The season is coming, believe it or not, when the sugar maples start to run and maple producers start to think of the days and nights over the boiler. For those who consider Aunt Jemima or Mrs. Butterworth as the pinnacle of pancake potions, please give your head a shake. A vigorous shake. A go-to-the-chiropractor-shoulda-worn-a-HANS-device head shake that makes your eyes go wobbly for a hour and loosens dental work.
Jemima and Butterworth have as much to do with maple syrup as you do with Slovakian monetary policy and high school Calculus: Distant, unrecognizable, confusing and a bit strange.
For centuries before us white folks got here, the First Nations figured out that a small cut in a sugar maple tree would produce a sweet watery fluid in the early days of Spring. If you collect that tree water and heat it for a while over a fire, it becomes sticky and outrageously sweet with a taste that is nothing like honey, or corn or anything else except maple syrup. In exchange for tuberculosis and blankets, the First Nations taught us how to tap sugar maples and to make maple syrup.
The sap from a sugar maple only starts to rise up from the roots of mature trees when the daytime temperatures are above freezing. It is an initial harbinger of Spring being if not just around the corner, at least on the off-ramp to the boulevard a couple of turns away from the corner.
The first step is collecting the sap. In The Day, buckets were used to collect the tiny drips of sap from a hole drilled and tapped into the tree. The producer would use a horse-drawn sled to go from tree to tree, emptying each bucket into a big barrel, then bringing it all to the sugar shack. Some producers still do it Old School, but most use tubing that runs from tree to tree in a plumbing nightmare through the forest.
Collecting the sap is merely the start. Sap is almost all water, with trace elements of natural sugar and micronutrients up the wazoo. ("Up the Wazoo" is a scientific, very precise measurement term) To make syrup, the producer boils the sap for hours, boiling off the water, concentrating the indefinable flavours.
As a Rule of Thumb, 40 gallons of the sap makes 1 gallon of finished syrup. Most producers use a propane or oil-fired evaporator to boil off the water. Some still stick to the traditional methods, feeding split, dried oak and other hardwoods into the furnace, creating that heady scent of wood smoke, hot metal and boiling syrup that is only found at a sugar shack.
When the syrup is judged by the producer to be right, he or she drains off the batch for bottling and starts again; another batch boiled down to produce the 40 to 1 ratio of sap to syrup.
There are standards of course. The lightest, Canada #1 Light, has a little more water and a delicate taste that subtly whispers "maple" (complete with italics), on your pancakes or ice cream. That’s the grade exported most of the time, in tiny plastic decorative jugs emblazoned with "Souvenir of Canada". The quantity is usually a couple or four ounces.
At the other end of spectrum, Canada #3 Dark grabs your collar, slaps your face with the pancakes and screams "Yippy Kay Aye Yay MAPLE Motherf***er!" Then it steals your car.
This is stuff that we don’t export, as Canada is not keen on causing international incidents with a souvenir bottle of evaporated tree sap. Canada #3 Dark is usually found in gallon bottles with a WHMIS warning to hide the car keys and to cover your ears when you open it. Many Canadians are unaware of the existence of #3 Dark; they’re happy with Amber, the kind you’re most likely to find in a supermarket.
Which all leads to the gallon jug of Canada #3 Dark in my kitchen right now. A certain producer of maple products always has a stock of #3 Dark in their store at an Undisclosed Location in the country. While I was there today, they were running sap line and setting up a new set of trees they have adjudged to be ready to tap in a few weeks. A sure sign that Spring is not far off.
RoadDave 