Reference point
Open a bottle of cane molasses and smell from about a hand’s span away.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Deeply sweet, with a smoky note and a faint earthy layer underneath. Heavy and lasting, hardly evaporating at all.
It differs from caramel in that cane molasses has not been through direct fire but only concentrated, so it keeps some of the smell of the sugar cane. That faint earthy layer is the trace of the plant that is left, the very thing refined sugar has had stripped away completely.
It is the reference for understanding sweetness with depth, as opposed to the flat sweetness of white sugar.
How to smell it
Put a drop of molasses on white paper, wait a minute for it to thin a little, then smell. Smelling straight from the bottle catches only the sweetness and misses the earthy layer. Compare it with a spoonful of dissolved white sugar — you will find white sugar has almost no smell.
Why this one is hard
Because the word sweet is shared by taste and smell. You have to remind yourself that you are smelling, not tasting, or the brain automatically switches to the taste channel.
Scientific note
Cane molasses keeps the compounds that white sugar loses in refining: minerals, organic acids, and products of the Maillard reaction between sugars and the amino acids left in the cane juice. The smell of molasses is the smell of everything white sugar no longer has.
In Vietnamese life
Cane molasses is the base ingredient of many central Vietnamese dishes, especially cu đơ peanut candy and the braised dishes of Nghe An. Hand-making molasses is a trade shrinking fast, and with it a smell is disappearing from daily life.