Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [132]
Finally, finally, it’s time to taste. Bill twists a spigot, pouring a smooth amber stream of syrup, filling paper cups. We blow and sip, and it’s exactly as good as you’d expect hot syrup to be when you’ve seen the trees it came from, when you’ve learned a little about the slow roll of seasons coming around brightly. It’s sweet and rich; it’s vanilla and toasted marshmallows and caramel. Chemically, the sugar from maple and cane and beets is nearly identical, but the extra compounds in cane and beets taste awful and have to be refined out. With maple they’re the whole point—they’re what make it maple. Erik drinks cup after cup; it’s going to be hard to convince him that we should ever drink anything else.
In his 1886 Signs and Seasons, the naturalist John Burroughs said that well-made maple syrup has “a wild delicacy that no other sweet can match.” In the Old World, he reflected, “in simple and more imaginative times, how such an occupation as this would have got into literature, and how many legends and associations would have clustered around it!” In fact, Virgil did fantasize about something like maple syrup, dreaming of a golden age when grapes would grow from briars and “stubborn oaks sweat honey-dew.” It really is miraculous, and entirely natural; though Bill and Amy don’t bother to certify their syrup as organic, no cattle graze in the forest, no pesticides or fertilizers are added to the land. It’s forever a thing of place, a food of brief hours and long years.
Old-timers may call what the Proulxs make technosyrup, but it’s the innovations that let Bill and Amy do the work they love—that let them make it a life. And every innovation has its old analogue: drills instead of augers, plastic buckets instead of galvanized pails, reverse osmosis instead of freezing, an evaporator pan instead of kettles or a hollowed-out log. Even the filter in the cellar reminds me of Wilder’s grandfather, out in the woods with his kettle and ladle, constantly skimming. . . .
Then it hits me. Burroughs thought that maple sugar was too often “made in large quantities and indifferently,” thus ending dark and coarse, unlike sugar made from “properly treated” early sap. Boiling outside meant dirty snowmelt from branches overhead; it meant twigs, dead leaves, cinders, all ending up in the kettle. I grin—I almost laugh. I should have known better than to doubt Twain. Maybe he didn’t want it clear as in light; maybe he wanted it clear as in, simply, clean. As in pure. There were no inspectors back then, nobody checking whether sugar makers were filtering sap through mats of hemlock and spruce bark, no one ensuring that there was more sugar than cinder. Maybe Twain did like his syrup dark. Dark and clear.
Of course, I’ll never know for sure. But I like thinking that that’s the case, that Twain loved the flavor of dark syrup as he did the Mississippi’s dangerous currents or a deckhand’s artful curse. I throw a mental apology back a century. And standing in the sugarhouse, the firebox roaring, Erik gathering wood, Bill preparing to pour off another batch of syrup, I include a short, heartfelt thanks.
Livy, Twain remembered, “always worked herself down with her Christmas preparations.” On his last Christmas Eve, his daughter Jean did the same; she decorated the house, readied a tree, and littered the parlor with so many presents that