MO Lasses or molasses!!

 Those Continentals:

This is a 55-56 Oldsmobile

For today:

On NANA Dianna’s blog the gingerbread recipe called for ‘light’ Molasses. Sherry said “Print it!”

Oh boy, did my mind start to wander… GREAT memories of a child who ignorantly enjoyed life, not knowing what segregation and integration was!  My dad and mom were NEVER prejudiced. BUT the first 17 years of my life segregation was accepted. I never attended school with kids of ‘color’.  That seems strange now, but I do understand it.

When dad pastored a country church (where I burned the straw field), our closest neighbors were the Davis family. They had a boy my age and a sister Shirley’s age. They were ‘Colored’. At the time that was a ‘respectful term’. We played together caught crawdads, jumped out of the loft of their barn into piles of straw and manure. Played hide and seek and tag.

Above feeding the sugar cane into the rollers.

Cooking the squeezings in BIG pans

But in the fall, they made some delicious molasses or just ‘Lasses.  They made it by the gallons to sell. Mr. Davis put me on the mule that went round and round like a ‘merry go round’ turning the rollers that squeezed the sugar cane. 

This is a molasses mill we saw in Cade's Cove Tennessee.

I was raised eating molasses mixed with butter and using mama’s biscuits to sop it. Liking Molasses must require an ‘acquired taste’.  We have only one grandchild that really enjoys them and that is Granddaughter Sherece. Our sons like molasses.

Did you know you can’t have any Mo-lasses until you have had some lasses.  Once you have had some lasses then you can have Mo. Yeah I know it is corny but it was funny when I was a kid.

When I ate at the Davis’s home, I was not allowed to sit at the table, I had to sit on the firewood behind the stove cause Mammmy said ‘it weren’t fittin’ for whites and coloreds to eat together’.

When the Davis kids ate at our house they sat at the table that always confused a little kid.  I had no idea of segregation and how one sided it was.

I never liked ‘Black-strap’ Molasses (Molasses cooked twice more), they were too ‘sharp’ for my taste. I like what must be ‘light’ molasses.  They are not easy to find. (Funny, is/are Molasses plural?)

I just learned that Molasses originated in Africa, news to me.  

Nite Shipslog

PS: Some of the best Molasses I ever had came from cane grew by Kenneth Conrad in Missouri , then squeezed and cooked by the Amish on shares.