What Exactly Is Molasses?

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is an old saying folks use, slow as molasses in January, to mean something thick and lazy and harmless, creeping along, slow and sweet and gentle. And in a kitchen, that is mostly true. But here is a strange and sobering bit of history. In January of 1919, in the city of Boston, a great storage tank full of molasses burst open all at once, and that slow, lazy syrup came out in a wave many feet high, rushing through the streets faster than a man could run, and it took twenty-one lives. Even a thing right there in the pantry can hold a history far larger than we ever guessed. So what exactly is this stuff? Where does it come from? Is it grown or made? Why did the thrifty old folks treasure it so? Today let us peel the lid off the jar and understand, plainly and fully, what molasses really is. I am Elias Yoder. I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And I will tell you, this is one subject I come to not as a curious outsider but from my own kitchen and my own people's table. For molasses is no stranger to us Pennsylvania Dutch. It is woven deep into our cooking, into our pies and breads and old receipts handed down for generations. Our famous shoofly pie is built on molasses. My wife Esther keeps it in her pantry as her mother and grandmother did before her. So this dark syrup is an old friend in the Plain kitchen. What I walk you through: ✔ What molasses plainly is: the rich dark liquid left behind when white sugar is made from boiled cane juice ✔ How sugar cane is crushed, the juice boiled down, the sugar crystals taken out, and the dark leftover that remains is molasses ✔ Why that leftover holds all the minerals, the iron, the deep flavor, the very soul of the cane that the pale white sugar left behind ✔ The grades by boiling: light molasses (mild, sweet), dark molasses (the flavor of gingerbread), and blackstrap (the thickest, richest in iron and calcium) ✔ Why the old folks valued blackstrap as a strengthening tonic, though I make no doctor's claims of healing for it ✔ The dark and sorrowful history this syrup carries, its place in the rum trade and the cruelty of the slave trade, named honestly and with the gravity it deserves ✔ How quarrels over a tax on molasses in the 1730s were one of the early sparks of the discontent that grew into the Revolution ✔ Why we still keep molasses in the pantry: it draws and holds moisture, keeping cookies and gingerbread soft and chewy for days ✔ The plain truth that brown sugar is simply white sugar with molasses added back in, and how to make your own in a pinch with a cup of white sugar and a spoonful of molasses The deep old wisdom underneath it all: for a long while the sugar makers thought molasses mere waste, the dregs left after the prize was taken. Yet that despised leftover held the richest part of the cane. And that is a wisdom the thrifty old folks knew in their bones, that the real worth is so often hiding in the very thing the careless world throws away. Do not be quick to throw a thing out. Look hard at the leftover first. This is one of a series on Elias Yoder Explains, where I take the ordinary things of daily life that everybody handles and nobody really understands, and explain them plainly, the way the careful old folks understood them. Tell me in the comments below. Did you know molasses was the rich leftover from making white sugar, or had you never thought about where it came from? And what does your family make with it, a shoofly pie like ours, a gingerbread, a pan of baked beans, an old cookie receipt from a grandmother? I would dearly love to hear the old molasses receipts your families keep. I read every single one. Next video: how the bees make honey, what that golden stuff truly is, and why honey is the one food that, kept rightly, will never spoil, not in a year, not in a hundred years, not ever. Subscribe so you do not miss it. #Molasses #Blackstrap #HowThingsWork #AmishWisdom #PennsylvaniaDutch #ShoeflyPie #Baking #BrownSugar #PlainSense #PantryWisdom #FoodHistory #KitchenThrift #SimpleExplained #EliasYoderExplains #EverydayFood