It's Maple Syrup Season

I keep hoping someone will ask me what we did for our anniversary last week.  I have my answer ready.  I would say, "We went to a world famous restaurant in New York," and they would be so impressed.

Indeed we did go to a world famous restaurant in New York -- The Maple Tree Inn in Short Tract, along County Road 15 in Western New York.  It is open for about two months a year, and they serve delicious buckwheat pancakes and their own maple syrup.

According to their website, "the family places approximately 8,000 taps each year and most of the sap is piped by tubing to holding tanks. The large evaporator is still fired by wood, but the time consuming task of boiling has been greatly reduced by the 1984 installation of a reverse osmosis machine. This modern equipment removes the excess water from the sap, thus reducing the time and energy needed to produce syrup."


The way we made maple syrup when we lived in Western New York was much more labor intensive!


You make maple syrup in the late winter, when the temperature is above 40 degrees during the day and below 32 degrees at night.  The season lasts about six weeks.  The sap comes from the sugar maple, which you tap.  You drill a hole in the tree and put a spout into the hole, tap it into place, and hang a bucket on the spout.  The sap drips into the bucket.  It takes a day or more for a bucket to fill with sap.  


When a bucket is full, you replace it with a new one and boil down the collected sap to make syrup.  At the beginning of the season, when the tree is full of sap, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup!  Later in the season it will take closer to 100 gallons.  


The sap boils for about twelve hours -- more or less depending upon the outdoor temperature and the quality of the sap -- before the water is evaporated out of the syrup, and you need to keep your fire at 218 degrees for that to happen.  (If you boil it too long it will become maple sugar, a very pleasant treat, but not what you're aiming for.) Tom's Grampa Mills had a sugar shack in the woods behind the house which they used for years, but by the time we got to the farm in the early 1990s the sugar shack was not operational.  Our wood stove in the dining room became our sugar shack.  It required great vigilance to keep the fire going and to keep from spilling the sap as we poured it into the large pans for boiling.  Inevitably the wallpaper peeled because of all the steam, but the house smelled wonderful!


I can't remember how in the world we kept our two little boys from disaster with that hot sap boiling for days on end.  Perhaps that's why Tom built a sugar shack in the yard not far from our back door during our third (and last) winter in New York.  One evening late in the maple syrup season we were at his parents' house, enjoying dinner together.  Tom noticed smoke rising above the woods that separated our house from Dad and Mom's and dashed off to investigate.  There was our sugar shack, burning down! 

We left the Maple Tree Inn last week with full tummies, a half-gallon of their own maple syrup, and some sweet memories stirring in our hearts.