Tapping the Maples

There was an article in yesterday's online Waterville Sentinel about maple syrup production. I was surprised to read that Maine's Somerset County produces more maple syrup than any other county in the country. My family moved to Somerset County back in 1978 and though I've returned to New Jersey, the rest of them still live there.

For a few years after we moved to Maine, my father made maple syrup himself. It was part of his back-to-the-land, survivalist phase. In contrast to the farmers interviewed in the article, Dad made the syrup the old-fashioned way. He tapped our sugar maples and those of some neighbors and hung covered buckets beneath them to catch the clear, slightly sticky sap. He collected the sap once a day, more frequently if the sap was running well, and eventually boiled it all down over a huge wood fire that burned all day.

On average, it takes about forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, depending on how sweet the sap is that year. Dad would generally get a better ratio of about twenty-nine gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup. After giving some of the finished product to each of the neighbors whose trees we used, he was left with just a few gallons for us. It was enough to last the year, though.

In March 1981 Dad had his gall bladder removed and wasn't supposed to lift the buckets of sap for at least a week after his surgery. Fortunately I was home from college for spring break during that week so I was able to help out. We drove the pickup truck down the road, stopping at each of our tapped trees. My job was to hop out, remove the buckets and empty the accumulated sap into a vat in the back of the truck. Then I replaced the buckets and we drove on to the next stand of sugar maples.

There's no sweetening I like better than real maple syrup. Its flavor is wild, smoky, and complex. A small taste reminds me of its origin, the stark image of trees in the snow. During our annual visits to Maine, we always buy a couple of gallons from a farmer who lives near my mother. I use it in cooking, over vanilla ice cream, and, of course, on waffles, pancakes, and French toast.

People who use those fake, artificially-flavored corn syrups like Mrs. Butterworth's don't know what they are missing.

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