It's easy to get stuck on ribbon cane

In East Texas, it wasn't pumpkins that signaled the arrival of fall — it was ribbon cane.

We knew it was fall when Daddy came home from work with a stalk of ribbon cane from McNew's produce stand.

It was tied in bundles, like sheafs of dried corn stalks, only in this case, the ribbon cane was shiny, plump and dark.

We usually had to wait for the weekend to eat it, since Daddy was the only one strong enough to cut it.

He'd use his big pocketknife to circle around the cane, cutting through the hard dark purplish-brown exterior then snapping off a piece. He'd strip it, then cut the fibrous interior into a short lengths, quarter it, and hold out a piece on his knife for us to take.

We kept him pretty busy cutting and peeling the cane, since it only took two or three chews to extract the sweet juice. It was a lot like chewing on a crispy, juicy stick.

While ribbon cane was a novelty for us, ribbon cane syrup was something revered by the older members of my family.

My great-grandparents' syrup mill, was long out of use by the time I was born, but the use, and the stories of ribbon cane syrup were not.

I carried crustless sandwiches and Hostess cupcakes in a McPherson plaid metal lunchbox. My mother, her mother and her mother's mother had carried their lunch in syrup buckets.

Inside was a "biscuit with a hole," a biscuit leftover from breakfast, poked in the side with a finger, then filled with syrup. "If they were lucky," as my grandmother would say, there would be a piece of sausage or ham and a cold sweet potato.

When my grandmother got home from school, there might be a flour sack full of freshly-baked syrup tea cakes for a snack, or a pan of gingery syrup pudding fresh from my great-grandmother's wood-fired oven.

My cousin Frances, remembered how fall was "syrup-making time," and the entire family would cut, haul and stack the cane next to the syrup mill. A mule walked in a perpetual circle to power the shaft of the machinery that squeezed the juice from the cane being fed into it.

The juice flowed into a long rectangular metal "kettle" roughly the size and shape of a king-sized mattress. It sat under a shed and atop a fire constantly stoked with wood. The simmering juice was boiled down, stirred constantly by men weilding long wooden paddles.

The syrup would trickle out of a spigot into tin buckets, ready to be used in pies, cakes, candy, and over the innumerable biscuits and slices of ham and sausage my great-grandmother would cook.

Mine wasn't the first generation to lose touch with ribbon cane syrup. My parents never used it much. We preferred jelly.

My great-uncle Herbert Leopard donated the syrup mill to my hometown, the city of Henderson, which holds the Syrup Festival every November.

I took my throughly urbanized children to the festival once, hoping they'd get a feel for their heritage. They were much more interested in funnel cakes and light swords than they were in the syrup. But we bought a jar, and a copy of the cookbook that contained our familiy recipes.

My daughter and I decided to play pioneer and make the recipe for syrup candy for a class project on family history.

We buttered our hands, and began pulling the extremely warm candy, over and over until it looked like the salt water taffy we'd seen at fairs and carnivals.

In the end, we did have candy. While it would certainly never replace chocolate, it wasn't half-bad. It earned Amanda an A, and the amazement of the class. Candy from syrup. Who'd a thunk it?

Frances said it saddened her to think that younger generations would never know the "good experience" to be gained from a family working together.

I should tell her she needn't worry.

|Syrup Candy|

2 cups ribbon cane syrup

1/4 cup butter

1 tsp. vinegar

Melt butter in medium saucepan; add syrup and bring to boil, stirring constantly, frequently testing by dropping a small amount into cold water; when it becomes brittle, add the vinegar and remove from the fire.

When sufficiently cooled (which means just enough until you think you won't give yourself a third degree burn) pull until it turns a soft golden color.

Pull out into a rope about 3/4-inch in diameter; cut with large kitchen shears into one-inch pieces. Wrap each piece in buttered wax paper.