Molasses

Molasses, like honey, is a liquid sweetener. The term “molasses” has several meanings. In the rural South and in parts of Appalachia, “molasses” refers to a homemade syrup produced from farm-grown sugarcane. The sugarcane is cleaned and then manually crushed by rollers in a mule-powered mill or press. Milling extracts juice and water from the cane. The extracted liquid is boiled down in an open kettle to evaporate some of the water, making a syrup. This very sweet sugary syrup is pure cane syrup or more commonly, “molasses.” In Louisiana, this syrup is called la cuite. Farther to the north, including most of the Midwest, farm-produced molasses is made from sorghum, a cereal grass, by the same open-kettle technique.