The past few days I’ve been reading an amazing book – “The Heretic’s Daughter” by Kathleen Kent. The story is set in the late 1600’s in Salem Massachusetts during (you guessed it) the Salem Witch Trials. I don’t want to digress from my theme of Sugar Shackin’ by discussing the story at much length – except to say its a remarkable read. My point in bringing it up is that there’s a scene in which the main character Sarah Carrier goes off with her father and brothers to collect maple syrup that I thought was particularly evocative. At the beginning of March 1692 it goes:
“…The maple grove was very old, many of the trees forty of fifty feet high. Father told us that the Indians would come there to make their gashes in the trees, collect the sap in hollow logs, and thicken the sap by dropping heated rocks into it. Father chose the best, feeling carefully around the crags and fissures with his fingers, never tapping below a limb or close to a defect in the bark at the the Northern exposure. When he chose his site he gently hammered into the bark, in an upward motion, the concave rod, allowing the sap to flow downwards from the inner recesses of the tree. It would take hours to fill the buckets…”
I was reading this on Saturday morning and realized that it was indeed the big time of year here in New England when the sap is running and the sugar collectors are out in droves – hanging their buckets and firing up their kettles and stoves.
While most of us think of Vermont and Canada when it comes to maple syrup, there is a respectable sugar culture here in Connecticut. I drove out to East Haddam over the weekend to take photos of some of the buckets.
Modern collection methods are far less sensory and use drills to punch the plugs into maples all around the trunks rather than carefully hammering them in like Sarah Carrier’s father did, but the old fashioned aluminum setups are still pretty romantic looking.
Three buckets above for these mature maples. We’re having a very mild March here in Connecticut (hallelujah!) – rather than snow on the ground there were birds chirping and daffodils coming out of the ground nearby.
An inside look…
What “a sap” I am – I thought it just flowed out the trees rich and amber colored. Nope – clear.
Driving around I came across Rick’s Sugar Shack – set deep in the woods in East Haddam, Rick was having an open house. I was able to get a little insight into the syrup making process and take some shots of their maple stoves and rendering equipment – which as a California girl, was quite a revelation. I didn’t grow up with sugarin’ as part of my culture so I find this really charming.
I’ve always wondered what the smoke was all about – apparently it’s from a wood fired stove that heats a large cauldron that cooks the sap down and renders it into syrup. Here’s the main cooking in process:
Inside the pot there are four chambers that the liquid flows through as it’s rendered. You can see the clear sap in the far right chamber and the tone changes to deeper amber as it flows along.
You can really detect a smoky flavor in many local maple syrup products – particularly in maple candy. I’m certain that oak fired stoves have a different flavor than pine since the heat and burn rate is different with soft and hard woods.
The rendered syrup is strained and then made into candies or other goodies.
A candy machine waits to make new treats for visitors:
I discovered a treasure trove of recipes and ideas for using maple syrup other than simply pouring over pancakes – even though that is probably my favorite. I’ll be adding them this week – among them is Maple Mustard – and Maple Jelly (shown below) it is so surprisingly yummy you just won’t believe it!
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