Despite the region’s long association with maple sugaring, even here in New England you have to ask if it’s the real deal, because some cost-conscious restaurants don’t serve it. If you’ve grown up on maple syrup or acquired the taste later in life, you can’t stomach so-called “table” or “pancake” syrup. They may advertise maple flavor, depict quaint cabins on their label, or have “Vermont” in their name, but they are viscous, cloying, and have a manufactured aftertaste. Maple syrup is made from the pure, clear sap of maple trees. While table or pancake syrups are not made from tables or flapjacks, as the names seem to suggest, they are generally concocted from corn syrup and may use sodium benzoate, cellulose gum, and artificial flavor with propylene glycol, sulfites, and dextrose. Used to be that sometimes a minuscule amount of actual maple syrup was added, but that seems largely a thing of the past. Sure, real maple syrup is a bit pricey, but when you discover the labor that goes into making it, it’s a bargain. I spent more than a decade of frenetic days, long nights, sweat and aching muscles finding out by running a small sugarhouse in the old mill village of Collinsville, Connecticut, once a world capital of axe and machete manufacture.
A couple of tablespoons or so of golden syrup hardly seemed sufficient when drizzled over my goodly stack of waffles punctuated with dark-blue fruity dots, but I poured it gingerly over the crispy grid of squares, knowing what little I was using took about a quart and a half of sap to create. Like in gold mining, where tons of rock are crushed, sifted, and treated to produce a few ounces of precious metal, a sugarmaker gathers large quantities of sap and by boiling and other clever innovations drives off the water and concentrates the sugar. Maple syrup is nothing more than condensed maple sap. The only added ingredient—leaving no taste, color, or odor—is the sugarmaker’s considerable labor. And usually that labor is itself the producer’s principal reward, for few earn much cash at it. Only a tiny percentage of big sugarmakers using thousands or even tens of thousands of taps will make a good living. The vast majority, hobbyists and small operators, make little or no money.
In spite of sugaring’s demanding bull work that might harden and obscure metaphysical notions, sugarmakers are a remarkably philosophic group. Regardless of the number of taps or size of the evaporator, sugaring is a seasonal rite of passage, a species of secular religion attaching a person to the larger cycles and rhythms of nature and life. Sugarmakers describe it as an addiction, a fever, even a contagious disease. It’s easy to get hooked, almost impossible to stop. Getting a few dollars for their work is rewarding, but for most producers it’s not their principal motivation.
“You can be successful at any size,” says maple impresario Bruce Bascom of New Hampshire, one of the nation’s largest producers, packers, wholesalers, and equipment dealers; “it just depends on what you want to get out of it.” As with a vegetable garden, a person can grow a few tomatoes and cucumbers, plant corn and rows of radishes sufficient for his family and a few friends, or can expand enough for sales at a roadside stand or get even bigger and wholesale the crop. One tap or a hundred thousand, sugaring can be a life-changing experience.
Backyard sugaring remains a time-honored activity that can stay homebound and close-knit or grow into a large company. With a season that lasts only about six weeks, maple lends itself to the devoted amateur, demonstrating that the passions of our free time are not necessarily frivolous, but can represent the best in dedication and craftsmanship. “It can be brutally hard work and the hours beyond exhausting,” Bascom told me, “but the sap run is short enough to withstand.” Until the advent of new technologies in the 1980s making large quantities easier to process, it was almost always part-time, something that dairy and other farmers did to make a few dollars in mud season so they could buy seed and other necessities. To this day, only a relatively few are in the maple business year-round.
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A NEIGHBOR’S ancient sugar maple crashing to the ground in a violent autumn windstorm over twenty-five years ago began my education as a syrup maker. She missed summer shade, splashy fall color, and the tree’s muscular winter limbs, but most of all she longed for the sap. Partially heating her house by woodstove, she used to keep a pot of sap simmering on the hot cast iron to moisten the dry interior air. The dark syrup obtained as a by-product had a slightly burnt flavor, but made at home, it was the best she had ever tasted.
The next February she asked permission to tap the two large maples that then stood like pillars on either side of my front walk. I watched in fascination as white wood spooled from holes drilled with a carpenter’s brace. Using a small hammer, she lightly tapped galvanized spiles into the openings and then attached a couple of gallon milk containers using picture-frame wire. Every few seconds a drop of clear liquid fell into the jugs with a heartbeat-like pulse. I was mesmerized.
I became as devoted as a daily soap opera fan to watching the containers, and they quickly superseded my bird feeders as objects of out-the-window interest and a measure of the changing season. My glances through the glass became an obsession, and even when I was out of the house my mind was drawn back to the trees. Warmer, sunnier days meant a continuous dribble, but when the temperature did not get much above freezing or the sky was overcast, drips were slow and far between. Nothing happened on cold days, and it made me anxious. I began describing the weather not by the usual conventions of cracker-barrel forecasters and meteorologists but by the amount of sap and frequency of drops, as if they were as probative as a changing barometer or cloud formations. I was hooked.
The following year, I put in four taps of my own and boiled sap on my kitchen stove, burning one pot, curling a few pieces of already loose wallpaper, and producing almost a pint of thin, cloudy, but tasty dark syrup. Next season, I bought the most powerful twin hot plate my hardware store could find and boiled in my garage, far from any wallpaper. With my backyard and neighbor’s trees recruited for the cause, I had eight taps and made almost a half gallon of the golden liquid, which I bottled in half-pint mason jars and gifted to smiles and rave reviews.
No twelve-step program for me. Not even a twelve-tap program. I was a confirmed maple-oholic. I made a pilgrimage to the sugarhouse of Rob Lamothe, a genial, bearded Pied Piper of sugaring in the next town with a growing family operation and a brisk equipment business. Rob didn’t have to give a sales pitch. His generosity sharing knowledge and natural enthusiasm for an activity he loved were infectious. Securing permission from more neighbors to tap trees, I tossed my milk jugs and bought the traditional sixteen-quart galvanized buckets and a barrel evaporator—a horizontal thirty-five-gallon drum set on legs so it could be used like a woodstove. It was fitted with a flat-bottom pan on top in which to boil sap. I had twenty-one taps and made five gallons of syrup.
The next year, I received permission to use the trees at both the Congregational church down the street and the phone company, whose nearby switching station had a maple out front. I had thirty-four taps. The season after that, I visited Rob just as he returned from his ancestral Quebec with a load of new and used equipment. I purchased a small two-by-four-foot professional-style evaporator. It had twin stainless-steel pans that separated fresh sap from nearly finished syrup, thereby providing continuous flow of the transforming liquid. I bought a 150-gallon storage tank, a hydrometer for measuring the density of syrup, a grading kit, and plastic jugs just like the big guys used for their product. Eventually, I had over eighty taps along the streets and in the yards of homes and businesses throughout the small downtown where I live within sight of town hall.
Sugaring captured my imagination, was a lifestyle, became part of my identity. I defined the years by the sugaring weather, the sweetness of sap, and the amount of syrup I produced. I met other sugarmakers, went to maple meetings, and was eventually elected to the board of the Maple Syrup Producers Association of Connecticut. There was excitement in the way sugarmakers always looked forward to the future, the grand gamble with Mother Nature and new technologies and products. The wisdom of a deep heritage shared with old-timers tempered innovation and kept cultural amnesia at bay. They might grumble about adverse weather, new government regulations, and the cost of replacement equipment, but their complaints were always softened with a joy in producing something natural that simply made people happy. I had dreams of expanding my somewhat urban experiment in agriculture, though I stopped short of installing tubing, which would have had to be exceedingly high or tie up traffic. Still, it would have been