Grandpa Making Molasses

(Click to enlarge.)

How the heck do you make molasses and what is it anyway? First you grow sugar cane, of course, then the stalks are fed through a mill, the liquid drained off, cooked down and put in glass jars. It makes a sweet, syrupy, dark liquid that can be used as a sweetener. Here's a great WV blog out of Beaver with people that still keep up the tradition:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/docs.htm?docid=19003 (You'll need to paste this in your URL.)

Notice their mill was turned in the author's childhood by a mule walking in circles and today is powered by a tractor. I'm wondering what my grandpa used. I do remember molasses, though...on biscuits and pancakes and in gingerbread and cookies. Yum!

Family Gathering

Hey, this is such a great picture shot about 1950 at my aunt and uncle's farm near Calvin, West Virginia. That's me in the middle of the front row leaning against my Grandma Rose's knee. On either side of me is my sister Shirley and my cousin Clark. In the back row is my mom Katie, my Grandpa John, Aunt Luella and Uncle Silmon. My dad was taking the picture.

I used to love to go to their house...just getting there was an adventure. You turned off onto this little windy  dirt road that hugged the mountains and hoped you didn't meet anyone going the other way. I was prone to car sickness so it seemed a long way to their farm but probably was only a couple of miles.

Once we got there, it was a kid's paradise, though. There were my five boy cousins and all they were into (they had a box of comic books under the bed!). I especially remember my aunt's homemade mincemeat pie with whipped cream straight from the cows. There were animals and always kittens, it seemed. And there were the mountains (need I say more?).

Look how happy we all are! I'd like to step into the picture and relive it for a couple of hours.

WV Rain

Here's a photo I dug up of my mom making apple butter (see yesterday's post). True it's an old picture but some of the gray is because it chose to rain that day and they moved to a semi-enclosed spot, so there's a lot of smoke from the fire.

It chooses to rain a lot in West Virginia. I would often wake to the sound of raindrops hitting a million leaves. I slept upstairs in the old farmhouse and the rain would pour down the tarpaper roof outside my window, rush through the gutters and thunder into the rainbarrel. It was a lovely sound and I would sigh and go back to sleep to its music.

Mom making apple butter on a rainy day

Apple Butter Time

This time of year was all about the apples on my Grandma's WV farm. They ripened in September and October, depending on the kind of apple. We had apple pie every Sunday after church in the fall and it was to die for!

But making apple butter was the big event. I wish I had the recipe because I've never tasted any apple butter quite like it. Maybe there wasn't one, though, just apples (peeled, cored and sliced) along with sugar, water and cinnamon. All of this was put in a huge cast-iron pot over an open fire in the side yard of our old farmhouse.

Grownups took turn stirring all day to keep it from sticking and burning. At the end of the day, the apple butter was put in glass canning jars and stored in the cellar. Then all winter we had a delicious spread to put on biscuits and cornbread. Yum!

Do you have a favorite recipe for apple butter? I'd love to have it.