Nature Bulletin No. 419-A   May 15, 1971
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
George W. Dunne, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt. of Conservation

****:MAPLE SYRUP AND MAPLE SUGAR

When we old-timers were youngsters, a favorite breakfast in winter -- 
one that stuck to our ribs -- featured buckwheat pancakes or 
"flapjacks" with plenty of butter and maple syrup. Our great-
grandfathers who settled here in the Middle West soon learned from 
the Indians how to tap sugar maple trees in early spring and, from the 
sap, make syrup and sugar.

For the Indians inhabiting New England and the country on both sides 
of the Great Lakes, maple syrup and maple sugar were very important 
foods. Upper Michigan and adjacent Canada were occupied mostly by 
the Chippewa or Ojibway when visited in the 1760's by two explorers 
who lived among them and wrote accounts of how these "Canoe 
People" obtained and used the sugar and syrup so essential to them.

Salt was scarce, so they employed maple sugar in their cooking to 
season wild rice, parched corn, boiled vegetables such as squash and 
pumpkin, meats, and even boiled fish. Some sap was allowed to sour 
into vinegar used in cooking venison or bear meat which were then 
sweetened with maple sugar -- like the sweet-sour cookery of Germans 
and Bohemians. Sap stored undergound, in vessels made of bark or 
skins, was drunk as a beverage in summer or used to sweeten their 
medicines, most of which were very bitter -- such as a tea, made by 
boiling roots of the paper birch, taken to relieve stomach cramps.

Not much is known about what the Indians did before the first white 
men came to America, except that they tapped the maple trees by 
slashing the bark, on a slant, with stone tomahawks and apparently 
had two crude methods of making syrup. One was to place a vat, made 
of bark or wood or moosehide, in a pit; fill it with sap; and toss red-hot 
stones into it. The other was to freeze the sap repeatedly in shallow 
vessels and throw off the ice as it formed on top. By 1763, the 
Chippewa were using iron hatchets and kettles obtained from French 
fur traders. Their other utensils were all made of native materials. The 
bark-covered lodges at each grove of maple trees or sugar bush, and 
their methods were very crude.

Today, in the large commercial sugar camps, a portable power-drill is 
used to tap the trees, and metal spiles through which the sap drips into 
transparent plastic bags -- from one to five per tree, depending upon 
its size. The stainless steel collecting vat, mounted on a tractor-drawn 
trailer, is emptied through pipes into a big storage tank inside the sap 
house. Periodically, the sap flows through a valve into a stainless steel 
evaporator with a hot fire underneath. There it boils and circulates, 
carefully tested and controlled until it weighs 11 pounds per gallon, 
and comes out the other end as syrup which runs through a filter into 
tins or drums for shipment at $4.35, or more, per gallon. Vermont is 
the leading producer of maple syrup and maple sugar, followed by 
New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, but a lot of the syrup 
made in other states is shipped for bottling and sale with a Vermont 
label.

Syrup boiled until 28 or 30 degrees hotter than boiling water, is stirred 
and run into molds where it becomes "cake sugar" sold in 1/2-pound 
or pound blocks, or in some fancy shape such as a maple leaf, a pine 
tree, a rabbit, Santa Claus or a log cabin. Syrup boiled to a lower 
temperature and poured onto snow, as the Indians did, becomes a 
chewy sweet called "jack wax". Poured into a flat dish and stirred 
continuously, it becomes "maple butter". Syrup mixed with milk and 
hard cider becomes a potent beverage called "Jersey Milk".