Celebrating World Food Day: Cooking with Saved Sorghum
OSGF
Many of us in the Appalachian region are familiar with sorghum, whether we picture it poured as a syrup over buttered biscuits or rustling gently in a backyard garden.
Dried sorghum hung for seed saving at the Biocultural Conservation Farm. Photo by Christine Harris.
Sorghum is one of the heirloom crops currently sprouting in the Biocultural Conservation Farm’s seed saving garden. One of the main goals of the farm is to save and share seeds from heirloom and heritage crops which are culturally and historically significant to our Appalachian bioregion, home to the world’s highest diversity of food crops. With an estimated loss of roughly 90% of our global crop diversity, conserving historical crops is more important than ever - not only as a way to connect with our heritage, but to help create a more sustainable and secure food system by preserving crop diversity.
The BCCF’s sorghum is one of many crops that were generously shared with the farm by fellow seed savers: in this case, neighbor Kat Gemmer and her mother, Kathleen. The other crops the Gemmers shared with the BCCF include twined tomatoes, giant okra, and giant okra seeds with the BCCF, some of which have been in their family for centuries.
“Never say thank you for seeds,” Kathleen repeated during a recent visit to the farm, where she saw the crops grown from her family’s seeds and spoke to the farm team about their histories. She explained that, in her community, homegrown seeds are always meant to be happily and open-handedly shared.
Kathleen Gemmer looks at the BCCF’s sorghum, grown from saved seed she and her daughter, Kat, shared with the farm . Photo by Caitlin Etherton.
And like many heirloom seeds, sorghum has a rich and interesting history. The grain, now grown across the globe, has roots in Africa, where it has been cultivated for thousands of years: the first known record of the plant comes from an archeological dig near the Egyptian-Sudanese border. Like many other crops we are familiar with today, sorghum was brought to America by slave traders on ships transporting enslaved Africans in the early 17th century. Once in the U.S., it was primarily used by enslaved people who made bread, pulled candy, and chicken feed from the plant. The fibers were also used for non-culinary purposes: the first written reference to sorghum in America was penned by Benjamin Franklin, who wrote of the bristly, inedible parts of the plant being used for brooms.
Around the Civil War era, the relatively hardy, drought-resistant crop began to replace pricey sugar cane products in many households, particularly in rural Appalachia. The tradition of making sorghum molasses (different from regular molasses, which is a byproduct of processed sugar cane) is still carried on in the region in the fall. Kathleen, who hails from western North Carolina, described the annual sorghum molasses-making in her community as “quite an undertaking.”
“It was several days of molasses-making,” she said. “You ground the juice out of the cane, and put it in a long pan over a fire outdoors, and then you’d boil it for like eight hours, until it comes down to a syrup.”
Kathleen and Kat shared some of that molasses (from a 2007 batch!) with the BCCF during their visit to the farm. To celebrate World Food Day, chef and organic farm assistant Saskia Poulos prepared some special caramel apples with their molasses and popped sorghum seeds, using fruit plucked from Oak Spring’s orchards. Watch the video below to learn more about cooking with this historic crop, and scroll down for Saskia’s written recipe for sorghum molasses caramel. Happy World Food Day!
Do you have seeds of a treasured heirloom that your family has been collecting for as long as you can remember? Or perhaps you have stories around a particular heirloom variety of collards, beans or squash that you’d like to share? We’d love to connect with you! E-mail the Farm Manager at christine@osgf.org or click here to learn more about seed saving at the BCCF.
Banner photo by Christine Harris