Sorghum And the Columbian Exchange
Making sorghum syrup, Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Naturopath and entrepreneur Dr. Alvenia M. Fulton grew up on her parent’s family farm in Pulaski, Tennessee. Each spring the Fultons sowed sorghum for making molasses. Sorghum is a sticky grass indigenous to Africa. Like sugarcane, The Portuguese most likely introduced sorghum to the New World during the Atlantic slave trade. Slave owners in the South distributed niggardly allotments of molasses with other rations such as corn meal, rice, sweet potatoes, salt pork, and or fish. Molasses, like corn bread, at one time southerners had considered molasses at stable of people living on the margins of society such as slaves. However, over time the value of molasses increased in the public eye as people learned about its medicinal properties.
Based on Food Historian Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie’s Work in Progress
