LeRoy Pennysaver & News

LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - MARCH 14, 2021 by Lynne Belluscio My mother’s family tapped maple trees and boiled maple syrup. My aunt and uncle who lived in Copenhagen, New York, had a large sugar bush of maple trees that were at least a hundred years old. Each tree would have four or five buckets hanging from it. They were hard scrabble farmers, and the money they made from maple syrup was an important part of their income. They were so far off the road, that we never went up there during sugar season, and when they sold the farm, they sold off the maple trees to a lumber company and the maple was made into bowling pins. I cannot imagine what it was like to see those magnificent trees come down. My mother’s cousin lived south of Cortland down the Brackle Road from Lower Cincinnatus. He had a dairy farm and sold some milk to the cheese factory over in Taylor. We visited his sugar house a couple of times. It was a hike up the hill from the house, and it was surrounded by huge old maple trees. The buckets were cedar, stained red on the outside, with a fresh coat of light grey paint on the inside. He would put the buckets in the stream for a couple of days so they would swell up to hold the sap. He told a story of one year when the sugar season was particularly long, they were running out of fire wood to fire the evaporator. They had some old railroad ties that they shoved into the firebox. The fire was pretty intense and the creosote burned pretty hot – so hot in fact, that the irons doors on the front of the firebox started to glow red and they were afraid that they would melt. It was on a visit to his farm one year, that we brought back 15 of the old red cedar buckets to hang on our trees on North Road. We had to swell the buckets up in the bathtub each year. We had two big collecting pails, and we collected by hand using a wooden neck yoke for a few years. Then we tapped a few more trees and gathered the sap in a barrel we pulled behind the tractor. In the very early years, we boiled in two large wash tubs, but soon built a sugar house and installed a commercial evaporator. Eventually, we had 1200 taps that were connected by plastic tubes that fed right into the sugar house. When the evaporator was cranked up and we had a roiling boil, the steam would rise out of the steam vents on the roof, and red sparks would fly out of the top of the smoke stack. One time we looked out the window just as the LeRoy fire trucks pulled into the bottom of the driveway. Apparently, someone driving by saw the sparks and the steam and called it into the dispatcher. The next time, that happened, at least the guy stopped by first to check the sugar house out and learned that it wasn’t on fire. Maple sugaring is a part of the history of this area. The early settlers relied on maple sugar not only for their own consumption, but as a source of income. On an average, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, but syrup will spoil unless it is sealed in cans or jars. So, the syrup was boiled until it became hard sugar. It was poured into wooden molds or boxes. Sometimes, the sugar was beaten in wooden troughs until it formed crystals. It was told in my family, that one year, my great grandmother beat hundreds of pounds of maple sugar to be sold. Abolitionists told people to use only maple sugar, since white cane sugar was made by slave labor. And grade A fancy maple sugar had no maple flavor or color because it resembled white cane sugar. It was only recently, after people were disappointed to have a flavorless “fancy” syrup, that the grading system changed to light amber, medium amber, and dark amber. The darker the syrup, the stronger the maple flavor. Tapping maple trees usually begins when the temperature begins to get above freezing. Ideal weather is a cold night followed by a warm sunny day into the low 40s and then a cold night.. It helps to prolong the season if there is a good snow cover, and the ground has frozen. There is a great story, that some early land investors in the early 1800s thought that they could make a lot of money by making maple sugar. They hired a crew of men to go into the woods and make long wooden sap troughs that would carry sap down from the hills to a sugar house. Their first mistake was that as soon as the sun hit the troughs, they warped and didn’t work. But the second mistake was they thought that the sap ran all year long and so their money making scheme didn’t work. Before the Europeans arrived, the Indians gathered sap from the maple trees, although they did not use taps. They slashed the tree, and collected the sap in a trough, or bark bucket. Early on, the pioneers used a gouge and a curved piece of tin to gather the sap into wooden troughs on the ground. Buckets were expensive, so the men would carve out wooden troughs. Long hand- carved wooden “spiles” would be pounded into holes in the trees. There are accounts of men carving hundreds of spiles during the winter to be used in the spring Most people enjoy maple syrup on pancakes. But there are so many other ways to enjoy this sweet treat. If you boil the syrup until it is thick, to what is called the “soft ball” stage, it can be poured on packed snow and it becomes a taffy. It’s called jack wax and when my kids were young we would write their names with the thick syrup. Our sugar house hasn’t been in operation for over 20 years, but when the sap starts running it’s still time to go out and tap a couple of trees. I’ll boil it down on the stove and try not to burn out an element like I did a few years ago. Great salad dressing recipe ¾ cup oil ¼ cup vinegar 2 Tbs maple syrup 1 tsp salt 1 tsp mustard ½ teaspoon paprika Sap’s Running