Dear Readers, sometimes when I’m stuck for inspiration for a post I have a quick look in my ‘Tree of the Day’ book by Amy-Jane Beer, and for 15th January it was all about collecting maple sap. As maple syrup is probably my favourite sweetener, and as we are expecting snow here in London next week, I thought it might be a good time to have a little chat about it.

One of the many reasons that I love maple syrup is its complexity of flavour – all those caramelly, toffee-like overtones make it much more interesting than your average brown sugar. Beware of imitations though! When in Toronto we always go to the Sunset Grill for breakfast (an ironic name as the place shuts at 4 p.m. but there we go) and if you don’t ask specifically for ‘real’ maple syrup (and pay a few dollars extra) you’ll end up with pancake syrup, which is basically corn syrup with brown colouring. Aaargh!

Maple syrup is the sap of the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) or the black maple (Acer nigrum). During the winter, the trees store carbohydrate in their roots as an energy reserve. In the spring, the starch is converted to sugar and the sap literally ‘rises’ as fuel for the developing leaves and buds. At this point, humans have traditionally stuck a spike into the tree just under the bark, so that the sap is diverted into a bucket. There’s then a whole lot of boiling involved to reduce the sap to about one-fortieth of its original volume, which concentrates all that sweetness.

Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) Photo by By Bruce Marlin – Own work http://www.cirrusimage.com/tree_maple_sugar.htm, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2611206

Maples and maple syrup really are the emblems of Canada – after all, there’s a maple leaf on the national flag, and Canada produces over 80% of all the maple syrup in the world, with the rest coming from the north-east of the US. Within Canada, the bulk of the production comes from the province of Quebec. We watched an interesting documentary a while back about the ‘maple syrup heist’, when 3,000 tonnes of the sticky stuff, worth 20 million Canadian dollars, was stolen from the Strategic Reserve in Quebec. Who knew that there could be so much riding on tree sap?

Before the American Civil War, abolitionists switched to using maple syrup as a sweetener because, unlike cane sugar, it wasn’t grown and harvested by slaves. And during the Second World War, when sugar was again hard to come by, American housewives were advised to switch to maple syrup. Not a hardship, surely?

And here is what looks like the mother of all maple syrup steamed puddings. The recipe is here. You’re welcome.

Interestingly, other trees also produce a sweet sap, and I was intrigued to hear that birch syrup is becoming popular with chefs. You apparently need twice the quantity of birch sap to make a syrup (presumably because it isn’t as sweet), and it’s described as having notes of soy sauce, molasses or balsamic vinegar. Not surprisingly, it’s more often used with savoury dishes as a glaze. Let me know if you’ve tried it, I’m intrigued! Birch syrup is produced in the chilly northern parts of Canada, the US and Russia, where there are (not surprisingly) birch forests. The sap is also used ‘straight’ for a whole range of medicinal purposes across the Baltic states, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.

Commercially produced birch sap from Russia (Photo By User:Fox89, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31920113)

And look, here’s a poem. I rather like the slow meander of this, and the house, with the root cellar underneath, feels like a familiar North American place. See what you think.

Maple Syrup
BY DONALD HALL

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk
into the graveyard, to find
my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago
I came here last, bringing
marigolds from the round garden
outside the kitchen.
I didn’t know you then.
We walk
among carved names that go with photographs
on top of the piano at the farm:
Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck.
We pause at the new grave
of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s
sister. Last summer
we called on her at the nursing home,
eighty-seven, and nodding
in a blue housedress. We cannot find
my grandfather’s grave.
Back at the house
where no one lives, we potter
and explore the back chamber
where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels,
pretty boxes, quilts,
bottles, books, albums of postcards.
Then with a flashlight we descend
firm steps to the root cellar—black,
cobwebby, huge,
with dirt floors and fieldstone walls,
and above the walls, holding the hewn
sills of the house, enormous
granite foundation stones.
Past the empty bins
for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes,
we discover the shelves for canning, a few
pale pints
of tomato left, and—what
is this?—syrup, maple syrup
in a quart jar, syrup
my grandfather made twenty-five
years ago
for the last time.
I remember
coming to the farm in March
in sugaring time, as a small boy.
He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart
buckets, dangling from each end
of a wooden yoke
that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them
into a vat in the saphouse
where fire burned day and night
for a week.
Now the saphouse
tilts, nearly to the ground,
like someone exhausted
to the point of death, and next winter
when snow piles three feet thick
on the roofs of the cold farm,
the saphouse will shudder and slide
with the snow to the ground.
Today
we take my grandfather’s last
quart of syrup
upstairs, holding it gingerly,
and we wash off twenty-five years
of dirt, and we pull
and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff,
dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers
in, you and I both, and taste
the sweetness, you for the first time,
the sweetness preserved, of a dead man
in the kitchen he left
when his body slid
like anyone’s into the ground.