Before industrial sweeteners, the South ran on cane syrup, cooked down from sugar cane in open kettles over wood fires in a process that filled autumn air with a distinctive sweet smoke. The practice nearly died out, replaced by cheaper, faster sugars. Lately it has begun, slowly, to return.

The revival is led by a small number of families and small producers who never stopped, or who have taken up the old methods again. Making cane syrup the traditional way is laborious, seasonal, and resistant to scale, which is precisely what its admirers value about it.

Chefs have driven much of the renewed interest, prizing the syrup's deep, complex flavor, closer to molasses than to anything in a modern pantry. It has begun appearing on ambitious menus, drizzled over everything from biscuits to roasted vegetables.

The economics will never support mass production, and no one involved expects them to. The appeal lies in the opposite direction, in the slowness and specificity of a food made by hand, in season, the way it always was. Each jar is a small act of preservation, sweet and stubborn and increasingly rare.