My great grandfather's favorite dessert was buttered white bread torn into several bits covered with sorghum molasses. I always watched in great fascination as he devoured the concoction every evening. Unless my great grandmother baked a pie, this was the regimen.
A few years ago, I began researching my family’s genealogy, and I came upon an article from my hometown newspaper which had been written circa 1930, and I learned that my great grandfather’s penchant for sorghum went back to his childhood.
His grandfather, a physician from Kentucky, was sent some sorghum cane seed from the Department of Agriculture. He planted the seeds in his garden and crushed the juice of the matured stalks in a cider mill. His slaves then boiled down the juice in = huge black pot located in their quarters.
A crude product by today's standards, but it was the beginning of my great grandfather's love for sorghum. During the Depression, Granddad and a farmer friend started a sorghum mill in Bloomington, Indiana. Rarely seen in Southern Indiana, sorghum became a necessity during that poverty-stricken time. In autumn, farmers brought their sorghum cane to Granddad’s mill to be processed and were given in return their fair share of sorghum molasses. According to the newspaper article, Granddad constructed an evaporator similar to those used in boiling down sap for maple syrup. Because sorghum scorches easily when it becomes very thick, my great grandfather determined the culprit to be the corrugated pans used in maple syrup production.>/p>
He surmised that a smooth-bottomed pan would resist scorching and found even small amounts of sorghum could be boiled in his new invention without burning. The author of the article, Mrs. L. A. Winslow, asked by great grandfather how he knew when the sorghum was done. He replied, “oh, I can tell by looking at it.” After dusk, he could tell “by Listening to it when I put my ear down close to the pan. I never use a thermometer.”
Although dubious, Mrs. Winslow sampled Granddad’ s sorghum and proclaimed it to be “perfect.” Granddad lived to be 89 and died i 1964, and he enjoyed his sorghum molasses until that time. Sometimes he even had a piece of pie with his sorghum concoction.