitcher or jar or bottle on the table at every meal, and folks would eat it on just about everything because it was about the only sweetener they had.”
It’s an acquired taste, Smith admits. “Unless you grew up on it, most people say it’s too strong.”
That’s because we’ve gotten accustomed to the syrups we find at the grocery store—mild commercial blends containing mostly corn syrup. Well, pure cane syrup is much sweeter than corn syrup. It’s more complex, more flavorful, darker and richer, “buttery” and “earthy” (people say), with just a little hint of bitterness to balance out the sweetness.
“Corn syrup is just kind of blah,” Harrison explained. “But cane syrup has flavor.”
Cane syrup has all kinds of uses. Most famously, it is sopped up with hot fresh biscuits, but it can also be drizzled on pancakes, waffles, and cornbread, added to baked beans, and used to make glazes for meats. It’s a key ingredient in traditional pecan pies and popcorn balls.
The taste is strong and nostalgic, but as beguiling as it is, it isn’t the reason—not the real reason—people go through the trouble of making syrup. No, they do it because syrup-making is a ritual, and like all good rituals, it puts them in touch with something larger than themselves—the rhythm of the seasons, the flow of time, the people that came before them, and the people that surround them now.
“Syrup-making brings a group of people together,” Smith said. “And it brings back memories. Maybe you only heard your parents or your grandparents talk about it. Well, then you do it and it’s just a way of experiencing life as they knew it.”
Syrup-making is a social event. There are cooks and helpers and observers. People stand around chewing sugarcane and swapping stories, watching the syrup boil, telling jokes, and offering advice. Covered dishes accumulate in the kitchen. Dogs run around, and children play, making themselves sick on sugarcane juice and “polecat”—the delicious nougat-like stuff that sticks to the kettle rim after the syrup is poured out.
“In the old days your neighbors would come over to help you make syrup,” Smith said. “Usually somebody in the farming community had a complete mill and a furnace and you’d take turns and help each other make syrup, because it’s more than a one-man job. It gave you an opportunity to socialize. And that’s what everyone’s back into it for now. It’s just a good outing and a chance to get together with other people who enjoy it.”
Syrup-making is about fellowship and community-building. But most important, it’s about passing along a tradition.
“It’s always fun to see the kids taste sugarcane for the first time, you know,” Smith laughed. “Some of them, they’ll get a big grin right off the bat and others curl their lip up.”
For more information about the Southern Syrupmakers Association, visit www.southernsyrupmakers.com.
