Molasses Time

Let me put a smell and a taste in your head to go with all these buildings, because a place isn't really real to you until you can taste it. In Cades Cove, come the cool end of summer, that taste was sorghum molasses.

Here's how it went. The families grew sorghum cane — tall stuff, looks a good bit like corn — and when it came ripe in the fall, it was time for the molasses making, and that was as much a party as it was a chore. You'd strip the cane, and run it through a mill — a press, often turned by a mule walking slow circles all day — to squeeze out the green juice. Then that juice went into a long flat pan over a fire and got boiled down, and boiled down, and boiled down, somebody skimming it and stirring it for hours, until all that thin juice cooked away into thick, dark, sweet amber molasses. The smell of it hanging over the cove on a fall evening — I'm told there was nothing like it.

And the work was social. That's the part I love. Out here, the big jobs all doubled as gatherings. A molasses boiling, a corn shucking, an apple-butter stir, a hog killing, a barn raising — the whole neighborhood turned out, the men and women worked, the young folks courted, somebody brought a fiddle, and a hard day's labor turned into music and supper and matchmaking by lamplight. That's how you survive with no money and no machines: you trade work, and you make a joy out of the trading.

So next time you drizzle a little molasses or sorghum syrup on a biscuit, think of this valley. Somewhere in these fields, a mule walked its circle, a fire burned down low under a long pan, and half the cove stood around it laughing in the cooling dark. That was Cades Cove too — not just the cabins, but the sweetness they made in them.