This book-cover picture, was photographed, in 2004, by my friend, Marie Chase. She and her husband, Howard, made maple syrup for over twenty years. They built a sap house in a separate shed behind their barn.
For over one hundred years, four huge sugar maple trees had stood near Old Bedford Road in our backyard of our animal hospital. For a long time, I had wanted to tap them for sap to make maple syrup. When Sam and Pen were nine and ten, in 1978, I decided that it would be a good year to do this project with them.
In New Hampshire, maple sap runs from the middle of February into March depending on the weather; freezing at night and the temperature rising to 40 degrees in the daytime. This freezing and thawing causes this miracle. The sap in the sugar maple trees slowly rises along with the mercury in the thermometer, then drops to the bottom of the trees when the temperature drops. It is this rising and falling of the sap that allows us to collect it from the trees.
By the end of March, the sap will have an unpleasant flavor.
Standing in a foot of snow, the girls helped me use a carpenter’s brace drill to make holes angling slightly upward, and three inches deep three feet high up the tree. Then, we hammered a metal spout (‘spile’), tightly into each of the tap holes. A spile is a tap; a simplified spigot which channels the maple sap from the tree to waiting containers. The girls and I were amazed that the sap started to drip immediately.
Pen, Sam and I worked hard, and as fast as we could scrambling to attach clean, plastic milk jugs tightly to the hook on the spile and around the tree, securing them with hay-baling twine. We had to put in lots of effort because of our inexperience.
Our trees were large enough to tap in four places so we were able to collect forty gallons in three days, the minimum amount of sap required to make a gallon of syrup.
The girls often checked the jugs, and as soon as they were filled, we emptied them in two new, clean, thirty-gallon, galvanized barrels with covers, which were kept cool in an unheated room in the front of our house. Lugging the jugs was a chore but the girls loved collecting the sap. It had started to snow again. They had to carry their load up a short hill through a foot of snow. Soon a well-worn path led to our kitchen door. A wet track of melting snow went through our kitchen to the front of the house where the barrels of sap were stored to keep cool.
When we had gathered a little more than the necessary forty gallons, it was time to start the evaporation process. Heating the liquid in two large pans on our electric stove, with two burners under each, the sap started to boil.
To make a gallon of syrup, this procedure should not have been done not in our kitchen, but on an outside fire or in a sugar house, for two reasons; the humidity of 39 gallons of water evaporating for a single gallon of syrup is enough moisture to make wallpaper peel and the other reason is that every surface in the kitchen seemed be sticky.
Pen and Sam, when necessary, as the liquid boiled down, emptied fresh more sap into the pan. They had to be very careful to avoid being burned. Often stirring the syrup-to-be and then skimming the foam off the bubbling surface with a large metal strainer kept us busy. When the syrup was boiling at the required 218 degrees, which took about six hours, the liquid had thickened become pure maple syrup. We then strained it through cheesecloth. All the while the three of us were laboring over the hot stove a lovely snow was falling heavily outside.
After six hours of boiling down the thin, clear sap, the girls and I had successfully produced a gallon of perfect, beautifully clear, light amber, maple syrup.
Now we had the best treat of all. We poured the hot syrup on the freshly fallen snow. It turned to chewy ‘maple taffy’… Delicious…YUM!
Sounds difficult to make, but worth making!