The Sweetest Tradition

IN MOULTRIE, GEORGIA, THE TURNER FAMILY GATHERS EACH FALL TO MAKE CANE SYRUP

- BY IVY ODOM PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBBIE CAPONETTO

WHERE I COME FROM, biscuits aren’t reserved for breakfast. While many families serve yeast rolls or buttery garlic bread alongside their main courses, the dinners eaten around the oak table of my childhood featured pillowy soft biscuits with a side of cane syrup. I would use my index finger to poke a hole in the center of one, creating a crater to pour the good stuff right on in.

Cane syrup is slightly sweet and sour, like a milder version of molasses. Its burnt-sugar notes are beloved by those who grew up on it. I was raised in the rural South Georgia town of Moultrie, and like many others from my neck of the woods, I didn’t even know maple syrup existed until I was old enough to notice it at the grocery store. When I moved about four hours north to Athens for college, I was baffled to find that cane syrup was not part of the dining hall’s array of breakfast condiments. Sharing in my dismay, my best friend and roommate, Rebecca Rykard Lovett (who is also from Moultrie), insisted that I join her that fall to experience syrup making at her grandfather’s farm.

For her family, the ritual begins in mid-November, after the sugarcane has grown for about eight months. One chilly morning during our Thanksgiving break, I made the familiar drive to Renrut’s Six Mule Farm. Although I grew up with Rebecca, this was my first time witnessing syrup making in action. Just beyond the field, right outside a little red barn, the family was already hard at work. Billy Turner, her grandfather, has been boiling sugarcane juice into syrup for as long as he can remember. It’s a tradition that he inherited from his late father, Robert, who grew and pressed cane before cooking it in a 100-gallon cast-iron kettle. “He set it up in the front yard for advertising. People from all over the community would come to buy juice and syrup, and since he was a farmer, it was a way for him to make a little extra money to get through the fall and winter,” Billy recalls.