THE TAP & SAP SOCIETY

By John Lee

Usually come mid-March, ‘old John’ Atwell down the road would rally the venerable Tap and Sap Society for an end of the season last boil. The Tappers had met up in old John’s sugar house ever since Bert was old enough to remember such things. Used to be that most every farmstead around had at least a small sugaring operation and the money made from sugaring was just about enough to make a quarterly tax payment or two. In their salad days, each farmer broke out roads in their sugar bushes so’s they could hang buckets and gather the sap more easily. wit Most every bucket had to be emptied every day or at least every other. Once as much sap as could be gathered in a day was collected, each would fire up his evaporator in the sugar house and boil down the sap to make maple syrup and finally tin it up for sale. Boiling sap was sometimes a social occasion. City folk thought it was like watching paint dry but extreme care had to be taken to manage the heat under the pan which sat over an ‘arch’ atop a roaring fire. If the fire was too hot or unevenly distributed the pan scorched and the syrup was ruined. Some folk were particularly good at managing the fire. Some weren’t. So sometimes boiling might be shared between sugar-makers and in the process the sugarers got to know each other better after what might have been a long, lonely winter. Hence the origin of the Tap and Sap Society. So, the annual convening of the Society was an opportunity to gather treasured memories, occasionally align them with remembered reality and have breakfast around a fire. (Some folk still believed that Old John ran a still out behind the evaporator making use of the excess heat to have a little corn liquor for the following season. It was said that anything in a Four Roses jug was probably not what was on the label.)

Brenda, as did many other wives, chipped in to feed ‘the boys’. She annually produced enough batter to make several dozen blueberry and corn meal griddle cakes on their big old soapstone griddle. In keeping with how things used to be, she always had Bert grow

Blueberry Cornmeal Griddle Cakes

2 cups unbleached flour

1/2 cup (or a bit more) stone-ground corn meal

1 1/2 Tbsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp salt (or a little less)

1/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 cups boiling water

1 1/4 cups whole milk

1 fresh egg

2 Tbsp butter, melted a small stand of calico or ‘Indian’ corn. Come fall they stripped the ears and hung them to dry somewhere safe from the mice. When the kernels were too hard to dent with a fingernail, they scrubbed them off the cobs for a bit more final dry before jarring for future use. When opportunity knocked, Bert ground the corn into a colourful, coarse texture which was perfect for making cornbread, griddle cakes and cornmeal mush (now known as ‘polenta’). Brenda always saved more than enough meal to make blueberry (from her freezer) cornmeal griddle cakes for the Tap and Sappers. She preferred Fannie Merritt Farmer’s original Boston Cooking School recipe from 1922.

Add the meal to the boiling water and cook for five minutes; turn into a large bowl and add remaining dry ingredients mixing thoroughly before adding in the wellbeaten egg and melted butter. Cook on prepared griddle as you would any other griddle cake after stirring in one cup more or less frozen blueberries.

Old John still boiled enough sap to have enough syrup for the breakfast. He actually preferred raspberries in his griddle cakes but always said he could wait for raspberry season and his own fresh fruit.

Rabbit season having run its course, talk usually quickly came around to who actually had a successful growing season last summer. While there was always a lot of self-deprecating humor and humble kindnesses about the gardening acumen of fellow preppers, everyone knew who was a really good gardener and who really needed a little help (despite years of practice). There was never any fingerpointing or finger-wagging. It was clear that one or two of the Tap and Sappers clearly were not blessed with the proverbial green thumb. Finding good started seedlings had always been challenging so this year Bert took it upon himself to offer tomato, pepper and eggplant starts if folks weren’t too fussy about varieties - he had only so much time and space. He saved seed every year and, as a result, he nearly always had more seed than he needed. So, why not share and sow some good will? He was of the opinion that shared knowledge and resources was a good idea up to a point. He drew the line at sharing space. There was a community garden in the village (which he disparagingly referred to as the ‘weedy wonderland’) for anyone who wanted a communal experience.