As I write this blog, we are getting ready for our second annual Sugar Cane Syrup Cooking this Friday and Saturday (Nov. 6-7) at the Inman Farm Heritage Days showground.
The cooking was a lot of fun last year, and we decided to cook on both the Sams family’s evaporator pan and in the kettle that we have used to cook sorghum syrup for years.
Jim Sams (L) & Daniel Perkins (R) feeding sugar cane into the Fletcher family’s Goldens’ Model No. 54 Cane Mil
Jim Sams (L) & Daniel Perkins (R) feeding sugar cane into the Fletcher family’s Goldens’ Model 54 Cane Mill.
We plan to use Jim Sams’ giant mill, powered by a one-cylinder diesel flywheel engine to squeeze the stalks into juice for both mills since it is much faster than the old mule-powered mills that were used for years. (We used lawn mowers to pull the mills.)
Jim will lead the way with the pan, and Bill Maloney will head up the crew on the kettle. It means a lot to me that the pan is the same one used back in the day by Jim’s great-grandfather, also named Jim Sams, and the kettle was used by my great-grandfather Will Harp.
We’ve invited the public to come be a part of the harvesting on Friday and cooking on Saturday, and we hope this event will grow and build a substantial following. We will have breakfast for sale and biscuits available for sopping up some fresh-made syrup.
Like other cooking ventures, making home-made syrup is a challenging but fun process. We hope our syrup cooking weekends will offer a chance for younger members of our group to learn the process so they can keep the syrup cooking going for generations to come.
This weekend also offers our friends a chance to participate in the harvesting process, which is done by hand and isn’t too taxing if there’s lot of us there. As they say, many hands make light work.
Usually, some strip the leaves off the plants with a special stripping tool while others cut the stalks off at ground level with machetes.
It’s a chore, but the camaraderie makes it a memorable experience.
Mike Pollard helping cut & strip sugar cane before the syrup cooking event in 2025.
Back in the day, Stephanie joined us for an afternoon of cane stripping and cutting behind my parents’ house on McBride Road.
When we all arrived back at the showgrounds, Joanne asked Stephanie how it went.
In a very dramatic tone, she answered, “Daddy made me strip in front of a bunch of old men!” This, of course, set her mom off like a Roman candle.
Sonny Pollard, who helped us that day, was quick to explain to a horrified mama that there was nothing nefarious going on. He vehemently denied it, saying, “That is NOT what happened!”
But it did make for a story that has been repeated many times over the years (and got Steph out of “stripping” cane for many, many years as well).