Sorghum: Coming Home

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The other two items were good breakfast sausage — it just isn't the same anywhere else — and sorghum. Occasionally I could find Jimmy Dean sausage, which, although not the best, is edible, but sorghum? No luck. In fact you can't even find sorghum in the average grocery store around here.

Sorghum is a grass native to eastern Africa, grown, in most places, for its grain. It's also known as durra, Egyptian millet, and milo as well as other nom de grains. I've never tried the grain and didn't even know there was a grain until I did a little research -- although I've heard of both durra and Egyptian millet. I'll have to try the grains, but that's not what I missed. The sorghum I missed is a syrup also known as sorghum molasses.

The syrup is made by crushing the stalks of a sorghum variety called sweet sorghum. Sorghum begins just as molasses does by crushing the cane stalks to squeeze out the juice, the juice is then boiled down, again like sugar cane juice, to produce a syrup (I'm simplifying here). In the case of sugar cane this reduced juice is molasses and in the case of sorghum it's sorghum or sorghum molasses.

Although there was time when sorghum was common throughout the South, these days about the only place you can find it reliably is along the Appalachian Mountain chain. As transportation systems improved cane sugar and molasses replaced sorghum.

However, the Appalachian mountains were one of the last areas in the country to enter the 20th century. In fact, is it weren't for LBJ's War on Poverty the mountain people might still be struggling to escape the 19th century. (Poverty still exists -- but Applalachia is a significant battle largely won.)

Because of this delayed progress, sorghum production lasted long enough in the mountains to enable the desire to preserve folk-ways to capture it before it died. At least this is my theory (although sorghum syrup is still made elsewhere in the US). What is fact is that the National Sweet Sorghum Producers and Processors Association is based in Lexington, Kentucky (which is not in Appalachia, but is in an area that was also depressed well into the last century). It's also fact that next annual meeting of the NSSPPA will be in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee - 40 miles from here.

Sorghum tastes a lot like molasses. Dark sorghum is harsher than an equally dark molasses (and I like that harshness) but the lighter versions are milder. It's a good sweetener in cooking, and you can use it interchangebly with molasses except in baking. Sorghum is sweeter than molasses and you should reduce the amount of sugar by 1/3. But I love it most, poured on a hot, buttered biscket with a side of good sausage. And be sure you get a bit of syrup on that sausage. It's plain simple food, but it's seriously good.

And as we say around here, take two biscuits and butter them while they're hot.

Kevin Weeks is a Gather food correspondent (Paisano), personal chef, cooking teacher, and writer in Knoxville, Tennessee who spends too many hours on his feet, cooking. "Paisano" is a column focused on peasant dishes from around the world. To read more of Kevin's writings or connect to him click here. His blog,Seriously Good, is read by 75,000 cooks a month and in addition he writes a weekly column forSpot-On.