Volume 53 - No. 11
By Cecil Scaglione It’s the time of year for a ritual that predates by centuries the arrival of European settlers in the New World. The indigenous folk of this continent had been producing the comfortably sweet product for centuries but how they came to make use of sap running out of maple trees is clouded in several legends. Until the Europeans used a tube to
March 16, 2023
tap into the tree trunks, the native people sliced a tomahawk into the tree and caught the clear liquid in a birch bark bucket. The maple syrup ingathering season runs from late February to early April, when the days are balmy and the nights freeze. Snow still covers the underbrush of southern Canada and the northern states when folks gather in maple groves to collect and save the
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sweetness for their kitchens. Corporate mechanized production that accounts for some 5 million gallons each year has replaced much of the old time fun. Us kids in northern Ontario used to run into the nearby woods and snag sap icicles and suck on them on the way to school. Canada produces more than 80 percent of the world’s maple syrup. The province of Quebec whose bor-
der is just an hour from my home town, accounts for 90 percent of that amount. Memories still linger of a time when we would collect the pails of sap and take them to the boiling kettle where 40 gallons of clear sap was processed into one gallon of caramel colored maple syrup. To keep us kids happy, the adults would toss a ladle-full of the brown bubbling syrup onto the snow and watch us scramble for fists-full of snow-taffy.
Spring
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