By Sherif Sonbol STICKY, SWEET PERFECTION: I was crossing the sugarcane fields in Mallawi, Minya, in search of the ancient Vana Monastery. The farmers busy harvesting the taller-than-man stalks could not help me with directions, but when I asked about the small building emitting a thick black smoke in the distance, everyone told me this was the "cane squeeze" -- the place where hand-made molasses is still made. Haj Mosaad's molasses factory in the village of Beni Hawara is a modest operation functioning annually through the sugarcane harvesting season between January and the beginning of May. It consists of a press in which the stalks are peeled and squeezed, a roomful of copper cauldrons in which the sugar cane juice is boiled repeatedly while impurities are skimmed off the top (this is known as the copper room), and a space in which the sticky, sweet black honey is poured into containers. Simplicity? The place seemed designed to demonstrate it. Yet already world market dynamics and the international economy have contributed their own problems. With the prices of gas and machine oil as well as sales taxes consistently on the rise, the hand manufacture of molasses in Egypt is threatened with extinction.
