Fleur-de-Sugaring

Pure maple syrup is made by gathering and concentrating the slightly sweet sap of the sugar maple tree, found only in the northeast of the U.S. and Canada. As winter comes to an end, the sugarmaker uses the clues of nature to figure out when the timing is right to tap the trees. “Sugar weather”–when the nights are below freezing and the days are mild–makes the sap flow.

Tapping into that science and art requires cool heads and cooler temperaments.

My sister Lee Ann and her husband Tim started maple sugaring three or four years ago at their home in Roxbury, CT. They use kits purchased from Agway. Each kit cost $35-$50 and came with instructions, two or three buckets, a drill bit to make the holes, and one spile (spout) per bucket. Each kit includes hooks, bucket covers, to keep out rain, snow and debris, and cheesecloth for filtering.

When the time feels right, the sugar farmer drills a hole into his selected trees about waist high, fits a metal spout into the hole and a bucket is hung from a hook on the spout. A maple tree should be at least 10 inches in diameter, so it takes about 40 years for a tree to reach tappable size. Proper tapping does not endanger the health of the tree and a healthy sugar maple can provide sap every year for 100 years or more.

Tim: This year, we did a minimalist collection of four small maple trees, close together, by the driveway. I collected the sap for four days, Sunday through Thursday (nothing flowed on Friday or Saturday because it was too cold.) The sap was stored outside, in a large stainless steel pot, in the woodshed under a tarp. We collected maybe 15 gallons of sap.

Tapper Tim

Yields can vary greatly from year to year, and depend upon the length of the season, the sweetness of the sap, and many complex conditions of nature, such as weather conditions, soil, tree genetics, and tree health. Sap flow requires freezing nights and warm (but not hot) days. These must be in a long enough series to allow the sap to move in the trees. Prolonged warm spells or cold snaps during the season may halt sap flow for several days, and it may start again when conditions are favorable. As a result, 24-hour workdays are often interspersed with two, three or even more days of relative inactivity. This gives the sugarmaker a chance to recover lost sleep, make repairs, clean equipment, and get ready for the next sap run.

Tim: The first year I tapped five trees, a couple with two buckets, and gathered a lot of sap over days/weeks. The harvested sap was collected and boiled down for consecutive nights, all indoors, to the consternation of someone.

Lee Ann: The upstairs windows fogged and my hair frizz became crystalized.

Tim: LA gets nervous as the process monopolizes the stove for hours.

Lee Ann: With five of the largest pots we own on five burners.

Tim: Leaving sugar residue around the stove and odors throughout the house, all done in the evening, when some are groggy.  It takes five to eight hours to boil the sap down, depending on the amount. That is, until two years ago when I purchased a large propane-fired grill to boil the sap down outside.

Maple sap, as it comes from the tree is a clear, slightly sweet liquid. The sugar content ranges from one to four percent. The sap must be evaporated as soon as possible because the freshest sap makes the best quality syrup.

Maple syrup is traditionally made in a building called a “sugarhouse” –the name of the building comes from the time when most sap was actually turned into sugar. Sugarhouses vary in size and shape, each with its own character. Each sugarhouse will have vent at the top, a cupola—which is opened to allow the steam of the boiling syrup to escape the building. Throughout the maple producing regions, steam rising from the cupola is a signal that maple syrup season is under way. Antique or modern, each sugarhouse contains an evaporator used to boil down the sap into syrup. Many backyard and hobby sugarmakers use smaller arrangements, or boil down sap on the kitchen stove.

Lee Ann: Then we bring it inside, pour it into one large pot for another five or so hours of boiling.

Tim: Having a wide pan, with a 2-inch level of sap on a hot stove boils it down faster.

Lee Ann: It would although we usually bring it inside when the outside tank runs out of propane and we have a pasta pot full to boil down.

The sugarmaker concentrates his attention to the front of the evaporator where the boiling sap is turning a golden color as it approaches being maple syrup. From time to time he will check the temperature of the boiling liquid. When it reaches seven and a half degrees above the boiling point of water, it has reached proper density and has become maple syrup.

