Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff
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around the village and sparkling in the sunlight.
I was making just over fifty gallons of syrup in a good year, which means I was hauling and boiling about two thousand gallons of sap. It was backbreaking work, but I was energized by it, totally in thrall until my vertebrae literally gave out. Despite two surgeries to repair the damage and help from my children and neighbors collecting and boiling sap, I was finally forced to stop sugaring.
Though it has been over ten years since I made syrup, I still get the itch and longing in late winter when daylight grows and temperatures regularly climb above freezing. I feel like a baseball fan as Grapefruit League games approach or a fisherman awaiting opening day. Spring is less about colorful flowers and the smell of softening soil than the aroma of wood smoke mixed with sweet steam.
During the season, I drive around to see who is tapping and where. Unless I do so, I feel a hunger, an emptiness that no number of waffles smothered in syrup can satisfy. I stop into sugarhouses to chat and smell the mapley moist warmth of these New England saunas where there is always a welcome, some equipment to be tinkered with, and a few stories to be shared. I found that you can stop boiling sap, but never quite quit being a sugarmaker once it’s in your blood.
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SUGAR MAKING is ancient, simple, yet somehow mysterious. A familiar homegrown local food in my corner of the world, it nevertheless seems exotic, the transformation from sap to syrup almost magical. It’s part art, alchemy, and science. Though looking at a liquid boil is not much more exciting than the proverbial opportunity of watching paint dry, sugaring not only addicts sugarmakers but intrigues everyone from grammar schoolers to octogenarians, thousands of whom are drawn yearly to visit sugarhouses and watch the process. Perhaps our fascination has something to do with our love of sweets, our nostalgia for simpler times, hunger for healthful and pure foods, or that this first crop of the new year takes us from frigid winter to the threshold of spring and yields a golden, luminescent liquid that seems the very distillation of sunshine itself.
Maple sugaring may be the most Yankee of Yankee activities. On one hand, it has an old-timey backwoods image, but shrewdly uses high-tech equipment like reverse osmosis, vacuum pumps, and check-valve spiles. There’s a dirt-road, country-store sales pitch, yet sophisticated marketing sells not just a product but an experience, a sense of place and time. If it’s true that we are what we eat, maple syrup has an edgy difference. With rare exception, it’s a food harvested not from plantations, but wild-grown forests. These are managed to favor the sweet trees by people serious about long-term, sustainable stewardship of the woods. Maple is at the confluence of wild nature and culture, a hunter-gatherer activity that’s become somewhat domesticated. This connection to ancient food harvesting may be part of the magic.
Maple syrup is a true marker of place, a symbol of authenticity and deep heritage that is produced in one region of the world. Though in the United States it’s primarily a product of the Northeast and upper Midwest, sugaring can be a lens focusing on and illuminating a wide swath of America’s cultural geography. It’s a story of entrepreneurship, technical innovation, family life, and our relationship to nature. Its history is rooted in Native American traditions and the politics of national independence and the antislavery movement. Nevertheless, maple issues are as contemporary as the economics of international trade. Sugaring is sensitive to environmental change from invasive species, air pollution, and global warming; some observers believe that sugarmakers may be the canary in the coal mine for such environmental transformations. Recently, maple has become emblematic of increasing interest in independent lifestyles and healthful food choices.
The most Yankee of Yankee activities
In the United States, commercial sugaring regions extend south to Virginia’s mountains and as far west as Minnesota. But for generations Canada has produced the vast majority of maple syrup, with the province of Quebec making close to 80 percent of the world’s total. A syrup cartel, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, tightly regulates marketing and production in our northern neighbor. With a strategic reserve, or surplus, of tens of millions of pounds of syrup, it not only controls the wholesale price in Canada, but largely in this country as well. Though sometimes pejoratively referred to as the OPEC of syrup, with a barrel of the sweet stuff commanding a price much higher than the standard West Texas Intermediate crude, even American producers acknowledge that the federation has beneficially stabilized prices in a business otherwise subject to wide supply and price swings from the vicissitudes of weather.
With production in good years at well over a million gallons, Vermont is by far the leading syrup producer in the United States, usually making twice as much as its closest rival, New York, and generally two times what the other five New England states produce combined. Certainly, in the public mind Vermont is the place most intimately and immediately identified with syrup, and the state has long been a leader in research, regulation, and inspection. Fortunately, Vermont’s stature in the maple world has, to some degree, radiated by association to the other New England states. While New England is not the big player on the world maple stage, it is a place where the sugaring culture reaches its apotheosis, looming larger than what is revealed by mere measurements in gallons of syrup or trees tapped.
Maple sugaring exemplifies the classic New England values of connectedness to land and community, Yankee ingenuity, observation of the natural world, heritage pride, entrepreneurship, homespun hospitality, make-do and can-do, and simplicity. If you want to understand much of present-day America in a grounded, tangible, and fundamental way, sugaring is a palpable means. Just as the nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau found universal truths in the details of particulars, so too can larger truths about America be wrested from the sugaring culture of this region.
Sugaring simultaneously keeps alive both the old and contemporary New England, whether in the shadow of Hartford office towers or the most rural precincts of Maine. It’s not a “Bert and I” story, a Yankee magazine puff piece, and it doesn’t look like an advertisement for Pepperidge Farm. The much-vaunted and lamented New England character is not dying. It’s present in the sugarmakers who each year return to their evaporators like migratory birds. They remind us that the essence of a region is not just in what we see, however careful our observations. It’s in the doing of something that binds people to a place where they are firmly rooted in the here-and-now while simultaneously able to reach back to deeper connections.
America needs maple syrup. Not so much to drench its pancakes to satisfy an insatiable sweet tooth, but to tell us who we are, where we’ve been, and where we might be going. It ties the past to the present and the present to the future. It’s a small world that reveals something larger and more fundamental, like a hilltop sugarbush offering a distant view.
Maple Dip
Yield: 2 cups
INGREDIENTS
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 cup pure maple sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Fresh fruit slices, such as apple, pineapple, banana, peach, or pear
DIRECTIONS
1. Combine cream cheese, maple sugar, and vanilla extract in a bowl; mix until smooth.
2. Chill in refrigerator until ready to serve.
3. Spoon into serving bowl and serve with the fresh fruit slices.
Recipe by Wenzel Sugarhouse
Butternut Squash/Maple Soup
Yield: 8 servings
INGREDIENTS
2 ounces butter
2 cups chopped onion
1 tablespoon cornstarch
4 cups chicken stock
3 pounds cooked, mashed butternut squash
Salt