Sinzibuckwud!
So, where does Maple Syrup come from? What does sinzibuckwud mean? And what do any of that have to do with Bunnies? On, on with the story! :-)
Under a crisp blue winter sky, over hills covered in snow gleaming bright white from the strong (rare) winter sun, our guide, through a series of stations, explained the wheres and whys and hows, the history and the making, of where maple syrup came from and how we get it, a story shared with Jesse and I that I'd like to share in this entry with all of you. Equal parts culinary, anthropology, and just plain happy silliness, before all that I'd like to begin with the ecology...
Recall from biology that plants manufacture the energy they need to survive and grow by turning carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into sugars, from which they make nearly everything else. (A pause for everyone, like me, having post-traumatic flashbacks of the Calvin Cycle.) These are manufactured in leaves (which provide the surface area to harvest the sunlight) and then transported through the tree itself as sap. In tropical climates, this process goes on year round. Up here in the north, however, the ambient air tempatures drop far enough to freeze water -- which poses a problem to a tree with lots of water-filled leaves. (Consider what it would be like for you to have one of your appendages freeze solid -- like an earlobe or a hand. Ow.) Coniferous (ex: pine) trees solve this problem by manufacturing terpenoids and turning their sap into antifreeze, allowing them to retain their leaves (needles) throughout the winter. Deciduous trees instead disassemble as much of the useful biochemical content of their leaves, pull them back into themselves, and then abandon the now empty leaves. This results in two neato things, from the perspective of us non-photosynthesizing bipedals: we get cool funky colors in the fall, and we get maple syrup in the spring.
As the hardest cold of winter gives way to the early thaws of spring, trees begin re-exporting the stored nutrients in their roots -- including their stockpiles of sugar fuel -- back up to where new buds are to be grown. All trees do this; but most trees also carry high concentrations of bitter chemicals in their flowing saps, or have low volumes of flowing sap, or have extremely high volumes that dilute the sugars to a virtually unnoticeable amount, or so on. In most parts of the world, either it never gets cold enough for trees to bother to shed leaves and store; or the transition between winter to spring is too fast or too slow. But across a large swath of the Great Lakes and Northeast North America, hard, deep-frozen winters only gradually thaw into warmer springs, creating a prolonged hovering just around the critical tempature range within which certain species of trees transport (relatively speaking) concentrated amounts of sugar through their trunks. And by happy accident, species of trees which do this and yet do not stick bitter or even poisonous additives in their saps grow plentifully across the blanketing forests of north-central/north-eastern North America. From natural gashes and cuts in large sugar maple trees during the right times of year would ooze this sweet sap, which would freeze at night into big chunks sweet enough -- roughly as sweet as a half-teaspoon or soish of sugar dissolved into a large tall glass of water -- that animals would come eat it. Some animals would even gnaw into the bark of appropriate trees and sip. This was noticed by -- and taken advantage of -- by the indigenous native Americans, which one tribe of which had the name Sinzibuckwud for the maple syrup resulting product, meaning "drawn from wood".
- If one were to collect the sap of appropriate trees and then concentrate it, the sweet, water-like sap becomes syrup. For the native Americans, lacking convenient ways to store syrup, they went further and boiled that syrup all the way down to rocks of maple sugar. Once in that form, it would keep all year, wouldn't spill, and could be moved and traded easily. Northeastern native Americans lacked ways of smelting metals in any significant quantity, and thus developed methods of doing all of the above that did not require metal tools. Axes could score the trunks of appropriate trees and the sap would run out of the gashes. Running down the side of the bark, it would be hard to collect, and so the native Americans inserted little spigots -- spiles -- made out of hollowed out sumac branches (about as thick as your finger, the interiors were soft and easy to hollow out) and then put birch-bark buckets underneat the ends to collect the sap as it dripped out. Without metal pots, the native Americans couldn't just boil the collected sap over a fire; they instead first left the sap out to freeze overnight and tossed the pure-water ice that collected on top in the morning; the concentrated solution left behind they then poured into thicker-walled buckets made by hollowing out logs, and instead of putting the (flammable) log bucket over a fire, they heated rocks white-hot in the fire and then moved the hot rocks into the sap-filled buckets and boiled off the remaining water that way until they were left with rocks of maple sugar.
European maples did not produce sap useable for syrup, but Europeans did have honeybees and honey. The northeastern native Americans had the exact reverse situation -- lots of sugar maples, but the native bees did not produce appreciable amounts of honey, and neither sugar cane nor sugar beets were known to them. Maple sugar thus had a critical role in the northeastern native American diet, used to give flavor just about everything. Where we today consume sugar in dozens of forms, from high-fructose corn syrup to sugars brown and white, the native Americans used maple sugar, comprising almost 10% of their total diet. And when the European colonists arrived, they soon learned to do the same, employing metal spiles in places of the sumac, and boiling sap directly on fires in metal pots.