Tim: The boiling began on Saturday. It went through the day. The wind kept blowing out the grill flame so I hung a tarp as a windbreak, and it went on until dark. We stopped the flame, kept the reduced sap out overnight, and brought it in on Sunday for the final boil. LA likes to be directly involved in the final action, including sterilizing the bottles, filtering the mix, bottling the syrup, and cooling it off before refrigerating.

Coming from the tree, maple sap is approximately 98% water and 2% sugar. When the syrup is finished, it is only 33% water and 67% sugar. At this stage the finished boiling syrup is drawn off the pan and is filtered.

Tim: There is an art to when to end the boiling. As the sap gets to a continuous boiling point, the thickening occurs fast, just as the sap turns to syrup it turns from clear to amber color, and you must turn off the heat. From past mistakes, we made a cup of crystalline maple sugar, and…once, even burned it into thick molasses-like stuff, just as it began to crystallize in the pot! That event caused the smoke alarm to go off, woke me on the couch, and then an irate, skinny, speedy, early-to-bed person took over the job—without much joy.

Lee Ann: All true except the skinny part…and don’t forget to mention that the fire department showed…when they came into the house the fireman asked if we were maple sugaring. He had been there, done that.

Sir Syrup

The length of the sugaring season is totally dependent upon the weather. As the days become increasingly warmer, and the nights rarely get below freezing, the buds on the branches of the maple trees begin to swell, marking the end of the season. Chemical changes take place within the tree as baby leaves begin to form within the buds. At this time the sap is no longer suitable for boiling down into syrup.

Lee Ann: When it is all done, it feels worth it. Doing a few batches is plenty…collecting for an entire month is demanding. Boiling only on weekends is manageable. Last weekend we filled three 8-oz. bottles and one mini bottle with about two tablespoons of syrup. I read once that you don’t make maple syrup for the money—TRUE. But it is delicious and tastes very fresh. Our first year, some batches had a woody flavor. The colors varied from light to dark. This year the batch is very dark, maybe Grade A.

Mmm, Mmm Maple Syrup: I had little writing to do with this newsletter, but it sure stirred my maple syrup craving. So, tonight I made one of my favorite salads. Baby greens topped with strips of roasted beets and goat cheese. I dress the salad and with a simple mixture of Balsamic vinegar and maple syrup (2-1, to taste). Laurie Lynch

Written on Slate: “We must keep these waters for wild rice, these trees for maple syrup, our lakes for fish, and our land and aquifers for all of our relatives—whether they have fins, roots, wings, or paws.” –Winona LaDuke

 

Fleur-de-Trilogy

I took a long trip this winter—945 pages worth.

The first book of my self-selected trilogy was Taras Grescoe’s The Devil’s Picnic, Around the World in Pursuit of Forbidden Fruit.

The second book, also a mouthful: Provence, 1970, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and The Reinvention of American Taste.

The third was simply The World of Venice by Jan Morris.

My bedside reading of history, adventure and travel kept me going through the doldrums of our short-day, long-night winter.

To research The Devil’s Picnic, Taras Grescoe spent a year in search of and consuming products that are taboo in certain countries and not in others—Norwegian moonshine, Bolivian coca leaves, Swiss-distilled absinthe, and raw-milk cheeses of France. In Spain, he dined on gooseneck barnacles, baby eels, and pig testicles. He smuggled forbidden temptations into Singapore—Wrigley’s chewing gum, Marks & Spencer poppy seed crackers, and yes, a copy of Fanny Hill.

While describing his escapades, Grescoe also reflects on the role of Big Brother governments trying to “protect” their citizens and the rights and needs of individuals to seek thrills, flex their egos, challenge authority, or to simply disappear.

When something is banned, Grescoe suggests, that “thing” becomes stronger, costlier, and more coveted. Or, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap.”

Hefty doses of history are built into the book, examining control measures, taxing schemes, societal pressures. After the Volstead Act was passed, prohibiting the production, sale, and transportation of “intoxicating liquors” in the U.S., Grescoe reports that 57,000 druggists in Chicago applied to sell “medicinal” liquor. During the 13 years of Prohibition, half a million Americans, most who couldn’t afford lawyers, went to prison for Prohibition violations. Does this sound all too familiar?

