| Nature's sweet harvest |
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The first warm days of spring make the sap of the sugar maple begin to rise, heralding the start of the maple syrup harvest in Canada and the North-Eastern United States. Cookery writer Claire Hopley was there to taste and join in the fun.
Spring comes to New England on a February day, when the snow sparkles under an azure sky and afternoon temperatures can hit 8–10°C. Cloudless skies bring freezing nights. This is just the weather that maple syrup producers have been waiting for. During sunny days the sap runs in the maple trees, but the chill nights stop it getting high enough to bring the buds into leaf. This weather signals that it’s time to hammer taps into the trunks, perch galvanised buckets underneath to catch the sap, and get to work making maple syrup. The plink, plink of sap dripping into the buckets harmonises with the twitter of songbirds and the honks of the returning geese to announce that the year is turning towards summer, but maple syrup producers don’t want it to warm up too quickly. When the nights stop freezing, the sap makes its way to the buds and develops a bitter ‘buddy’ taste that brings the season to an end. Typically it lasts about six weeks, maybe eight in a leisurely spring. It’s a busy time. There are two fundamental tasks: collecting the sap from the maple trees (Acer saccharum) native to Canada and North-Eastern United States, and boiling it into syrup. Sap collection has not changed much over the centuries. While small producers use buckets with a lid to prevent dilution by rain or snow, larger producers, especially in mountainous countryside such as Quebec and Vermont, link trees with plastic tubing that pipes the sap straight into waiting tanks.  Empyting buckets of sap into a tank to take to a sugarhouse in Vermont Sugar is still made, though it’s even more expensive than maple syrup, so the days of using it as a basic sweetener are long gone. But still today, maple terminology is all about sugar – a stand of maple trees is a sugarbush; syrup is made in a sugar shack or sugar house by men called sugarmakers, who call their task sugaring. Tasteless sapOne might imagine that maple sap must taste like syrup – dilute, but sweet. Not at all. It is only 2 per cent sugar and it tastes like mineral water. So how did anyone discover that the huge effort of collecting and boiling it would be repaid with a sweet harvest?Native Americans were making it when European settlers arrived in Canada and New England. As Marc Lescarbot noted in his 1609 Histoire de Nouvelle France, they got “juice from trees and from it distil a sweet and agreeable liquid”. Settlers called maple products “Indian sugar” and “Indian molasses”, while Native Americans called white sugar “French snow”. Lacking iron cooking vessels until settlers brought them from Europe, Native Americans boiled sap in hollowed-out tree trunks by throwing in heated stones. This took days of work, and how anyone discovered the sweetness hidden in the tasteless sap remains a mystery. Legend claims that rather than melting ice from a frozen stream, a woman used sap dripping from a damaged tree to make a stew. As it evaporated it revealed its syrupy secret. Alternately, Tom McCrum, who heads the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association, suggests, “Ice sublimates: it can evaporate without melting, as you see when ice cubes shrink in your freezer. When a bough breaks, the dripping sap forms a kind of icicle – I call them ‘sapsicles’. Thawing and refreezing condenses them. I think people sucked them and found they were sweet.” Indeed, some Native Americans let their containers of sap freeze several times, each time skimming off the ice, and thus increasing the sugar content before boiling it. This effect now is achieved by the latest advance in maple syrup production, reverse osmosis, a technique that pumps the sap through membranes in a high-pressure chamber. The denser particles of sugar remain behind, bringing the sugar content of the sap up to 8 per cent and improving the yield per gallon. When the sap is boiling, billows of steam pour out of the sugar house, announcing a sugarmaker is at work. Neighbours stop to chat and to watch the bubbling sap darken. The sugarmaker tests it by pouring a little from a dipper back to see if it ‘aprons’ – falls off in a sheet rather than a stream. If so, he compares a syrup sample to the spectrum of ambers and browns on a grading chart. Traditionally, the delicate weak-tea shades fetch the highest price while the darker coffee-coloured shades are cheaper but more flavourful. Where to buy Maple syrup is often sold at roadside stands as here in Heath, Massachusetts But while all maple syrup is sweet, producers emphasise that it varies in both taste and colour. Early season syrup is light: dark syrup comes later when warmer weather changes the metabolism of the trees. Brooks McCutcheon, a young Massachusetts producer, explains: “On a warm day the syrup can change from amber to medium amber to dark all in one day.” He disputes the idea that dark syrup is inferior. “The difference between dark and light is like the difference between pale ale and stout,” he says. “Both are good.” Unlike most producers, who stockpile several days’ harvest until their tank is full, McCutcheon boils each day’s sap separately, then packs his syrup in pretty Italian glass bottles (rather than the more common metal or plastic containers) to show off its varied hues. Jill Mancivalano of Wilmington, Vermont sells syrup in a shop on the family farm. “I always invite customers to taste before they buy because the flavour varies so,” she says. “Some light syrups are fruity; others are nutty. The dark syrups are more intense, but sometimes they’re really fruity too.” She uses light syrup on pancakes or ice-cream, and the stronger syrups in baking and cooking. In the 18th century, Americans hoped maple products would make their newly independent country self-sufficient in sugar, and, in the 19th century, abolitionists argued its moral superiority. As William Cooper, a Pennsylvania sugarmaker, noted: “It is made by the hands of free men, whereas West India sugar is the product of the unwilling labour of slaves.” Even today, sugaring is still hard work. When speaking of the maple season, sugarmakers often repeat the saying, “Glad to see it come; glad to see it go.” Mark Lattanzi of Montague, Massachusetts taps three trees of his own plus a few belonging to neighbours. He spends an hour a day for six weeks tending his taps, and 12 hours each weekend boiling sap. His yield for the season is about ten gallons. “It’s crazy!” he says. “But it’s an addiction. Small guys like me and large producers all say the same – we just can’t imagine not doing it.” Fortunately, maple syrup lasts all year. Its golden rivulets brighten breakfast pancakes, and it’s equally good on porridge. New Englanders often bake or mash butternut squash or pumpkin with maple syrup, and it’s a traditional flavouring for baked beans. Canadians have many recipes for maple cakes, frostings and pies. Maple syrup flavours ice cream, cheesecakes and salad dressings, and it can sweeten tea. Innovative chefs brush maple syrup on salmon or scallops so they emerge from the pan with a lovely lacquer. Indeed, maple syrup invites experiments in the kitchen. The only caution is that heating it at a high temperature for a long time weakens the flavour, so use the stronger dark brown syrup in cooked dishes and keep cooking times short. Please visit our recipe index for some tantalising maple syrup recipes. |
