When most people think of sugar, they usually picture the finely ground white or brown table and cooking sugar that comes in the little packets at your local coffee shop. This kind of sugar comes from sugar cane, which is a crop grown in the more temperate regions of Central and South America, as well as many other warm regions across the world. And when you mention sweeteners, the first thing to come to mind is most likely corn syrup, the high-fructose product made from ground corn crops.
But there was once a time where settlers in Canada did not have such easy access to either of these commodities and had to get a bit inventive in order to satisfy their sweet tooth. Early European inhabitants of Quebec learned from the Iroquois and Ojibwa natives that the ‘water’ from certain kinds of trees could be used in cooking to sweeten foods. This ‘water’ was of course the tree sap of maple trees, and with time and experimentation they were able to increase the sweetness of the sap by boiling it off until the sugar was much more concentrated. Eventually, this boiling or ‘sugaring off’ process led to the creation of a sweet, syrupy substance, and maple syrup was born.
Early collection techniques
Native Americans collected the tree sap by cutting v-shaped holes into trees and then used hollow reeds to direct the flow of the sap into buckets. These early buckets were made out of birch bark. The sap was either used directly from the tree in cooking, or it was left overnight to evaporate and perk up the sweetness. By the 1700’s, immigrants from France and England had improved upon the collection process by using wooden bucks and steel taps inserted in smaller holes in the trees. They were also able to use steel kettles to boil the sap over a fire, greatly speeding up the sweetening of the liquid. The sugar provided by the maple trees was an important staple in the diets of these early settlers, who were often cut off from the supply lines of their home countries by the harsh winters and difficult overseas journey. Maple sugar was found in almost every home and played a much larger role than the niche it fills today in modern kitchens.
The march of progress
By the mid 1800’s, the collection and production of maple syrup had undergone a few changes. Tin buckets replaced wooden ones and sheet metal pans that fit into special evaporators vastly sped up the boiling process. Incremental changes in these boiling pans allowed sugar shacks to increase the amount of surface area that the sap was exposed to during boiling and shave off an hour here and there. It was almost 100 years before the collection of maple syrup underwent its final evolution with the introduction of better filtering systems for sap, vacuum-assisted tube networks connecting maple trees and replacing bucket collection systems and increasingly modern methods of extracting moisture from the sap prior to boiling.
While technology might have taken a lot of the time-consuming labor out of collecting and boiling sap, the maple syrup you pour on your pancakes today still follows the same basic process that it did almost 300 years ago when the first enterprising settlers used it to cure their meats and satisfy their cravings for something sweet.
