Here’s another story from for the WPA America Eats Project from the Great Depression. The records are in archives scattered around the country. Southern recipes that call for molasses may have originated during the Civil War when the confederate government rationed luxury items such as sugar, particularly in non-sugar producing states. As the war raged on Union blockades prevented the importation of sugar from Louisiana, Florida, and the Caribbean to ports in the Carolinians and Virginia. As a result, many people replaced more abundant and less expensive molasse in recipes that called for sugar like sticky buns. Molasses sticky buns, according to WPA writer Wendell B. Phillips, “were made of a rich biscuit dough, rolled thin, spread with molasses and butter, rolled up like a jelly roll, then sliced thin, placed on a biscuit tin and baked.”
