Читать книгу Maple Sugaring - David K. Leff - Страница 8

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Time, Space, and the Special Theory of Maple Relativity

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IT’S ROUGHLY AROUND the middle of January that sugarmakers, even retired ones like me, become vigilant about weather. We don’t necessarily pay attention to the forecasts of professionally cheerful meteorological evangelists with their Doppler radar and satellite data. We notice the small local details visible from the doorway or sensed during a walk down the street or a hike in the woods: the temperature, amount and intensity of sunlight, the cloud cover. If the old saying that “when the wind’s from the west the sap runs best” can be believed, we notice the direction of the breeze. We become hyper-aware and somewhat obsessive as we get psyched to tap. Tapping day is the ribbon-cutting on a new season, a portent like the first robin snatching a worm from the lawn.

Since maple sap runs with the fluctuation of daytime thaws and nighttime freezes, traditional sugarmakers using buckets have usually tapped in late winter at the outset of the first stretch of sunny weather when thermometers rise to about forty degrees Fahrenheit. But like most everything about sugaring, tapping time is a wager with Mother Nature. A sugarmaker’s rabid weather watching creates a pressurized excitement, and with all the anticipation it’s easy to tap prematurely and get a small run of sap lasting only a day or two. It might not even be enough to make boiling worthwhile. You can find your storage tank clogged with a solid block of sap ice and the trees locked in a cold snap and refusing to yield a drop more.

In parts of southern New England, Lincoln’s February 12 birthday has been the cue. Vermont sugarmakers customarily waited until after town meeting day, the first Tuesday of March. Years ago, according to some old-timers, a farmer might base his number of taps on how much he had to pay in taxes following passage of the local budget. But the calendar and political events are useless. The sugaring world sculpts and bends time in a unique way that belies the orderly mechanics of any clock. Whether it’s tapping, sap flow, evaporating, or bottling, sugaring’s compressed season distorts the progress of hours, speeding them to a frenetic pace or slowing them to a glacial crawl in an Einstein-like warp of normal experience.

Sure, it’s a crazy big leap, but if Albert Einstein had been a sugarmaker, the experience might have induced him to propose his theory of special relativity earlier, sooner consigning concepts of absolute motion to the trash heap of ideas. In the early twentieth century, around the time the Cary Maple Sugar Company of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, became the world’s largest maple products wholesaler and the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act outlawed syrup adulteration, Einstein postulated movement as a relative measurement between frames of reference, replacing distinctions between space and time with a four-dimensional continuum called space-time. Though destined for much more lofty purposes, the great scientist’s theory also illuminates the way in which sugarmakers experience time, as well as the deep intimacy between location and seasonal movement that is a hallmark of sugaring, seemingly fusing time and place into a single phenomenon.

Few sugarmakers are likely to be impressed by such theories. Those with even a modicum of experience have a sixth sense about when to tap, like gamblers knowing when to play their hand and when to fold. It’s nature’s casino, and you take your chances. Of course, with innovations like tubing, high-tech taps, and vacuum pumps that suck sap from a tree, dried-out tapholes from early tapping is not so much of an issue anymore. Besides, big sugarmakers with thousands of holes to drill need days or weeks to get the job done, even with many hands using speedy electric drills. They have no choice but to tap into frozen trunks long before they begin to drip.

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IT’S THE SMALL-TIMERS with buckets, like sugarmakers past, who still tap on sunny days of soft air after weeks of frigid temperatures. Smells are again on the breeze, and the steepening angle of the sun warms the nape of the neck. With no more than eighty taps, I had the luxury of drilling the holes myself, using a hand-powered carpenter’s brace fitted with a seven-sixteenths-inch bit (though now five-sixteenths are used with smaller spouts, with no appreciable reduction in sap flow). The holes were no more than two inches deep at a slight upward angle into light-colored, healthy wood. Since previous tapholes should be eight to twelve inches distant vertically and at least an inch horizontally to avoid wood no longer conducive to sap flow, I always gave the trunk a quick inspection. I got to know each individual maple better, recalling past seasons by finding completely healed tapholes that left marks like “outie” belly buttons, and gauging the tree’s health by how quickly last year’s holes had filled.

