High Sugar Season 

A young woman walks down the road supporting a bamboo yoke from which is suspended half a dozen plastic bottles on either side, filled with a pale green liquid. Plastic is lighter than the traditional bamboo tubes. This is high sugar season, or at least high enough. Twice a day for around seven months the palmyra palm is scaled, the farmer stepping first on the protruding bark and then on a whisper slim bamboo ladder made of one pole to end up 30 feet high or more amidst the swaying fronds. Below cattle graze and the rapport of dark koel cuckoos is heard.

Sprouting amidst the fronds are the thick shoots that produce flowers and then sleek, maroon, hard-shelled fruit, one of which fill an open hand. To feed this growth, the palmyra produces sweet sap, its journey literally cut short with a machete and rerouted to the bamboo collecting tubes that dangle at the end.

Like sugar production from other plants, the sap is then boiled down to concentrate the sugar. In a large wok over a wood fire, the boiling sap is stirred with a bamboo scoop to keep the temperature even, watching for the right consistency as the boiling creates a steaming froth.

Some of the fresh sap, by itself sweet and delicious, is poured into clay pots where it works its way to a pungent vinegar. Other sap is fermented into a light beer or, when allowed to continue to ferment, it is clarified into a sharp spirit.

Two busloads of students are here to learn, to sample the fresh juice and jelly of the burnished palm fruit, maybe getting squirted in the eye, maybe slurping loudly, maybe trying a few steps up the palm tree or the hard work of whisking the thickening palm syrup as it turns into soft candy over heat. From the candy stage, students see how the palm sugar is incorporated into a myriad of sweets at a community dessert co-op nearby. Here recipes that date back centuries are still being made using the sugar plus a creative array of ingredients including sticky rice, roasted tapioca flour, cashews...etc.

The Folklore Museum and Institute of  Southern Studies bring to students some of the traditional knowledge that the Institute has been working for over 50 years to collect and preserve.  As a volunteer newly arrived at the museum, this is a rich introduction to not only the work of the museum but to local life in southern Thailand.