🌿Molasses: A Traditional Taste of New England

Chances are, you keep a bag of sugar in your pantry, but do you ever use molasses as a sweetener? This brown, sticky liquid used to be a staple in New England kitchens 300 years ago. That’s why you find molasses in baked beans, Indian pudding, gingerbread, and more traditional recipes.

Molasses is created from crushing sugar cane stalks and boiling their juice. After the juice becomes concentrated, sugar crystals are extracted. The leftover liquid is molasses. The sugar cane plant is likely native to the Pacific island of New Guinea (near Australia and Indonesia), but traders brought it around the world. Columbus likely introduced it to the West Indies in 1493. Soon it was cultivated on so-called “Sugar Islands” across the region.

After the British began settling in North America in the 1600s, molasses became a prized trade good. Not only could molasses be used in recipes, it could also be distilled into rum.  In the 1700s, there were more than 25 distilleries in Boston alone and Massachusetts was a leading rum exporter. Much of the rum went to Africa, where it was traded for enslaved people who worked at plantations on the “Sugar Islands.” The plantations in turn sent molasses back to New England. This formed the “Triangle Trade.”

Because the Triangle Trade brought abundant supplies of molasses to New England, molasses became the leading sweetener in all kinds of dishes popular in the 1700s. Among them: the drink switchel, Boston brown bread, stack cake (a layer cake), hermits, and ginger cookies. So important was molasses that the British set up the Molasses Act of 1733 to impose a tariff on molasses imported from West Indies islands owned by other European countries including France and the Netherlands. Americans protested this tax, leading to the first stirrings of the movement against British rule in the colonies that would ultimately lead to the American Revolution.

Even though the United States outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, molasses continued to come into New England. A huge storage tank of molasses exploded in the North End in 1919, sending two million gallons into the streets in what became known as the Great Molasses Flood. But soon after that, the price of refined white sugar dropped, and soon people were adding sugar instead of molasses to their coffee and to their desserts.

Today, people still reach for molasses because it adds a robust, slightly caramel flavor that other sweeteners lack. Molasses comes in three basic varieties based on when it was extracted from the sugar cane. The first, or light, extraction is mildest; the second, or dark, extraction is more flavorful. Blackstrap molasses comes from a third boiling, which creates a dark, thick liquid with an almost burned flavor. Whatever recipe you choose to make, each bite will be packed with traditional New England flavor.

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