I tended to tap in late morning when snowmelt was echoing in gutters and tinkling into catch basins along the street in my village sugarbush of roadside and backyard trees. At the base of some trunks there might be a little mud pooled on the sunny side. As I drilled, curls of blond wood wound along the bit and fell to the ground. Once the bit was withdrawn, sap would dribble out, followed by a regular pulse of drops whose frequency depended not just on the weather but perhaps the location of the taphole relative to the sun or a big root. I’d gently bang in the metal spout and hang my bucket to the reassuringly regular ping of liquid dropping to the bottom. Ah, the joy of instant gratification.

Most sugarmakers spend such days in the woods, enjoying the sound of wind and creaking trees, chickadees and other birds between the short-lived whine of a cordless drill used in tapping. Depending on cold and depth of snow, it can be both strenuous and peaceful. Sometimes the work is accomplished on snowshoes. But because my sugarbush was in the center of a small town, on tapping day I gave up the serenity of the woods for serendipitous conversations with neighbors. Long before anyone was sitting on a porch, attending outdoor concerts, or slowly strolling the sidewalks, I got caught up on who had had the flu, the neighbor kids’ grades, the quality of the ski season, who had bought a new car, and what was planned for the garden. A harbinger of warmer weather, I was a sight glad to be seen, and my hanging buckets on the trees was an occasion for cheer, a mark of optimism that spring would soon arrive. Needless to say, time expanded relative to the number of people I ran into and the length of conversations. The hours spent tapping had less to do with how long it took to drill a hole and hang a bucket than whom I might meet and the urgency of the conversation. Again, I was caught in Einstein’s theoretical grip.

Though there have been dramatic innovations in production since Native American times, perhaps most in the past generation, sugaring has long remained a process of tapping trees, collecting sap, concentrating the sweet by removing water, putting the finished syrup into containers, and distributing it. Afterward, there’s lots of cleaning, repairs, and, if you use wood fuel, cutting and stacking.

With sap running at the whim of the weather and often responding to micro-conditions not predicted on the morning forecast, collecting it injects a delightful if annoying unpredictability into a world increasingly regulated by alarms and notices where we are regimented with fairly precise routines of work, appointments, meetings, and even recreation planned weeks and months in advance. While a sugarmaker can, to a limited extent, plan when to boil, filter, or can syrup, sap collection is almost completely unpredictable and requires immediate attention. A bucket or tank running over is as demanding as a nagging two-year-old. It feels like money dropping through a hole in your pocket.

On sunny weekend afternoons, collecting sap was fun. Like tapping day, it became a social event. I’d run into neighbors asking about the progress of the season, putting in their syrup orders, spilling a little gossip, or urging me to come to a town meeting or the high school play. As we talked, I lifted galvanized buckets off a tree, poured them into five-gallon pails, and carried the pails to a plastic tank in the back of my pickup. Sometimes a neighbor would join me, riding shotgun and helping empty the buckets, providing more warmth with friendship than a February sun at noon might offer. Time seemed to fly.

Approaching the trees and gazing into their crowns occasioned a kind of interspecies intimacy. I was visiting with old friends. Each maple almost seemed to have a different personality expressed in its size and shape, the amount of sap it yielded, and how it responded to particular kinds of weather. Sugarmakers who have gone from buckets to tubing have few regrets, except maybe when an ice storm turns their lines into a tangle, but they frequently miss knowing their trees as individuals.

A sign of winter winding down

Despite my sylvan affections and sense of camaraderie, the trees never ran at my convenience. I’d get antsy finding myself trapped in meetings that seemed to go on forever at my Hartford office and was unable to concentrate on work during days awash with sunshine when the mercury flirted with fifty degrees. I’d imagine drops so fast that they were almost a stream, buckets overflowing, sap puddling around the roots. The trees had no regard for my overscheduled life filled with a job, children, home repairs, errands, and the occasional dinner and movie out. Often I’d find myself half exhausted, collecting late at night or before dawn. Sometimes it was urgent, as when the temperature was plummeting rapidly and sap might freeze solid in the buckets, causing them damage and leaving little room for the next run. I ventured out in wind-whipped rain and snowstorms, finding my slicker and Bean boots more valuable than my best suit. My fingers froze and my back ached, but the trees were relentless. Toward the end of the season, I’d walk around dizzily in zombie-like depletion and chain-suck cough drops in a vain attempt to keep a cold at bay. The trees kept their own secret schedules, maintained their own measures of time.

