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Barefoot In The Sand: Remembering the Waning Days of the Hopewell Community (1998) Bruce C. Gragg 93/123
herbs and chemicals around the house. Many would work faster and
safer than some of that’s used today, and a lot less toxic too. In
hindsight I wish I would have gotten the recipes to these many tonics
and various remedies she knew. Many were just lost or forgotten upon
her death in 1961.
Papa would hire Jesse when it was cane grinding time. He was slow,
but he could feed the cane into the mill which squeezed out the
juice. Beside the mill we had a wooden barrel to catch the juice. On
its top Papa would put a burlap sack to strain out most of the pieces
of cane and natural trash accumulated. Jesse would take a stick and
make a hole in the strainer to see how full the barrel was getting.
As more trash collected on the burlap, the juice and trash would
eventually run into the barrel through the hole. This would make Papa
very unhappy, but what could he say to Jesse, just tell him not to do
it any more. He wouldn’t, until the next barrel was started, the hole
appeared again. He was not able to lift a lot of weight, a couple
sticks of cane at a time he could handle. Our syrup kettle was in
reality a big, about 50 gallons vat that looked like an oversized egg
poacher, with no cover. It had a furnace under it to supply the heat,
and it had to be fired a certain way to get even constant heat to
cook the syrup properly. Before time to grind cane Papa would collect
some good heartpine and some hardwood so he could keep his fire
burning right. The hardwood for the long burn and the heartwood to
get it burning and keeping it burning. We always had a good
collection of honey bees, wasp, yellow jackets, hornets and other
stinging insects around the sugar shed and the mill. It was not
uncommon to occasionally have someone get stung. Papa always had some
chewing tobacco to put on a sting. But the "polecat” made at the end
of the cooking made it all worth while. The polecat was a by-product
of the cooking process to make syrup from the juice. It was the
candied syrup foam that would collect at the edge of the syrup kettle
just before the syrup was ready to dip up. It was good! Papa had an
aluminum pan with small hoes punched in the bottom attached to a pole
to do the skimming. While cooking, the juice had to be skimmed often
to remove all the trash that cooked out and rose to the top. While
the syrup was cooking the steam rose to the top of the shelter
condensed to water and it drop on you all through the day, and it was
always a sweet sticky rain. He had a copper dip ladle attached to
another pole to dip up the cooked syrup. He was particular about
these two items, no one, but no one bothered them for any reason,
except during syrup cooking time. Then he was the sole user of them.
The skimming removed before the syrup is completely cooked is not to
be eaten, but it is kept in a barrel and given to the hogs. After it
sets in the barrel a few days and begun to ferment, then when given
to the hogs they will get very drunk in just a short time and will
just lie around grunting. They didn’t squeal very
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