sorghum syrup

Sorghum syrup is made from the pressed juice of sweet sorghum stalks (Sorghum bicolor), cooked to a thick, amber liquid. The grain crop originated in northeastern Africa around 8000 BCE and spread along trade routes to India, China, and eventually the Mediterranean. The English word sorghum traces to Italian sorgo, which appears in 16th-century agricultural texts. The Italian word likely derived from Medieval Latin Syricum gramen, Syrian grass, reflecting the belief that the plant came from Syria, though its actual origin is Ethiopian.

Sorghum reached the American South through two separate routes. Enslaved West Africans brought knowledge of sorghum cultivation from a region where the grain had been a staple for millennia. European colonists separately imported Chinese sweet sorghum varieties in the 1850s as a potential alternative to cane sugar. Leonard Wray published The Practical Sugar Planter in 1848, advocating sorghum as a crop that could grow across the South without tropical requirements.

The syrup became an Appalachian tradition by the 1870s, replacing molasses on farmhouse tables in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Small sorghum mills, called sorghum presses, processed the fall harvest by squeezing stalks through iron rollers turned by mule power. The juice ran into open pans over wood fires, skimmed and stirred for hours. The resulting syrup had a characteristic bitter edge that distinguished it from cane molasses.

Sweet sorghum cultivation nearly disappeared after World War II as cheap corn syrup flooded American markets. A revival began in the 1990s among heritage food enthusiasts and small Appalachian farms. The National Sweet Sorghum Producers and Processors Association, founded in 1954 and still active, counts hundreds of producers across 15 states. Sorghum syrup festivals in Kentucky and Tennessee still draw crowds who pour the syrup over biscuits in the traditional Appalachian way.