Hundreds during the war resorted to such devices for freeing their grain of chaff; yet flour was very scarce, although the South put forth her best energies to cultivate wheat. After delivering the government tithe, and sharing with our home ones, the crop rarely lasted till another harvest. It was quite amusing to hear the neighbors as they met in social gatherings, or perhaps when separating from service at church, press their friends to come and see them, or come and have dinner, “For we have got a barrel of flour.” It was even more amusing to have friends sit at the dining-table, and, when a waiter of brown, warm biscuits was passed round, to see them feign ignorance of what they were.
Bolted meal, when obtainable, made a very good substitute for flour, though millers said it injured their bolting-cloth to sift the corn meal through it; yet nearly every household, in sending its grist to be ground, would order a portion of the meal to be bolted for use as flour. Such bolted meal, when sifted through a thin muslin cloth and mixed up with scalding water to make it more viscid and adhesive, was as easily moulded into pie crust with the aid of the rolling-pin as the pure flour. Nice muffins and waffles were made of bolted meal, and we also made a very nice cake of the same and our home-made brown sugar.
All the moist and marshy places in the fields that had hitherto been thought fit for naught as to the growing of farm products, were utilized for rice and sugar-cane patches, and were found to yield plentifully. Some people, not having dank or moist spots suitable for rice on their farms, planted rice on the uplands, and were surprised to find they had an average yield with those who had planted the moist spots; and thus it has come about that even now in the South rice is planted on the uplands. Some few rude rice mills were hastily put up for stripping the coarse brown husks from the rice, but as they were distant from most of the planters in our settlement, wooden mortars had to be temporarily improvised. A tree of proper size would be cut down; from the stock a length suitable would be cut or sawed; a cavity would be hollowed with an adze in the centre of the block endwise. For the want of better polishing tools the cavity would be made smooth by burning with fire. The charred surface was then scraped off and made even, the hollow cleared free of all coal dust, and the pestle, made, perhaps, from a bough of the same tree, completed the primitive rice mill. Rough rice pounded in such a mortar and winnowed by the wind was clean and white. The only objection to it was that it was more splintered than if it had gone through a better mill.
Mills had also to be erected for grinding sugar-cane and the sorghum-cane, as some sorghum was raised in southern Alabama. In our settlement only the “green” and “ribbon” cane were grown, which, like the cereals, were never cultivated before the war. What cane had been grown was in patches owned by slaves, and for the saccharine juice alone. Wooden cylinders had to be used, as those of iron were not easily obtained. With these cylinders all of the juice could not be expressed, but our farmers contented themselves with the thought that there was no great loss after all, as their swine could draw from the crushed cane all the juice that was left before it was hauled to fill ditches and gullies. In case one was so fortunate as to secure a sugar mill with iron cylinders, it used to go the rounds of its immediate vicinity, as the portable threshers did. First one and then another of the neighbors would use it till their crop of cane was ground and made into syrup and sugar. The furnaces for sugar and syrup making were built of rocks, if bricks were not convenient. They held one or two kettles, according to the quantity of cane to be ground and of juice to be boiled. A couple or more of long wooden troughs hollowed from trees were necessary for containing the syrup when boiled to the proper degree of density, before turning into the barrels. That designed for sugar, after being turned into the troughs, was usually beaten with wooden paddles, and dipper after dipper was filled with the thick syrup and poured back into the sugar trough, till all was changed into sugar. Of course there were mishaps now and then, as evaporators could not be had, and the planters were not experts in syrup and sugar making. I remember one gentleman, whose “green” and “ribbon” cane had been exceptionally fine for the season, who had engaged a man who was said to be something of an expert to supervise his sugar boiling. The owner of the cane was to make his own syrup unaided; yet his very first boiling of syrup, when run into the trough and stirred back and forth with the wooden paddles to cool, began to crystallize into grains of sugar, and on turning into the barrel was soon solid, compact, light-brown sugar, without further stir, and was his finest sugar, though the one who supervised, when it came his turn to make the sugar, tried hard to excel that made by the merest accident; but none of his was so light of color or so free of dripping. Another had boiled his juice too much for either sugar or syrup, so that he had a whole barrel full of dark-brown solid candy, which had to be chipped out with a hatchet. The syrup that was made later, as the war went on, was all that could be desired,—thick, clear, and pure. The sugar was necessarily brown, as appliances for refining at that time could not be had. The planters would place smooth oak splits and switches in the barrels of sugar, and just the length of the barrel, to aid the dripping, and to better free the sugar from moisture. It was not uncommon to see planters, when they called upon each other, draw from their pockets small packages wrapped in our own manufactured brown paper, which packages contained samples of their make of sugar. These they carried about with them and compared with the sugar made by others.
III.
A woman whose husband and one son were in our army had raised, with the help of her few slaves, among other farm products, a surplus of watermelons. The season had been propitious, and her melons were large, well flavored, and very juicy. So one day she determined to make a trial of the juice of the watermelons for syrup. She gathered those which were thought to be ripe enough for use, prepared a large tub with a sack hanging over it, sliced up the melons, and scraped all the meat and juice into the sack. From what dripped into the tub through the sack when pressed, she managed to get several gallons of bright juice, which she placed for boiling in her large iron kettle—generally known in the country as the “wash pot,” and which was always left out of doors, in a shady, convenient place, for washing clothes, making soap, or drying up lard in hog-killing time. She built her fire, boiled the juice slowly, carefully taking off all the scum, and was rewarded with syrup of a flavor as fine, or even finer, than that made from the sugar-cane. Flushed with success, she essayed sugar, also, from watermelon juice, and cakes as nice as those from the sap of the maple were the outcome. The balance of her melon crop was converted into sugar and syrup.
Inasmuch as syrup and sugar had to be placed in barrels, barrel-making was another industry that was forced upon the South. Soon several coopers’ shops were built here and there, and it seemed queer enough for us to have home-made barrels, casks, tubs, and piggins. They were manufactured of oak, pine, cypress, and juniper. Those in use for syrup or sugar were generally of oak, as it was thought they gave a more pleasant taste to their contents.
The Palma christi, or castor-oil plant, being indigenous to the South and growing most luxuriantly in the wild state, was soon cultivated in patches near our dwellings, for the beans, from which castor oil as thick and transparent as that sold by druggists was extracted. As we had no rollers to crush the beans, rude mortars were resorted to, in which they were well crushed, the oil passing, as it was expressed, through an orifice in the side of the mortar, near its base. Water was then added to the oil, and the whole was boiled, or rather raised to the boiling point, which caused all the impurities to rise to the top, when it was strained and the oil dipped from the top of the water. An uncle of Mrs. G—— had made some castor oil. He brought her a bottle, and when shown me I could scarce believe it home-made, as there was no apparent difference between this bottle of oil so produced in southern Alabama and that which we had been wont to buy before the blockade.