Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [125]
Jim’s sugar making follows almost exactly the process described by a Kickapoo man in 1835 after someone suggested to him that whites invented maple sugaring. He was understandably taken aback and described “the art of excavating the trees in order to make troughs of them, of placing the sap in these, of heating the stones and throwing them into the sap so as to cause it to boil, and by this means reducing it to sugar.” But Jim’s first few tries didn’t go smoothly.
“The first time I did this in public, I felt like the biggest fraud,” he says. “It was so muddy—I mean, am I conning these people? I brought the syrup home to my wife, and after the first taste neither of us would touch it. But the next morning it had settled out, and you could skim off the top and simmer it to sugar. It’s great energy, that way—I brought a lot of it with me when I paddled up to Canada.” Jim smiles at the memory; he says he closed the circle.
AUNT TOP’S NUT TAFFY
Two pints maple sugar, half pint water, or just enough to dissolve sugar; boil until it becomes brittle by dropping in cold water; just before pouring out add a table-spoon vinegar; having prepared the hickory-nut meats, in halves if possible, butter well the pans, line with the meats, and pour the taffy over them.
—Estelle and Hattie Hush
—ESTELLE WOODS WILCOX, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, 1877
After cutting down his maple, Twain had written that “I comprehend & realize one little fraction of what it is to part with all of one’s home.” But by 1904 the house at Nook Farm had been sold; he and Livy had been unable to bring themselves to live there after Susy’s death. Once, after a rare return to the home before it was sold, he wrote to Livy that he’d looked up the stairs, and “it seemed as if I had burst awake out of a hellish dream, & had never been away, & that you would come drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after you.”
Now Livy was sick, and weakening; they sought medical care in Florence. As she faded, doctors consigned her to her room, with instructions that her husband was to see her for only two minutes a day. They’d been married for thirty-four years, and of course they cheated—passing note after note under the door, scrawling a final few words. Soon Livy died. “She was my riches, and I am a pauper,” Twain wrote.
Twain’s home was gone; he’d lost half his family. He could feel the world starting to slip.
“No more knowledge is necessary for making this sugar,” the abolitionist Benjamin Rush wrote in 1792, “than is required to make soap, cyder, beer, sour crout, etc., and yet one or all of these are made in most of the farm houses of the United States.” I love that Rush could assume such homey competence on the part of Americans—these days saying that making sugar is as simple as making sauerkraut is like saying it’s as easy as unicycling. But what surprises me more is that Rush thought it necessary to promote maple sugar at all. Americans used to make a lot more maple sugar and syrup than they do today; peak production came in 1860 with 8.2 million gallons, while today it hovers around 1.6 million in a good year. But Rush, it turns out, had a good reason for promoting maple sugar—and for wanting to see it replace white sugar completely and forever. Maple sugar, he believed, could deal a fatal blow to West Indian slavery.
In 1794 Rush wrote a letter describing sugar maples to Thomas Jefferson, who was then the secretary of state and, just as important for Rush’s purposes, vice president of the American Philosophical Society. Maple sugar,