When conditions were right, my maples poured gallons to my delight, and irritation at being a slave to their caprice faded. The pace became frenetic. Then temperatures would dip for a few days or even a week or more. I’d quickly recover my sleep and equanimity and find myself eager for the next run. The trees were teasing me. I became fidgety and dull with waiting. I remembered seventh-generation Vermont sugarmaker Burr Morse’s quip that maple people “are more than fussy—we’re downright neurotic.”

Collecting sap did not end with visiting the trees and emptying the gathering pails into my truck. I needed a place to store all that liquid until ready to boil. In my first two seasons, I underestimated how much the trees could yield on a warm day, and after filling the plastic barrel, pails, and carboys I’d procured for the purpose, I began using soda and milk bottles destined for recycling and then frantically filling my kitchen pots until I had to borrow a saucepan from my neighbor to cook dinner.

By the third year I’d wised up. I hauled the sap back to my garage-turned-sugarhouse and backed the truck up the long driveway. With a submersible pump in the collection tank, I sucked the liquid up to a larger tank elevated on a stand made of rusting tubular scrap steel and angle iron leaning against the north side of the sugarhouse. Here it would be mostly in shadow, keeping the sap cool and fresh until ready to boil. A valve-controlled pipe led from the tank to the evaporator.

At first I had a plywood-covered, oblong galvanized stock tank that had once slaked the thirst of cows or sheep. Later I bought a 250-gallon food-grade plastic tank, a necessity in these days of increasing concern for product purity. It took several minutes to pump the sap, but it felt like hours in cold or raw weather late at night. Lastly, I rinsed out the collection tank and flushed the hose and pump, a dull and solitary job. By late in the season my reddened and chapped hands let me know they’d had enough drudgery.

Collecting with buckets is a lot of work, and sugarmakers of any size now use tubing. But regardless of the sap-gathering method, the sugaring paradox is that the next step is to rid yourself of most of what you’ve worked so hard to accumulate. Sap is mostly water, typically ranging from 1.5 to 3 percent sugar. In order to get a gallon of proper density syrup from 2 percent sap, roughly 43.5 gallons are required. At 2.2 percent, just over 39.5 gallons are needed, and for the very rare tree that has 10 percent sugar, only about 8.7 gallons.

Ice and fire are the time-honored ways of concentrating sugar. After a frigid night, sugarmakers often toss away the ice in a storage tank or bucket of sap because liquids with less sugar freeze first, leaving the remainder more concentrated. Though long utilized, this is a small gesture toward producing syrup. Boiling has always been the mainstay of sugaring as far back as Native Americans, who placed hot rocks into containers of sap to drive off the water. Boiling is still necessary to achieve maple flavor and color, though today larger sugarmakers first extract much of the water through reverse osmosis—RO, in sugaring shorthand—a process adapted from desalinization technology, whereby the sap is pushed through a membrane that allows water to pass but not larger sugar molecules.

In dawn’s dim gloaming, or after a long day at work, I’d lift the overhead door of what looked like an ordinary garage. Flicking on a bare incandescent bulb revealed the enchanted space of the sugarhouse. There among buckets and various other containers, tangled hoses, a splitting maul, and the other tackle of small-time sugar making, I’d kneel before the cast-iron doors of the firebox, called an arch, light a nest of paper and kindling, and watch the flames begin to dance. Soon I could feel uneven warmth on my face. Along the wall, the blaze cast shadows on the lawn mower, garden tools, and children’s bicycles that seemed to have been hibernating since fall. This plain space for the equipage of suburban life seemed momentarily transformed to a wizard’s lair of alchemy where what looked like water would soon be transformed, if not into wine, at least into a kind of liquid gold. Expanding with the heat, the stainless-steel pan startled me with irregular pings. I slammed the cast-iron doors and got busy.

