One of the fun experiences I had during my years at Middlebury College was making maple syrup. Friends of mine knew a local farmer outside Bristol, Vermont, and one winter day I was invited with my friends to visit the farm and watch them make maple syrup. I wouldn’t even have remembered when it was, except I wrote on the back of the photographs “March 1975.” So, technically, it may not have been a winter day, though obviously from these pictures, it was cold and there was still lots of snow on the ground. Of course, that was true of Vermont in April as well as in March.
Buckets collecting the maple sap
On this occasion in March 1975, we traipsed in our boots and heavy parkas through the snow to the maple trees, where the farmers collected the sap in buckets. We took the sap from the buckets on the trees and poured it into the vat in the sugar house. There it boiled to evaporate the water and concentrate the sugar to make the syrup. The farm operators already were boiling off the water in days ahead of our visit, and we just added more sap to the steaming vat.
The sugar house
There was some sort of skimming process involved to get rid of impurities in the sap. This was the step that determined the quality of the sap. As I recall, my college friends and I were not very good at skimming. I worried after our efforts that we had left a substandard syrup for the farmers to dispose of.
Still, as a city girl, I’d never come anywhere close to maple syrup outside a bottle before. As we worked, I thought of Almanzo Wilder in Farmer Boy as I worked that day, which was my only prior experience with sugaring.
Friends on our way to taste the syrup, sugar house in the background
After several hours of tending the sap in the cold barn, we abandoned the work to the professionals and retired to the warm farmhouse. There, we were treated to snow covered with maple syrup—some of the best “Sno-Cones” I’ve ever had. There were also lumps of maple sugar to snack on, sweeter than most chocolates.
Now, every time I see bottles labeled “pure maple syrup,” I appreciate the work that goes into making it. It’s expensive to buy in the stores, but it is well worth the cost. Assuming that the bottlers of the syrup had better workers than my friends and me.
What experiences have you had that remind you of times past?
Lovely, happy pictures, which remind me of a similar tour I took some years ago. As I recall, they also gave us doughnuts and a dill pickle… Hmm. We had fun anyway.
Joy, now that you mention it, I think I got a doughnut also. Or something sweet. But if there were pickles, I would not have eaten them. Thanks for the comment. Theresa