- Maple trees, sans leaves, can be identified by the symmetrical branching of the branches off of the main trunk -- much like a person raising their arms in a Y -- vs. the asymetrical branching of other trees. (Collection buckets hanging off spiles can be seen at the base of pictured trees.) Maple trees also have rough bark, vs. the smoother surfaces of birch. Maple trees can also be identified at times by individual leaves still stubbornly stuck on the branches, or even digging up the snow and seeing what the forest floor beneath said tree is blanketed with. While sugar maples are the best, other maples can also produce sap (albeit in smaller quantities). Other trees either do not produce appreciable amounts of sap, or have sap that is unusable. [1]
[1] Tapping pine tree sap for food: v. bad idea -- the aforementioned turpins in pine tree sap? Turpentine. Sure, it used in olden days to kill lice and intestinal parasites, back in the same time period when mercury was considered suitable for cosmetics and lead solder was used to seal canned goods [2]. The only time pine tree sap products belong anywhere near the kitchen table is when one wants to strip the paint off of it or set it on fire.
[2] The latter -- canned goods sealed with lead solder -- when consumed as a primary source of food, caused the unfortunate members of the Franklin Expedition to go stark raving bats**t from lead poisoning and die in the wilds of N. Canada in the late 1840s.
Modern maple-syrup production often collects sap from dozens of trees at once using webs of plastic tubing connecting steel spiles. The collected sap is then boiled in specially designed, shallow flat evaporators that spread the heat and surface area for more rapid evaporation, and channel and concentrate increasingly thick solutions until one can pour off the finished syrup at the end. The state of boiling is monitored by watching the solution go from clear to amber; by dipping tools into the syrup and watching the viscosity as the product drips off; by monitoring the tempature of the product at stages, as syrup will boil six degrees F hotter than water. Once the sap has crossed about 66% sugar, it's ready and done.
Pure maple syrup comes in grades, although these grades have nothing to do with quality. Syrups go from Grade A light, Grade A medium, Grade A Dark, and Grade B. (As far as I can tell, there's no real reason they decided to call Grade B a separate letter instead of just calling it Grade A Really Really Fraakin Dark.) Each of these grades is the result of sap generated at different points in the season, from the very beginning (Grade A light) to the end (Grade B). While the amount of sugar is the same in all -- the concentration of sugar being simply a function of how far you boil it down -- the flavor changes dramatically from mild to whack-you-in-the-face-with-a-falling-tree strong as you move later into the year. Choosing the "best" grade is like trying to decide whether red wines or white are "better" -- a matter simply of preference of delicacy (or not) of flavor.
All of this we learned on a morning long nature hike through the woods of Cranbrook, as part of their yearly Maple Syrup festival. Cranbrook is a vast sculpted campus of rolling hills, quiet ponds and thick forests. Home to one of Detroit's two elite private boarding schools -- one of the places where the children of the auto executives go -- it's buildings designed by the Saarinens, architects of Dulles International Airport and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Cranbrook is also home to a quietly influential school of Art and Design and a hands-on science museum, the last being the hosts for the Maple Syrup festival we had gone one bright, sunny winter morning to attend.
We had left Ann Arbor earlier that morning for the hour-long drive to Cranbrook and mansion-covered Bloomfield Hills in the northwestern suburbs of metro Detroit, just a few miles up the road --and another world apart -- from the auto-plant suburb I grew up. As we pulled onto M14, Jesse picked a CD out of her stash, asked me to put it into the purple CD player plugged into her car's tape deck, hit play, and pretty soon we were zooming down Detroit freeways singing along to The Hadrosaur from Hackensack and The Sauropod Swing, greatest hits from the silly (and scientifically accurate) paleotological musical Dinosaur Rock. A musical about dancing, singing, yodeling dinosaurs! HEE!
(Did I mention recently there's something special about a brilliant, beautiful, accomplished and wonderfully silly lady? ;-) )
We had a nice all-you-can-eat breakfast on the Cranbrook grounds, and then through wooded trails down the hill from the Science Museum/Planetarium complex and the big outdoor stegasaur we hiked, led by our guide. From stands of trees with buckets slowly filling at their bases, to living history demonstrations of native American or European immigrant maple syrup processing techniques, to a working maple syrup evaporator, all the pictures above from that hike. The tours ended with a maple syrup candy making demonstration in the lower-level atrium, and then some silly grazing through the Science Museum's gift shop. We spent time flipping through various glossy books (including the Great Big Glossy Book of Edible Insects -- ewww), and then suddenly something in the far back corner of the shop caught Jesse's eye...
"If you want it," I smiled a few minutes later, "it's yours."
Jesse made Bunny dance during traffic stops all the way home, as the marvelous swing band Blue Sky Five bounced across the car speakers. Hee! :-)