Coffee and Cane

The first year we spent in Haiti we lived in tents in a small camp next to a sugar cane mill.  This mill was not for sugar production.  The cane was pressed and cooked to a thin molasses, which was then fermented in barrels and distilled to make rum.  The squeezed cane stalks were piled outside the mill.  Here the slowly fermented to a compost called bagass.  To this day I like the taste of rum because it carries me to those days camped out beside the mill.

Other than cane, there were several ways that cane or its products were consumed.

Eating can raw was popular.  I liked to do this, but it is hard on the teeth.  You grab the bark of the cane in your teeth, then twist the stalk outward with you hand to peel it.  You then bite off a chunk of the fibrous pulp, chew it to get the juices out and then spit out the remains.  There was a variety of cane, kann anana (pineapple cane) that was grown specifically for this.  In the city you could buy short lengths of kann anana, already peeled, in plastic bags.  Consequently, even in the city you could find chewed cane pulp lying on the ground.  I would be leery about using this stuff because of uncertainty about the sanitary conditions under which it was prepared.

The next step in the cane processing process was the squeezed cane juice (ji kann).  This product was just like sweetened water.  In one part of Haiti, they had these home cane mills consisting of two logs placed slightly horizontally, one above the other, with one side anchored in a tree.  The lower log had grooves down each side.  The upper log was much longer and protruded beyond the lower one.  A person would sit on the end of the upper one, jumping up and down, while two others would hold opposite ends of cane stalks between the logs, twisting the cane as it was squeezed.  The cane juice would run down the grooves into a bucket.  They would use this juice, undiluted, to make their coffee.  The Haitians like their coffee strong, sweet and black.

The next step in cane processing was to cook it down to a thick syrup (siro kann) which we call molasses.  This was the stuff used to produce rum.  There were backyard stills and small commercial distilleries all over the island.  The poorer Haitians might end up buying rum that was cut with acetone to make it cheaper.

If the syrup was cooked further it became a thick paste.  This paste, which they called rapadou, was squeezed into tubes made from banana bark about 2 inches in diameter. These “logs” of varying length could be bought in the markets all over the place.  The poorer Haitians would use this to sweeten their coffee.

If the cane juice was cooked even further it became raw sugar (sik wouj).  This was the kind of sugar you could find in rural markets and the kind that we used most of the time.  The raw sugar could be processed (there was only one or two plants that did this in Haiti) to form white sugar, which you could buy in urban markets.  The sugar factory in the capital city for many years operated the only railroad in the country to bring cane stalks to the mill.  However, the last trains quit running in the late 1980’s.

Cutting Sugar Cane

Cutting cane is nasty work.  The leaves have these nasty hairs that would stick in you and sting much like nettles.  So cutting cane became work for those at the bottom end of the labor market.  In many countries, cutting cane was beneath most people so Haitians were hired to cut cane in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and the United States.

Once the cane was cut, the stalks went to the mill and the tops were hauled off to be used as cattle feed, as shown in the picture below.

Coffee

Coffee was grown in Haiti and you could purchase roasted coffee, ground or whole bean, in stores.  In the rural markets they would be selling only whole beans, roasted or raw. The Haitians had several ways to make their strong sweet coffee.  They basically made “drip” coffee using a cloth, sock-like filter called a gref.  One was to prepare it was to use raw cane juice, or else they might use water with lots of rapadou or raw sugar dissolved in it.  The ground coffee was placed in the gref and placed in the sweetened water.  They left it there for a while as the water boiled.

In some places, they would place the raw beans and sugar together and caramelize them in a pan over an open fire.  This caramelized coffee was then ground and placed in the gref to make the coffee.