Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 15. MAKING CANE SYRUP (Pp 23-25) Each farm had its own syrup shelter and cane
patch and the farmers made a year's supply of syrup and brown sugar every fall. Most of the folks would cut their cane just before time for the first frost. We stripped each cane of its leaves and cut off the top six or eight inches for that part wasn't sweet, and we piled the stalks on the ground. We covered that with the fodder we had pulled from the stalks, so the frost wouldn't get to the cane and ruin it. Then we hauled the stalks to the cane mill as they were needed.
The cows chewed on the top part that we had cut off. We usually cooked two boilings a day, sometimes three, but that meant starting before daylight and getting through after dark. On the three-boiling days, Papa got us children up early, before day, and he hooked up the mule to the mill and by the time the sun was up we had a barrel of juice ready to cook. Some of us kids fed the cane in the mill as the mule walked around and turned the sweep. One end of the sweep was'
long and low to the ground where the mule was attached to it, and the other end was short and high. The pommey, which was the mashed cane, went out the back of the mill and the juice came out the front into a barrel which had a croaker sack stretched over it. The sack strained the trash out of the cane juice. We put that juice in the sixty-gallon cooker and started a fire in the furnace under it and it would soon start boiling. It had to be skimmed as it boiled, for that's
how the rest of the trash was removed from the syrup. The skimmings were put in a bucket and fed to the hogs, but sometimes we would put it in a barrel, and if it sat long enough, it would make a pretty decent drink, but if it sat too long, sipping that stuff would make a person drunk. When the juice had finished cooking we let the fire die down and took the syrup up in kegs or barrels. Then just as soon as the last drop was taken out of the boiler we poured in another tub
of juice and started all over again. We usually waited till another time to put the syrup in bottles, when we weren't so busy, maybe on a rainy day when we couldn't do other farm chores. We stored this in the smokehouse along with the sausage and hams and jars of vegetables Mama had put up. I don't know why, but the syrup that came off Chesser Island was the best syrup to be sure, and everybody in Charlton County knew it. Folks would begin carrying their bottles out to the
island before the Chessers ever started cooking the syrup! They knew that the first bottles taken out there were the first filled and there was most always more bottles than they would have the syrup to fill them. It was the best syrup I ever ate. And the sweet potatoes from Chesser Island were the same way! It probably had something to do with the swampland they were grown on. I could pull one end off one of their baked sweet potatoes, mash the other end and that red potato would just pop
right out of the hull. I could get some hog cracklins in one hand and one of those sweet potatoes in the other hand and have the best between-meals snack you ever ate! The Chessers only cooked one boiling of cane juice a day and they did something else different from my family. They washed each stalk of cane before they ever put it in the mill to grind juice. I guess that most everyone knows that when syrup gets old, it can be cooked over again and made
into new syrup. And I suppose that everyone also knows that cold syrup doesn't take up nearly as much space as hot syrup does. Old man Dan Dinkins, who was known for his stubborn streak, had some old syrup one time. He took that thirty-gallon keg out to the syrup shelter and his wife, Miss Orpha, asked him what he was doing and he said, "I'm cooking this keg of syrup again." She said, "You can't cook that whole keg at one time!" And he told her, "I
guess I know what I'm doing!" So he dumped that syrup in the boiler, set a fire in the furnace under it and before long it was cooking. It boiled and bubbled and began coming over the edge of the cooker. Uncle Dan saw that he needed help and hollered out "Come here, Miss Orpha! And bring the dish pan, foot tub and water bucket!" I think it even got in his shoes! He learned the hard way that hot syrup takes up more room than cold syrup does! | 
