Ode to Maple Syrup

The smell, ah, the smell of maple syrup is heavenly. The taste of the syrup on one’s tongue could melt the hardest heart.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But you only think so because you eat so many foods loaded with added sugar or a synthetic sugar substitute. Today you may have added three teaspoons of granulated sugar to your latté, drank two Diet Cokes, ate a brownie, enjoyed some breakfast cereal and some ketchup, a couple pieces of sandwich bread and a cup of yogurt. Those last four are often made with varying amounts of high fructose corn syrup, which sweetens at a fraction of the price of cane sugar and has that “real” sweet taste that aspartame and the other fake sweeteners lack. High fructose corn syrup also keeps bread fresh at room temperature longer and adds a certain something to almost all your supermarket basics. It’s cheap to make because the raw ingredient, corn, is a commodity that the US government subsidizes heavily.

As you probably already know, this ubiquitous sweet syrup takes high technology and equipment the average person lacks in their home kitchen. Industry separates the physical components of the corn kernels into starch, hull, protein, and oil, inverting the glucose to fructose with enzymes, and removing the impurities. Even if I wanted to try making it at home, I couldn’t buy the type of corn used to make it, which is specifically grown for the wet corn milling industry.

Going back several more decades, or even centuries, I might be inclined to make my own white or brown sugar, which I use daily in cooking and baking. I can’t grow sugar cane in Massachusetts, because it’s a subtropical plant, and I don’t have the equipment to wring the water out of the cane, boil it down, and filter it of impurities.

Last weekend I went to the Natick Community Organic Farm to watch people actually do the hard work of making maple syrup — loading the chopped wood for the fire, boiling down the sap, and so on — and it made me really appreciate the rare treat of natural sweetness. If it took Native Americans a week or two to make their year’s worth of maple sugar, they must have had less of a sweet tooth than we do.

What did great-great-grandma eat to feed her sweet tooth? Apple cider from the fresh fruit in her village orchard, maybe, and other seasonal fruit. Honey, gathered from local hives, and only on special occasions. The muted sweetness of everyday foods — bread, eggs, milk, fresh lettuce, potatoes, leeks — must have been more satisfying than they are to one whose sweet tooth is fed with candy and cereal bars.

Here’s how you make maple syrup (something all of us in MA could do in our own backyards): In late February and early March, when the nights are below freezing and the days get up to 40 degrees, you collect maple sap by drilling holes into hundreds of tree trunks and wait for your buckets to fill up. Then you go around to all your taps and tip the buckets into larger containers and lug those home. You boil and boil and boil and boil the sap, which is only 3% sugar, until it tastes like syrup. You break the frothy bubbles that form on the surface tension with a piece of suet on a stick. After it’s up to 67% sugar, you filter the syrup of minerals and particles, usually through a woolen felt cone. It drips methodically into yet more buckets.

Then you sigh with exhaustion.

And bottle it.

And eat it, savoring every teaspoonful.