Maple syrup traditions 80
It might not feel like it quite yet but, across the northern hemisphere, spring is on its way. Deep in the Canadian countryside, the sugar maple sap is rising and the yearly ritual of syrup making is well underway
Two hours west of Montréal, there is a house surrounded by trees: beech, cedar, pine, birch, maple and sugar maple. Inside them, life is beginning to quiver, and in one of them it is sweet. Tubing weaves between the sugar maples like a spider’s web, descending to a small wooden hut near the house: the ‘sugar shack’. Right now, these tubes are filling with maple sugar water and resident Patrick Lavoie is one of many Québecois keeping alive the French settler tradition of ‘sugaring off’– faire les sucres – to make his own maple syrup. They call it le temps des sucres – ‘the time of the sugars’.
Patrick’s house sits at the confluence of native Mohawk, Haudenosaunee and St. Lawrence Iroquois territories. The indigenous peoples, now displaced, had long been using maple derivatives when settlers arrived. Legend has it they discovered this sweet treasure when they noticed deer licking the snow around the base of sugar maples at the onset of spring. As deer had rubbed their antlers on the trees, they had pierced the bark causing sap to trickle out. The people found it was sweet at this time of year. They also found that if they left the sugar water to freeze overnight, the water would separate and could be removed. As it would be boiled to concentrate it further, sweeter water was an advantage as it meant less time would be needed over the fire, less firewood burned.
During le temps des sucres, the deep winter snow begins to lose its grip. Daytime temperatures rise above freezing and fall below freezing at night. Concurrently, the sap is rising up to the branches and falling down to the roots. “My dad just knew how to do it, and his dad just knew, too,” says Emily – Patrick’s daughter – of tapping maple water. “It’s a thing the French settlers passed down. For each tree you drill a hole about two inches deep through the bark to the sapwood. You tap in a spigot ( un chalumeau) until it makes just the right sound. Then you hang an aluminium bucket ( une chaudière) on it. The drops come out one… by one… by one.”
The sap’s movement up and down past the hole offers up the sugar water to be collected. The real knowledge, according to Patrick, is in good tapping: where on the tree, the age of the tree, which angle in relation to the sun, and how to angle the hole downward so the drips don’t freeze on their way out at night. He uses a combination of buckets on trees close to the shack, and pipes further away. “You have to use gravity. The tubes
zig zag between trees but always going downwards,” says Emily.
Outside the sugar shack, the tubes converge in a tank, which begins to fill quickly. It’s time to gather helping hands: a three-week marathon of no sleep is about to begin. The shack was here when Patrick bought the house and has evolved with each season of his syrup making. Family photos of past sugaring offs hang next to antique snowshoes made of wood and animal gut. Markings of gallons-to-litre measurements are scribbled on a post, and Christ looks down from a crucifix upon the heart of the operation: an enormous cast iron wood-burning stove. A huge stack of firewood is at the ready. “That’s the hardest work of the whole thing: the months of gathering, seasoning and chopping enough wood,” says Emily, of a process that can be started up to a year beforehand.
While the syrup making itself lasts three to four weeks, with the preparation involved – cleaning tubes and equipment, chopping enough wood – the process can take up to eight weeks. Syrup making is an ‘exact’ science that Patrick is OK with not fully understanding. But he knows time and temperature are key ingredients. Sugar concentration is critical: too high will give you a solid rock of sugar; too low and the syrup will mould. Once it starts to flow, the sugar water comes in so fast that Patrick cannot stop. Six thousand gallons come pouring in every season. It takes 40 gallons of sugar water to make one gallon of syrup. Over the weeks, the sap’s natural sugar concentration increases, giving rise to a naturally darker syrup towards the end of the season.
The transformation happens on top of the stove in a long stainless-steel vat divided into three sections ( les pannes), each with labyrinthine subsections, which will guide the liquid to move slowly like a passport control queue. The stove lit, sugar water feeds through gradually from the first section to the last on a constant rolling boil, the colour darkening and the thickness and sweetness increasing to syrup as the water evaporates. Steam fills the air and slicks the ceiling in film. Impurities – bark, twigs, insects – froth to the surface in a thick white spume, which Patrick skims off regularly. As the water content lessens, the boiling point of the syrup increases, so each section of the vat must be progressively hotter. The last section, the hottest, is directly over the fire and finishes the syrup off. When the temperature is exactly right (about 4°C above the boiling point of water), Patrick releases the syrup through thick felt filters, into a pot. And then the cans are filled.
At the breakfast table, Patrick’s French toast at the ready, Emily lines up several glasses of golden liquid for me to taste, graded from light to dark. There is extra clair – the early, lighter syrup – which is valuable and most in demand; clair; médium; and ambré – the darkest with the strongest flavour, used for cooking. Her father never sells it, she tells me. He barters, and he gives it away. And, of course, he eats it himself. “He uses a can a day that guy. He puts it everywhere,” says Emily.
“His quiches are disgusting!”
My dad just knew how to do it, and his dad, too. It’s a thing the French settlers passed down