Tenant Farming and Molasses

Molasses flavored rice and meat stuffed bell peppers, recipe below

After the Civil War, access to food, particularly sweets like molasses, became an indicator of one’s social and economic status. Proletarians like tenant farmers experienced a quasi-slave-like existence in which they received food rations from large white planters. Corn bread and molasses were the only food items that tenant farmers in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana had during hard times. A 1928 Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station report on African American tenant farmers in the largely cotton producing Yazoo-Mississippi Delta provides excellent insights into molasses consumption among black farmers. Most whites and blacks ate the largest percentage of their calories in the form of sweets, particularly cane syrup. African Americans, says the report, “like molasses and eat a great deal of it especially in fall, winter, and early spring.” Most farmers also raised pigs and cultivated gardens with greens, peas, peppers, and other produce. So what kind of food could one make with such ingredients? How about molasses flavored rice and meat stuffed peppers with corn bread for sopping the tomato sauce.

Molasses flavored Rice and Meat Stuffed Bell Peppers Recipe

Ingredients
1 3/4 cup water
1 cup brown basmati rice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 pound vegan or regular mild sausage
1/2 vegan ground beef or regular beef
1 16 oz can vegan or meat no bean chile
1 16 oz can whole tomatoes
1 16 oz can diced tomatoes
1 16 oz can tomato sauce
1 8 oz can tomato paste
2 tablespoons or more of molasses
1 teaspoon of anise seeds
1/2 teaspoon fresh cilantro
1 tablespoon majorem
1 tablespoon sage
6 or 7 bell peppers

Method
Cook some wet rice with salt and butter, but be sure it doesn’t try out. While cooking the rice, sauté sausage and ground beef together in a skillet until brown then add chile, tomatoes, sauce and paste combining the ingredients with the meat in a crock pot on high then turn down to low after all the contents to really cooking. Then add the molasses, anise, marjorem, sage and cilantro into the crock pot and stir well and add more molasses to sweeten it if you like. Cook the stuffing in the crock pot well. Preheat oven to 325 while you are stuffing the peppers, careful because the stuffing will be hot. Place the stuffed peppers in a large (preferable glass) baking dish. Take the entire remainder of the stuffing mix and pour it over the bell peppers in the pan. Bake for about 10 minutes. Over cooking will dry out the sauce - or worse, blacken the rice.