Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [131]
By 1909 he was living near Redding, Connecticut, in the house he named Stormfield after the captain who’d brought him from San Francisco in the far-off days of 1866. In “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” Twain imagined the old mariner racing comets through space and finding Halley’s too slow to test him; the captain glimpsed it only as “a flash and a vanish” as he hurtled onward, away from the world.
Twain had been born during Halley’s comet’s last visit. Now, he said, “it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”
He waited; the comet would return in a year.
MAPLE-SUGAR SAUCE
Break half a pound of maple-sugar in small bits, put it into a thick saucepan with half a gill of cold water; set the saucepan over the fire, and melt the sugar until it forms a clear sirup; then remove it from the fire, and stir in two heaping tablespoonfuls of butter cut in small bits. Serve the sauce hot with any fruit-pudding.
—JULIET CORSON, Practical American Cookery and Household Management, 1886
Steam puffs gently from the wings on the sugarhouse cupola, wafting across the spread Bill and Amy and their kids share with their horses, beehives, and pack of dogs. On cold mornings the steam can billow a hundred feet into the air; neighbors have been known to come jolting down the dirt road in pickups to see if the place is on fire. Today is too warm for such a false alarm; it’s the beginning of what will probably be a good run—even a banner run, Bill hopes, with temperatures for the next few days looking ideal.
The boiling room is dominated by the evaporator, a divided pan ten feet long and four across (it’s been quite a while since Bill and Amy gave up their lasagna pan). Every compartment is full of furiously boiling sap; the rafters are fogged almost from sight, gray light shining in through the steam. The smell isn’t as rich as finished syrup—most of the steam, after all, is coming from something more like dense sap than what you’d find on a breakfast table. But it’s somehow all the more appealing for that, a sweetness I think I could breathe until nightfall and after without finding it cloying.
When Bill and Amy used a single pan, they were making syrup much as with boiling stones—adding sap continuously to a single vessel, with a last-minute transfer to a cooler pot for finishing. Now Bill pours sap into the evaporator’s main chamber; each addition pushes the already boiled, thicker sap further along, until it reaches the last and smallest compartment. When it does, this syrup will be medium amber. Sweet, first-run sap needs relatively little boiling, thus making lighter syrup; late in the season, lower-sugar sap will need more boiling, darkening and intensifying it.
“I need a special kind of wood. It’s called free,” Bill says with a grin. And he needs plenty of it—the broad rear entryway behind the evaporator opens onto wood stacked a neat eight feet high. Bill pulls on thick, nearly elbow-length work gloves; the firebox is blasting like a forge. He throws in four big logs, slams the door shut, and flips the fan back on, stoking the fire. When the syrup foams, threatening to spill from the pan, Bill drips in a precise five drops of a tasteless vegetable-oil emulsion, the modern version of salt pork or cream in the days of outdoor kettles. I’ve rarely seen any product work as well; it takes perhaps three seconds for the foam to vanish into the darkening sap.
A last innovation used by the Proulxs is a big reason old-timers sometimes call their product “technosyrup.” When Amy pulls up outside, the pickup riding low under