I opened valves on the white PVC sap line that ran from the outside storage tank through the wall and across the sugarhouse to a rectangular galvanized container, like a loaf pan, resting on top of the back of the evaporator, where rising steam would warm the fresh sap before it dripped through yet another valve into the boil below. I made sure there was enough sap in the back of the evaporator pan where the stainless was formed into corrugated channels, called flues, giving the fire more surface area so the clear liquid would boil faster. The front pan, where denser, more sugary pre-syrup flowed, was flat so it would boil more slowly, since sugary liquids can quickly caramelize and burn, destroying not only the syrup, but often the pan. I adjusted the valve that regulated flow from the back to the front pan and stepped outside to split a few chunks of wood.

Pin-prick bubbles formed in the pan, and I heard slight rumbles as the vaguest wisps of steam began to rise like mist off a chilling pond in autumn. Opening the firebox, I tossed in a couple more pieces of wood and listened to a low roar like dragon breath as the hungry flames sucked in oxygen. Jerkily moving like a butterfly from flower to flower, I played with the valves, prepared the next charge of wood for the fire, tested the more viscous liquid with a scoop to estimate its density, and readied cone-shaped felt filters suspended over a bucket for my first draw-off of nearly finished product. Thumbprint swirls of heat in the pan soon turned to churning bubbles and then to large cauliflower-like upheavals. Steam hung in the sugarhouse like fog before rising out a skylight in cumulous puffs. It was a day of clear sky and high pressure when the sap seemed eager to boil and time moved quickly.

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THE SWEET VAPOR of a boil is intoxicating. The muscle rhythm of stoking the fire, adjusting the flow of sap, and drawing off finished syrup is hypnotic. The smell, the moist warmth, and the sound of boiling and dripping produce a sugarmaker’s high—a kind of sensory joy forged in hard work and the pleasure of making something natural and nourishing.

Rising steam is also a welcome-mat for company. While a sugarmaker is always puttering around his evaporator, once a steady boil has begun there is plenty of time. In fact, boiling sap can be said to be made of time—minutes, hours, sometimes days. It’s not just time for processing a food—it’s time for visitors who work in offices and retail shops or whose jobs are focused on computers or carpentry to share in something attached to natural cycles and a deep heritage whose simplicity never fails to intrigue. They become part of something elemental and feel good about it. Describing his sugarhouse as second only to a general store as a gathering place, Burr Morse calls it a “focal point for pointless jabber and sweet triviality.” Time in a sugarhouse speeds up with visitors, and slows almost painfully when you’re alone. Sugaring not only produces syrup—the time it takes also generates stories.

Although a passerby once dialed 911 because he thought the steam was smoke and my garage aflame, the guys at the firehouse knew better, and a phone call to me kept the sirens silent. But since they were together anyway, they came by in a pumper to satisfy their sweet tooths with samples right off the evaporator. We swapped a few lies and had some laughs at the caller’s expense.

Like the pulse of sap, the flow of visitors is unpredictable. They come in dribs and drabs and occasionally in a steady stream. Sometimes I could go for hours on a sunny weekend and not only run the evaporator without interruption, but get through the paper and several magazines that had been waiting months on my bedside table. Other times, I’d be startled from a late-night fugue by a friend I thought had hit the pillow hours ago. It was an ongoing open house requiring no invitation, and the number of guests was yet another measure of time.

I liked it best when children came by and would stare moon-eyed into the steam as if they’d entered a fairy’s lair. Sometimes they would arrive with parents nervously working like sheepdogs to keep them from the hot arch or tripping on an errant bucket or hose. Older ones would bicycle over on warmer days. At the bank or the barber they might be treated to a lollipop or some candy around Halloween, but a paper thimble of near-syrup right off the evaporator was a wonder-working potion. Whenever there was fresh snow, they’d eagerly collect a bowlful and gasp as I’d drizzle hot syrup over it, creating maple taffy before their eyes. Often on weekend afternoons the sugarhouse would be filled with the screeching chirp and shout of children.

