Canadian history lesson never tasted so sweet
A pop-up sugar shack will let downtown Toronto tap into Quebec’s maple syrup culture
March break has a history rooted in sugar highs.
The annual week off from school started so kids could stay home to help their parents on the sugar bush, tapping maple trees and turning sap to syrup and sugary treats, at least according to unproven legend among GTA sugar-shack staffers.
“The teachers were like, ‘Do we beat them or join them?’ ” and March break was born, says Ellen Wilkes Irmisch, resource interpreter with Conservation Halton, home to one of the area’s few sugar shacks where sap flows.
It’s a history still played out today across Ontario and Quebec, as parents and children “sugar off” during maple syrup season every March.
From First Nations people to every school-tripping first-grader, maple syrup has always been an important part of Canadian culture.
“It resonates so much,” says Wilkes Irmisch, who works mainly at Crawford Lake in Milton. “It’s full circle. You think of First Nations people putting it in meat or putting it in soups or just something sweet to eat.”
Downtown Toronto is poised to tap into Quebecois maple syrup culture this weekend as a pop-up sugar shack comes to town. The typically rural activity will take over the waterfront via À la Feuille d’ Érable (“At the Maple Leaf”), a sugar shack from Mont-Saint-Grégoire, Que.
“Not everyone can make it out of the city. Ontario and Quebec both obviously have a really robust, longstanding tradition of sugaring off,” says Mira Shenker, spokeswoman for Waterfront Toronto, which will play host to traditional Quebecois music and maple taffy making.
Urbanites usually need to head out of the city for such a sweet sampling or to the sugar bushes of Quebec, which produce 70 per cent of the world’s maple syrup and where visitors might see as many as 40,000 taps extracting sap in one location.
At Mountsberg Conservation Area west of Milton, the more than 600 buckets still look impressive. They’re not completely modernized (the larger sugar bushes run their sap through pipelines), but demonstrating history is paramount at Mountsberg.
“Sugar maples grow in the U.S. and a few other places, but it’s essentially a Canadian thing,” says program instructor Jim Aikenhead, who has worked at Mountsberg for nearly 40 years.
And those roots run deep. The maple syrup tradition began with Canada’s indigenous people, who used to boil the sap down using hot rocks. That knowledge was passed on to early explorers and settlers, who continued to expand the technique using large kettles and flat pans over open flames. Today, the process has been modernized with advanced machinery, but the steps remain the same. Pick a tree Make sure you’ve got a maple tree. There are several kinds of maples, but sugar maple is the primary source of maple syrup. “It’s characterized by this bark that kind of curls away,” says Aikenhead. Measure the tree Using a caliper device, check the tree’s diameter. It should be at least 25 centimetres.
“Smaller trees need all their sap. Bigger trees, it’s like they have extra sap. We can take it and not harm the tree,” says Aikenhead. Drill a hole New holes are drilled each year because old holes are like “scars,” says Aikenhead. Drill in to what is called the “sap wood” just beyond the bark. Tap in a spile This small tube allows the sap to leave the tree and drip into a bucket. As the sap moves up from the roots to the branches to help the leaves grow, small amounts will drip out of the spile at varying rates. Hang a bucket, collect sap When the weather dips below zero overnight and back up during the day, gas pressure builds up inside the tree that pushes the sap upward.
“I’ve seen it where the buckets have filled up twice and going on to three times in one day,” says Aikenhead. Boil sap into syrup: using kettle Early settlers would have used ket- tles to boil the sap and evaporate water, long before the process was modernized. Boil sap into syrup: using flat pan This evolution from kettles allowed the sap to cover a larger surface area for the boiling process.
This was the forerunner of the evaporator. Boil the sap into syrup: using evaporator The sap moves through two levels of this modern machine and begins to drip out automatically when the temperature hits 219 F (104 C), the boiling point of a 67-per-cent sugar solution in the Mountsberg area.
What happens with the maple syrup once it’s been collected is up to the user: any number of creative recipes can sweeten up a dish, or some traditional and sugary taffy on snow can delight the whole family.
Getting a sugar high will never be more patriotic than this week.