Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [127]
It was hard, heavy work. Very often the only shelter was a simple cabin or lean-to. Once boiling began, it didn’t end until the sugar was done, so someone had to be awake through the night: pouring sap, throwing on wood, pouring graining sugar into shallow pans to cool into loaves. Most of the work was outdoors, the fire roaring as it boiled off the five hundred gallons of sap needed to make a mere twelve of syrup (or, more commonly, a hundred pounds of hard sugar).
Whether sugar was made indoors or out, in a single kettle or in a diligently tended row, it took skill to judge when syrup was actually done. Boil until thick, instructions might read. Until sweet. Until dark. Boil as long as you can without burning. Sugaring was a skill gained through experience, by boiling season after season until one knew what “thick” meant, or “sweet,” or “dark.” A sugar maker might drizzle syrup on a snowball, watching to see if it filtered through; another might dip in a loop of twig, drawing it from the kettle to see how far the ribbon stretched. A third would drip syrup onto a cold ax head to see if it turned brittle. They were boiling sugar in the woods, over a fire miles from home; they had little special gear except for their kettles. Instead they used what lay on the forest floor, what grew from it, and what they’d used to cut wood.
There were farms throughout New England, but they were farms hewn from the forest, and the forest was waiting to come back. It was a land for those who loved good fires.
TO MAKE MAPLE BEER
To every four gallons of water when boiling, add one quart of maple molasses. When the liquor is cooled to blood heat, put in as much yeast as is necessary to ferment it. Malt or bran may be added to this beer, when agreeable. If a tablespoonful of the essence of spruce be added to the above quantities of water and molasses, it makes a most delicious and wholesome drink.
—SUSANNAH CARTER, The Frugal Housewife, 1803
When you talk to sugar makers in Connecticut today, you’re likely to hear about a conversion moment—the day a maker decided to go out to his or her own backyard maples and see what the trees had to give. Small Connecticut makers tend to have started from scratch. It’s different in Vermont, where a single operation might run a hundred thousand taps; Vermont maple syrup is big business, a brand defended by inspectors who travel the state judging purity and imposing fines for improper grading. That’s admirable, and obviously important—by far the majority of American maple sugar comes from Vermont, which makes about 5.5 percent of the world’s total, and it should be made and sold correctly. Still, I love the fact that sugar makers from Connecticut often come to sugaring relatively late. For them it’s a new direction—an abandonment of one life, an adoption of another.
Which brings me to Bill and Amy Proulx. Before starting to sugar, Bill was a cop, serving on the Hartford K-9 unit for about twenty years. His best dog, Bruno, helped in some eleven hundred arrests, seven hundred of them felony convictions. They also did rescue work—there’s a picture of Bill and Bruno at Ground Zero on 9/12. Once, Bruno’s barking told Bill that there was still a fugitive hiding in a marsh they’d already pulled six guys out of—even surrounded by police and arrestees and diesel fire trucks, Bruno could smell the apocrine sweat a stressed man releases. Bill describes police work as 98 percent