Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [123]
We follow him through a snowy stand of backyard trees, finally pausing before a sugar maple. “I think the way people first found out how to sugar was probably just seeing a broken branch,” Jim says. He snaps off the end of a twig; a bead of sap gathers shining on the broken tip. It’s surprisingly clear and fluid, crystal without the slightest cloudiness, and thin as water—totally unlike the kind of oozing sap that can petrify into amber. When it falls to the snow, a second droplet gathers, gleaming. I touch the twig to my tongue, then to Erik’s. If there’s sweetness, it’s only a suggestion, a bare hint that there’s more here than water; before boiling, maple sap is only 2 percent sugar, the taste so dilute as to be nearly undetectable.
Talk to any maple-sugar maker and within a few minutes you’re likely to hear the magical ratio of forty to one. This is usually said quickly, almost as one staccato word (fortytoone), and refers to the daunting, stubborn fact that it takes an average of forty gallons of sap to make one of syrup. Sap is so dilute that white settlers called it maple water, or sugar water; it’s not at all obvious to the eye or the tongue that what runs from these uniquely North American trees might be gathered and boiled into syrup or heavy brown sugar. One story says that the Iroquois leader Woksis killed a deer, meaning to cook it the next day; before he went to sleep, he stuck his ax into a nearby maple, which dripped sap all night into a cooking pot below. After his wife simmered venison in it for a day, the stew was sweet. An Ottawa and Chippewa story, on the other hand, says that the hero Ne-naw-bo-zhoo came upon a seemingly abandoned village; the people were lying under maples, mouths agape as they drank syrup straight from the trees. Ne-naw-bo-zhoo filled the trees with a lake’s worth of water, diluting the syrup, forcing the people to work for their sugar so they wouldn’t become slothful.
But when Jim hacks into the wood, it’s easy to imagine how the discovery happened. At the first blow of his homemade basalt ax, the lightly gashed wood begins to bleed. Soon it’s as wet as though freshly splashed. Jim cleans the edges with a knife, then a flint awl. Next he takes out a sap guide, a two-foot-long forsythia twig he’s split and scraped into a thin gutter. When he fixes the guide into place with pitch, sap flows down it, dripping into the mocuck. The run is quick and unwavering; I’d guess that anyone who saw such a flow, or the sap icicles that can form from broken branches, would be moved to taste and cook with it. Why not?
Plus, I remind myself, my modern palate has been pretty well shot by a lifetime of easy access to white sugar, brown sugar, sugar-in-the-raw, turbinado sugar, beet sugar, honey, and way, way too much corn syrup (not to mention, to the extent I’ve been unable to avoid them, an abominable array of NutraSweets and Splendas). Native Americans had honey and the tart sweetness of ripe berries, but other than that, sweet flavors were rare before someone first boiled down sap into its essence. That spare 2 percent of sugar, touched to the tongue, might have seemed a gift.
That’s certainly how many of the northern nations understood it. Like the booming of prairie chickens, the run of maple sap was a signal of spring, and of the rebirth of the nurturing world. The Abenaki named April’s first full moon Sogalikas, or the sugar maker’s moon. Others called it, simply, the sugar moon—the time when they knew to watch for flowing sap. Once the sugar was made, it could be mixed with crushed corn, then simmered into a nutritious pottage. It might also be mixed with water and drunk, blended with bear fat