Sugaring Off
"Sugaring Off"
"Nature supplies good things in abundance, yet she suffers them not to be won without toil."
The Greek philosopher-Xenophon
Among the folklore of maple-sugaring is an old Indian legend that at one time the
sap of the maple tree was almost pure syrup and that when tasted by one of the gods
he found it to be too good and too easily obtained. It would be, he thought, too
little prized. Accordingly, he diluted the sap of the maple until its sweetness was
barely discernible. "Now my nephews", he said, "will have to labor hard to make
sugar from this sap, and it will be much more valuable to them in the future time."
The settlers of colonial America learned from the
Indians the value and the toil of maple sugar. Because of the expense and difficulty
in securing cane sugar from the Indies many colonists, in spite of the labor,
looked upon the sugar maple as a gift from their own God, an..."unfailing source
of sweetness... from a benevolent providence."
Maple sap is thin, barely sweet, and as colorless as water. Forty gallons of sap
are required to produce one gallon of syrup or eight pounds of sugar. Hundreds of
trees are tapped and many more cut for firewood.
In the Spring, when the days and the nights and the 
sun and the frost are about equal, the sap begins to run. The sap is diverted
through spiles whittled of Sumac. An iron rod was inserted through the soft center
to provide a cauterized channel through which the sap would flow into a hand made
trough.
The sap was then gathered in buckets 
made of maple wood so as not to affect the taste and carried by shoulder yoke
or sled then stored in barrels to be emptied into kettles strung from a pole over
an open fire. The process of evaporation continued for days until the kitchen
was well supplied with tubs of sugar and jugs of syrup for daily use.
An English settler, in the early 1800s, found the whole business more bother than it
was worth. He wrote "that if a man had no sugar but what he made from the maple tree, and
he knew no more of making that sugar than I do, his wife...must learn to drink her tea
without sugar".
"Maple sugar
is a peculiarly American product and, as such, unadorned and unadulterated, fills
a niche all its own... When made in small quantities--that is, quickly from the
first run of the sap-it has a wild delicacy of flavor that no other sweet can
match. What you smell in freshly cut maple wood is in it. It is then, the distilled
essence of the tree."
Source: Herkimer Home State Historic Site
See also:Recipes
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