Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [120]
It’s amazing to think that maple syrup, which seems so intensely domestic and originates in one of the homiest of trees, remains a largely wild food. The trees can be planted, of course. But it takes some forty years for a tree to grow big enough to tap; actually planting a maple is an act almost entirely for the future, like a brandy maker distilling spirits that he knows won’t mature until after he dies. Most makers rely on the wild groves—some with hundreds or thousands of trees—known as sugar bushes. Tending a wild sugar bush by clearing out underbrush and thinning trees to let in air and light means entering into a quiet, centuries-long conversation. It means continuing phrases begun before the Revolution, and tasting sugar from trees once reached only on horseback.
Given how long it takes to make, it seems right that of all the foods of Twain’s feast, maple syrup is the one that lasts longest. In a sense it’s as much a seasonal food as asparagus, or butter beans, or anything on the menu; making it requires the delicate ebb and flow of frosts and thaws, the hesitant, stop-and-start beginning of spring in New England. But once boiled down to its sweet, unmistakable core, syrup has enough sugar to deter bacteria; sealed in glass, it can keep for years. Maple syrup can travel slowly. It lasts.
I can’t be judicious when I praise maple syrup: my love for syrup is pure. All three of my sisters prefer artificial syrup, but on this score my sisters—intelligent, down-to-earth native New Englanders—are insane. My own devotion was cemented early, when I watched sap boil in my Connecticut nursery school’s modest sugarhouse, waiting in the steamy wooden lean-to as the ladle passed between small hands. We’d spent the morning walking through the snow from tree to tree, emptying the metal pails into big plastic buckets and ferrying them back to the modest, waist-high iron evaporator. When I finally took a sip, it was one of those straight-to-the-brain-stem experiences, a perfect blend of flavor and place and moment that I’ll have for the rest of my life. To a four-year-old, it was magic: the trees whose leaves we’d collected in fall, whose limbs were still bare and frosted—those trees gave us this?
I’m lucky. Those early memories are of a food that’s still plentiful, that travels easily and well. But I can’t deny the poignancy of thinking of that morning, and of my eagerness as I waited for a taste. Syrup is a food of childhood kitchens. It’s a food of the sugar moon—the first full moon of April or May, when the Iroquois danced in thankfulness for what the forest gave. It’s a food of the year’s turning. Making it takes readiness, and care, but most of all it takes steady observation—understanding the pulse of one small piece of the world, as the years roll on and on.
And now it’s a food that makes me think, unavoidably, of Twain. Of Twain the boy, of course, as he gathered sap and hooked finished sugar in Missouri. But also of Twain the man, avoiding the windows in his beloved home—wanting never to see the stump of the tree he’d ordered felled, wanting never to give things up before their time.
A RECEIPT TO MAKE MAPLE SUGAR
Make an incision in a number of maple trees, at the same time, about the middle of February, and receive the juice of them in wooden or earthen vessels. Strain this juice (after it is drawn from the sediment) and boil it in a wide mouthed kettle. Place the kettle directly over the fire, in such a manner that the flame shall not play upon its sides. Skim the liquor when it is boiling. When it is reduced to a thick syrup and cooled, strain it again, and let it settle for two or three days, in which time it will be fit for granulating. This operation is performed by filling the kettle half full of syrup, and boiling it a second time. To prevent its boiling over, add to it a piece of fresh butter or fat of the size of a walnut. You may easily determine when it is sufficiently