Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff
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continuum, seeing in his syrup not only the weight and density of sugar, but of time. He’s never alone, even when he’s by himself, he assured me.
• • • • • • •
LIKE LYLE, Mike Girard has a large collection of sugaring artifacts that he displays at meetings and in his sugarhouse, home, and business office. He feels a similar connection to a collective sugaring heritage that goes beyond a general sense of history. His part in the continuum of maple culture is deeply personal because he has attached himself to a piece of sloping sugarbush that’s been tapped for over a century and a quarter, by him since 1976. The land is his touchstone. More than ownership, his relation to the land is one of belonging.
Though discouraged by his grandfather who sugared in Quebec, Mike began his maple ventures in 1960 at age eleven after observing some roadside buckets on a trip with his dad. Soon he was tapping on the family dairy farm in Simsbury, Connecticut, using an evaporator his father bought. Eventually the operation grew to six hundred taps. He is an athletic and articulate man with neatly trimmed dark hair who runs a construction company displaying a bulldozer on its logo. You wouldn’t immediately peg him as someone deeply in love with trees and a plot of land for its natural, sustainable values, but sugaring has made it so.
Mike recalls making maple candy instead of doing homework, selling it at recess during fourth and fifth grades, much to the chagrin of his Catholic school nuns. Eventually he built a sugarhouse on the farm, but wanted more than roadside trees. After diligent searching, he bought land and a sugarhouse just about a mile south of Vermont on Number Nine Road in Heath, Massachusetts, a town of about four hundred souls. Although it’s eighty-five miles from his Simsbury home, a trip that gets longer as he gets older, he fell in love with the property and its history of maple production.
The operation was begun by George Brown in 1887, and Mike speaks about it as one might an inheritance. He considers himself a steward, another in a line of several sugarmakers who have tried their luck here with nature and a bit of tinkering talent. Though it has been more than a century since Brown’s horses collected sap, and throughout the years Mike has installed over three and a half miles of vacuum tubing through the woods, he feels a bond with this land and its past that almost makes the differences in technology illusory. The sugarhouse has been rebuilt a couple of times and expanded, but the structure would probably be familiar to Brown despite an oil-fired evaporator and installation of battens over gaps between the old boards so wide “you could throw your hat through.” For decades the woods have been carefully managed for maples, and though storms have wrought sudden and sometimes violent modifications, the place has a purposeful, time-defiant personality formed by years of sugaring. “I suppose there will always need to be changes to keep maple viable,” Mike observed, “but it’s the memories that keep sugaring and the place alive.”
Some memories are bittersweet, such as the closure a couple of years ago of Peters General Store about three hundred yards down the road. For almost a century, they had sold syrup from Mike’s sugarhouse. Other memories bring a smile, such as the two dozen times he won first prize at the Heath Fair, and the other ribbons he’s garnered.
Mike took me through the cupola-topped board-and-batten sugarhouse with its adjacent two-bay woodshed. It holds thirty-three cords no longer needed since the purchase in 2000 of an oil-fired three-and-a-half-by-twelve-foot Darveau “Mystique” evaporator with digital auto draw-off, preheater, and air injection. He describes the machine as looking like “a locomotive that runs nowhere.” The sugaring operation is like a living thing to Mike, and as we stand in the sugarhouse he recalls his predecessors, the evaporators they used, the number of taps they had, and the price they were paid for a gallon of syrup. He knows when the roof was rebuilt and the sugarhouse moved eight feet back from the road. These stories are his patrimony, his sustenance.
Mike remembers every ice storm, tornado, and gypsy moth outbreak that damaged his trees. He knows when each part of the sugar-bush was thinned, and has planted plots of experimental “supersweet” trees from Cornell and the University of Vermont. He started with one thousand taps and went to thirty-five hundred by using trees all over town in partnership with the grandson of Francis Galipo, the man who succeeded Brown in 1929. He worked with the young man from the time the kid was twelve until his untimely death in a snowmobile accident at thirty-two.
Now down to about eight hundred taps, Mike’s son Mikey, who has assisted him for over thirty years, does most of the boiling and sugar-bush work, with Mike as his assistant. Mikey is strong and rangy, sharing his father’s delight in a sugarmaker’s life. He says sugaring frees one’s mind to “think about life and where you’re going.”
Mike Girard may have handed much of the operation over to his son, but he remains embedded in this landscape as much as his predecessors. His presence will be felt as long as there are maple trees here and people to care for them.
Orange Maple Glazed Chicken
Yield: 20 Chicken Wings
INGREDIENTS
1½ cups buttermilk
⅓ cup maple syrup
2 oranges, seeded, peeled, and sectioned
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
20 chicken wings
DIRECTIONS
1. Mix all ingredients except chicken wings in a blender to make a coarse puree.
2. Put wings and puree in a gallon-size plastic bag and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, turning occasionally.
3. Grill wings, periodically basting with the marinade, until they are cooked through, being careful to avoid scorching.
Recipe by Karen Broderick
Maple Parsnips
Yield: variable
INGREDIENTS
Parsnips
Maple syrup
DIRECTIONS
1. Scrub the parsnips until clean.
2. Cut parsnips into pieces. (Homegrown parsnips need not be cored, but store-bought ones tend to have a woody center that may need to be removed.)
3. Steam cubed parsnips until tender, about 10 minutes.
4. Mash and add maple syrup to taste.
This recipe tastes best when you use dark maple syrup! Its more assertive flavor perfectly balances the flavor of the parsnips.
Recipe by Pat Dubos
| • • • • • | The End of Maple? | • • • • • |
KILLERS ARE ON THE LOOSE. Invading aliens are attacking the old industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts, and surrounding towns. Almost thirty-four thousand street and yard trees in 110 square miles, largely maples, have disappeared. An additional fourteen hundred acres of forested land have been stripped of maples, birches, and elms. Entire residential neighborhoods are practically denuded, leaving barren streets and unshaded homes. The invaders have coal-black bodies stippled with white spots, six bluish feet, and striped antennae that can be more than twice their body length. Fearsome-looking creatures, they are fortunately no more than an inch and a quarter long.
It sounds like a science fiction plot from some Hollywood B movie requiring a superhero’s intervention. But there’s no unspeakable horror threatening from outer space, and the courageous champion fighting this calamity is neither more powerful than a locomotive nor leaps tall buildings at a single bound. He’s a soft-spoken entomologist with a beard and ponytail who wears jeans and work boots.
If you think the mundane terrestrial origins of this animal or its diminutive size is reason not to fear the end of maple trees in our region, then you probably are not aware that the American chestnut was once a dominant