Just finished a crazy tasting of top Canadian microbrews. Top ones, http://t.co/WNT2JZjO, http://t.co/mgSu7ADf, http://t.co/yiK7BC2H
| 01 July 2010
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| Maple Syrup |
| The Romance... |
| Recipes |
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Page 2 of 3
The romance that has attached itself to moonshine, in my kitchen or deep behind a Kentucky mountain, has also stuck to maple syrup. Maybe because the images of moonshine, cowboys on lone prairies, and traplines, are all so … natural, and evoke such strong personal memories? But you know what I mean.Those who have been close to the culture invariably get wistful about their golden syrup years. And those of us who live in the broad-shouldered, no- culture west find that wistfulness hard to understand. They talk, with misty eyes, of the last of the days in the sugar bush — the hectarage of trees that’s farmed — and how they dipped syrup into the fresh snow to make sweet popsicles; about their mom’s sugar pie; the intensity, and at the same time, the joviality of the sugar shack; how really good the syrup was back then, even if it wasn’t; how cousin Laurent’s maple syrup in Saint-Paul-de-Joliette was waaaay better than Georges’ stuff, just 10 k up the road. They regret that today many of the louvered shacks hidden deep in the woods, where the trilliums, columbines and chokeberries explode in their summer brilliance beneath the leafy maples, have been replaced by commercial syrup emporiums that come complete with every conceivable and inconceivable kind of syrup derivative, and restaurants full of very ordinary food.
One of my researchers wrote: “The menu is almost always omelettes, ham cooked in maple syrup, potatoes, baked beans, tasteless bread, pork rind, ketchup, grand-pères — dough cooked in maple syrup — and if you are lucky, a maple syrup pie. Most places have music that is far too loud. If you feel like it, you can dance to get rid of the extra calories. It's okay for groups that have known of nothing else. The best part is outside. They pour hot maple syrup onto the snow and you pick it up with a popsicle stick.” There seemed to be a yearning for other, sweeter times.
One day, I must heed the siren call of those brochures, catch the colours of fall, and hang around until spring when the sap starts flowing in the maples. Snuggled up in a sugar shack, I may even show them how to make a still from ordinary objects. I would guess that anything is possible in a sugar shack.