THE MAGIC OF MAPLE

This month Diana shares three recipes using one of her all-time favourite ingredients

It’s hard to think of an ingredient – except for nuts – that seems more autumnal than maple syrup. It’s the colour of turning leaves, it flows languidly (suggesting comfort and lazy afternoons on the sofa), it tastes of pecans and brown sugar. But maple syrup is a product of the cusp between winter and spring. Maple sap flows when the temperature is above freezing during the day but below freezing at night. If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘sugar snow’ in New England or Quebec that’s what they mean, a snow which gives the right conditions for ‘sugaring’. The real experts can even smell it in the air. Mom-and-pop operations still tap the sap by drilling holes in the maple trees and hanging buckets into which it can drip. Drive around Vermont at this time of year and you can see metal buckets gleaming in the moonlight, and furls of smoke from the fires under the troughs in which the sap is boiled in the cold air. Everything looks bright, even at night, as light is reflected off the snow. Small producers work in their sugar ‘shacks’, small huts where they have their equipment, boiling the sap until it reduces to the required consistency. They keep going round the clock, helped by their family, dozing alongside the boiling sap. It only runs once a year so there isn’t time to sleep much.

Commercial companies use a network of plastic tubing – it has to be inspected daily as squirrels gnaw through it and suck the sap – which doesn’t look as cute but is much more efficient. The sap is pumped via these into huge stainless steel containers where, just as in the mom-and-pop outfits, it’s boiled. It takes 35 gallons of clear sap to produce a gallon of amber syrup, which explains the high price tag. Ever since my primary school teacher read us Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, I’ve loved maple syrup. The idea of boiling this golden liquid until you could pour it onto snow where it would set into sticky cobwebs, as in the Little House books, enchanted. I did, in my thirties, eventually get to a ‘sugar-on-snow’ party in Vermont where I ate it along with pickled cucumbers (the sourness cuts the sweetness) and cups of mulled cider. ‘Sugaring’ is a huge community event there, with parties where you eat thick slices of ham, slaw and baked potatoes, as well as maple-sweetened dishes.

Right now, believe it or not, there are six bottles of maple syrup in my cupboard, plus a huge plastic tub I dragged back on the plane from the States last year. My kids have inherited my love for it and a stash is essential for pancakes and French toast. It’s harder to find the dark grade here (originally the dark stuff was considered inferior) but seek it out. It has a stronger maple taste. Whatever you do, don’t settle for maple-flavoured syrup. The real Mccoy is pure – nothing is added or taken out – and there’s nothing like it.