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Maple Syrup and Maple Sugar
Nature Bulletin No. 419-A May 15, 1971
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
George W. Dunne, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt. of Conservation
MAPLE SYRUP AND MAPLE SUGAR
When we old-timers were youngsters, a favorite breakfast in winter --
one that stuck to our ribs -- featured buckwheat pancakes or
"flapjacks" with plenty of butter and maple syrup. Our great-
grandfathers who settled here in the Middle West soon learned from
the Indians how to tap sugar maple trees in early spring and, from the
sap, make syrup and sugar.
For
the Indians inhabiting New England and the country on both sides
of the Great Lakes, maple syrup and maple sugar were very important
foods. Upper Michigan and adjacent Canada were occupied mostly by
the Chippewa or Ojibway when visited in the 1760's by two explorers
who lived among them and wrote accounts of how these "Canoe
People" obtained and used the sugar and syrup so essential to them.
Salt was scarce, so they employed maple sugar in their cooking to
season wild rice, parched corn, boiled vegetables such as squash and
pumpkin, meats, and even boiled fish. Some sap was allowed to sour
into vinegar used in cooking venison or bear meat which were then
sweetened with maple sugar -- like the sweet-sour cookery of Germans
and Bohemians. Sap stored undergound, in vessels made of bark or
skins, was drunk as a beverage in summer or used to sweeten their
medicines, most of which were very bitter -- such as a tea, made by
boiling roots of the paper birch, taken to relieve stomach cramps.
Not much is known about what the Indians did before the first white
men came to America, except that they tapped the maple trees by
slashing the bark, on a slant, with stone tomahawks and apparently
had two crude methods of making syrup. One was to place a vat, made
of bark or wood or moosehide, in a pit; fill it with sap; and toss red-hot
stones into it. The other was to freeze the sap repeatedly in shallow
vessels and throw off the ice as it formed on top. By 1763, the
Chippewa were using iron hatchets and kettles obtained from French
fur traders. Their other utensils were all made of native materials. The
bark-covered lodges at each grove of maple trees or sugar bush, and
their methods were very crude.
Today, in the large commercial sugar camps, a portable power-drill is
used to tap the trees, and metal spiles through which the sap drips into
transparent plastic bags -- from one to five per tree, depending upon
its size. The stainless steel collecting vat, mounted on a tractor-drawn
trailer, is emptied through pipes into a big storage tank inside the sap
house. Periodically, the sap flows through a valve into a stainless steel
evaporator with a hot fire underneath. There it boils and circulates,
carefully tested and controlled until it weighs 11 pounds per gallon,
and comes out the other end as syrup which runs through a filter into
tins or drums for shipment at $4.35, or more, per gallon. Vermont is
the leading producer of maple syrup and maple sugar, followed by
New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, but a lot of the syrup
made in other states is shipped for bottling and sale with a Vermont
label.
Syrup boiled until 28 or 30 degrees hotter than boiling water, is stirred
and run into molds where it becomes "cake sugar" sold in 1/2-pound
or pound blocks, or in some fancy shape such as a maple leaf, a pine
tree, a rabbit, Santa Claus or a log cabin. Syrup boiled to a lower
temperature and poured onto snow, as the Indians did, becomes a
chewy sweet called "jack wax". Poured into a flat dish and stirred
continuously, it becomes "maple butter". Syrup mixed with milk and
hard cider becomes a potent beverage called "Jersey Milk".
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Update: June 2012
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