“We’re drinking tree blood!” some third-grader would inevitably shout. Empathic kids, perhaps recalling a vaccination, sometimes asked if the drill hurt the trees. Older ones would eagerly help collect sap, though between spillage and a few drinks I’d have been better off without their labor. Nevertheless, their puppy-like enthusiasm was a bigger payday than I ever got from a gallon of syrup. Familiar with the process, my own kids and those of my neighbors would turn into mini tour guides, and I cringed to hear my own words and intonations echoed in their squeaky voices.

Living two blocks up the hill, my buddy Alan was a frequent visitor to the sugarhouse, where, like Thoreau, I kept three chairs on sabbatical from the summer terrace—one for myself, a second for company, and a third for society. He’d see steam rising, come in without a knock, plop down in one of the plastic-webbed seats, and pick up the newspaper with little more than a taciturn “hello.” After he’d digested a few column inches, we’d be off discussing Middle East politics, the power company rate increase, or some nearby mayor charged with corruption. His blood churning with the news, he’d get up and stretch, lean over the evaporator and breathe the steam like a person with a cold savoring a vaporizer.

At such times, my fire department friend Bill and his wife Teri might be passing by on one of their long walks, and we’d catch up about our kids or the latest fitting or hose lay on one of the trucks down at the firehouse. I’d be adjusting the flow of sap into the back pan or turning the draw-off valve and pouring syrup into a cone filter to remove niter, inert sand-like minerals that precipitate out of boiled sap. We’d chat while I moved about the machine, and the conversation might morph into a discussion of the town budget or an impending snowstorm.

The sugarhouse had the natural conviviality and easy talk of a neighborhood tavern or coffee shop, where you never knew who’d pop in or where the conversation might lead. Sometimes an impromptu party might erupt when someone came by with a few beers or cups of coffee. Toward the end of the season, when the last, usually very dark syrup was for my own consumption, I’d sometimes boil hot dogs in the slightly sweet back pan while talk turned to the new baseball season.

Some of the deepest conversations I’ve ever had occurred while I boiled into the wee hours when a friend or neighbor who tossed and turned with troubled sleep came by under the silence of stars. There were problems on their mind and no one to talk to past midnight unless they saw my light and rising steam. The visit might be generated by an argument with a spouse, fears about a teenager on drugs, or a sick parent barely clinging to reality and life. Perhaps it was the mesmerizing pulse of the boil or soothing sweetness of the steam, but personal details I’d never hear in daylight came spilling out. Maybe there was something insular and comforting about the sugarhouse, brightly lit, warm and moist in the icy dark. They could stare at the boil while they spilled their guts. I fussed about the evaporator, something to fill the silences and keep us from the awkward tension of constant eye contact.

Once a mere acquaintance nearing forty came by to tell me a sheriff had served divorce papers that afternoon. He leaned over the evaporator and began sobbing, perhaps hoping the moisture would mask his tears. He’d been unfaithful, and his wife would not accept his apologies and promises. Another time, a friend had gotten a late-night call about the death of her mother. Distraught and shaking, she didn’t want to awaken anyone and so drove more than five miles to see if I was boiling. There was always a powerful but brief intimacy, and I got to know a handful of people in dimensions few saw. Of course, it was an ephemeral closeness, because like the old saw about Las Vegas, what was said in the sugarhouse stayed there.

Among the most electric moments in the season were the three or four times I’d pack syrup into containers. I’d rewarm it on the stove in my kitchen or, in subsequent years, in a separate boxy stainless container heated with propane and made for the purpose. The room would fill with maple smell as the syrup reached the right temperature. I’d filter again and test the density with a hydrometer. I’d taste it, check the color, and ladle the hot, golden liquid into plastic jugs or log cabin-shaped tins, screw on the caps, and turn them upside down to seal as they cooled. I’d recruit my kids and friends to help. A glow of satisfaction overtook me as the last step in production was completed and the secret of how much syrup the year would yield was revealed quart by quart, pint by pint. Each bottle seemed a notch in time. The counter, floors, and equipment grew sticky as the process wore on, and the last job of a long day was washing down.

