Making Sorghum: Memory and Foodways

Annemarie Anderson

“How many stores can offer such exotic flavors as muscadine jam, sumac-berry jelly, wild apricot preserves, or mango butter, and how could either the flavor or the history of something like quince jelly ever be captured in a store-bought jar?”

In his classic book Southern Food: At Home, On the Road and in History, journalist John Egerton opined the eroding craft of food preservation. “Molasses and honey also come from the supermarket, but they are no match for the sorghum and sourwood that country people put up at home.” Egerton, like his contemporaries studying the South, was afraid that processed and packaged foods would erase what they saw as a distinct Southern food landscape. The demand for sorghum syrup stubbornly persists.

This audio documentary weaves the voices of sweet sorghum syrup makers from the Southern Sugars project. In the fall of 2018, I interviewed 14 people about their memories of sorghum syrup and their experiences producing it. These narrators explore producers and consumers’ memories of sorghum syrup. They call upon a nostalgic and memorialized southern past. Simultaneously, these folks recreate and reinterpret their Southern identity through Sorghum. Listen to them as they relate the sweet world of sorghum syrup production.

Annemarie Anderson is the Southern Foodways Alliance’s oral historian and working on her Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Expression. She received a master’s degree in history with a specialization in oral history from the University of Florida in 2017. She also earned her bachelor’s degrees in English and history from UF. She travels around the South interviewing people about the food they grow, make, eat, and serve.