Well, that’s history.

In 1970, I was a gangly, long-limbed high schooler. My favorite meal was liver and onions and Italian cuisine was simply “Nene’s cooking,” coupled with a few rousing games of canasta.

But for the generation that included food writer M.F.K. Fisher, PBS television’s The French Chef Julia Child, French cookbook author Simone Beck, American-in-France cookbook author Richard Olney, America’s cooking authority James Beard, and Knopf editor Judith Jones, the end of 1970 brought an accidental alignment of cooking stars in the South of France.

Within the pages of Provence, 1970 you can join these food notables as they gather in Provencal kitchens and dining rooms. To write the book, Luke Barr read letters and listened to his grandmother’s recollections of her trip to France in September 1970 with her older sister, M.F.K. Fisher. He interviewed Judith Jones as well as the French chauffeur who drove many of these culinary legends to the villages and markets of Provence. Barr’s piece de resistance was finding M.F.K. Fisher’s journal of her 1970 visit in a storage unit in California. With those accounts, he brings together meals, conversations, arguments, rivalries, and menus of that magical time, presenting readers with a view of the personalities in a changing food world, like one peeks into a pot of soup simmering on the stove.

By the time I switched to The World of Venice, I was fully sated on French and American cuisine and ready to stroll along a quay, cross St. Mark’s Piazza, and float on a skiff down the Grand Canal. I found myself wishing. I wish I had read this book before I went to Venice. I wish I could have splurged on a gondola ride. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride gondolas drawn by seahorses…

Jan Morris wrote the book in 1960, then revised it in 1974, 1983, and finally, in 1993. With her time spent living in Venice, researching its history, and getting to know its people, she provides a look at Venetians—from aristocrats to popes to fishmongers and shipbuilders—and examines their personality traits, from their stubborn conceit to inbred melancholy. She carves out the special place where the culture of Venice reigns between the West and the East, the city halfway between the rising sun and the setting sun.

Morris gives the reader a sense of the vast pull of Venice paired with its maze-like community. There are said to be more than 3,000 alleyways in Venice, and poet Robert Browning delighted in telling people he found one so narrow he couldn’t open his umbrella. Nietzsche, Hitler, Dickens, Hemmingway, and Longfellow all sauntered down those alleys, as did Monet, Renoir, Turner, and Whistler.

She makes the “streets full of water” come alive with the everyday reality of dustbin barges, milk boats, fishing trawlers, fruit and vegetable scows, canoes and cruise ships, military vessels, tourist vaporettos, and yes, gondolas. Then, there is the other side of reality: the dredging, the flow of tides, the sinking of buildings, the rivers feeding into the lagoon, the mudflats, the floods, the fragility of Venice.

Yet, with all of the allure and fantasy of Venice, Morris also points to the order and logic. Since the 12^th century, Venice has been divided into six neighborhoods or sestieri. Within each, the houses are numbered consecutively, from beginning to end. The sestiere of San Marco begins at No. 1 (The Doge’s Palace) and ends at No. 5562 (near Rialto Bridge.) In all, there are 29,254 house numbers in city of Venice—and the postman “begins at No. 1, “ Morris writes, “and goes on till he finishes.”

Morris dedicates a section of her book to The Bestiary, the stone-carved animals, of Venice. There are crocodiles and crabs, spiders, snakes and porcupines. There are carnivores gorging on their prey: a fox with a cock, a griffon with a rat—I don’t think I saw any of those. But the lions, the lions! Morris writes no less than five delightful paragraphs describing the lions of Venice. “I cannot help thinking that the old Venetians went a little queer about lions…” What a fun read. Laurie Lynch

What’s on Your Shelf? Marina always keeps me on my toes. You book-buying grandmothers, check out this video:

https://www.facebook.com/rebelgirls/videos/1596694693691853/

Written on Slate: “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” –C.S. Lewis