Toward the end of the season, when there was no threat of sap re-freezing in the buckets, I’d often be collecting late at night to ensure I got the full day’s run. Where once I was bundled in a coat and thick gloves, I now worked in shirtsleeves. In a fog of sublimating snow and squishy muddy ground, I’d go out with a flashlight to check for moths, ants, or other spring-awakening creatures that might land in a bucket. Some of the sap could be cloudy from bacteria on a warm day, or might have turned as yellow as urine and bitter after buds opened on the tree’s branches, heralding the season’s end. My last few collections were to the otherworldly sleigh-bell-like sounds of spring peepers who called from a nearby swamp. This last “frog run” of sap produced the darkest, strongest-flavored syrup, my favorite.

Sometimes I sugared into the first week of April, but usually the season ended in late March. On a sunny day I’d pull my spouts with a soft hammer tap and toss the buckets into the back of my pickup. Ending the season was sad, but I was eager to have my schedule back and no longer abandon my life to the vagaries of weather and sap flow.

Of course, the season wasn’t over when it was over, because all the buckets, pails, taps, storage tanks, hoses, valves, and tools had to be sanitized and put away. The evaporator had to be scrubbed, including the build-up of carbon beneath the pan from a season of fires. Usually it was a day when sun beat down on my driveway and I’d wash everything with a bleach solution and triple rinse. About five car lengths long, my driveway that day parked tens of galvanized buckets. It was pure drudgery, and I usually recruited Alan and sometimes my preteen son to help. I saw it as compensation for the comfort of the sugarhouse. Lastly, everything had to be packed carefully away like Christmas decorations awaiting the next season.

Carrot-Ginger-Maple Soup

Yield: 8–10 servings

INGREDIENTS

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 large onions, diced

1 clove garlic, minced

6 large carrots, peeled, cut into 1-inch lengths

4 large potatoes, peeled, diced

1½-inch piece of gingerroot, peeled, shaved*

9 cups chicken or vegetable stock (more or less as needed)

½ teaspoon salt or to taste

½ teaspoon pepper or to taste

⅓ cup maple syrup

Garnish, for serving*

DIRECTIONS

1. In large, heavy saucepan, heat olive oil. Add onions and garlic. Cook on medium heat, stirring frequently, until onions are almost translucent, 5 to 6 minutes. Do NOT let either onions or the garlic brown.

2. Add carrots, potatoes, and gingerroot to saucepan and cook 5 minutes to coat well with oil, stirring frequently.

3. Add stock just to cover. Add salt and pepper. Cook over medium heat for about 30 minutes, or until vegetables are soft.

4. Purée vegetables and stock in blender or food processor, adding more cold stock if necessary.

5. Return purée to saucepan. Stir in the maple syrup. Add more stock, as needed, for desired consistency.

6. Adjust seasoning. Heat through and serve.* Add a dollop of sour cream or yogurt with chopped parsley or thyme for garnish if desired.

*Variation: If you like curry, use only ½ inch of gingerroot and add ½ teaspoon of ground curry. Add it with the vegetables to the saucepan.

Recipe by Kay Carroll

Roasted Shallot-Maple Vinaigrette

Yield: ⅓ cup

INGREDIENTS

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 small shallot

1 clove garlic

½ teaspoon Dijon-style mustard

½ tablespoons maple syrup

2 tablespoons sherry (or balsamic vinegar)

1 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground black pepper

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.

2. In a small baking dish, combine the olive oil, shallot, and garlic.

3. Cover with aluminum foil and roast for 15 minutes or until easily pierced with a fork.

4. Strain the olive oil and set aside, reserving the shallot and garlic. Let cool.

5. In a blender or food processor, combine the reserved shallot, garlic, mustard, maple syrup, sherry or vinegar, and salt. Blend until smooth.

6. With the machine running, gradually add the reserved olive oil in a thin stream.

7. Season with pepper.

This recipe can be used as a salad dressing but also tastes especially delicious drizzled over warm vegetables!

Recipe by Kay Carroll