Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff
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Название: Maple Sugaring
Автор: David K. Leff
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Кулинария
Серия: Garnet Books
isbn: 9780819575708
isbn:
| • • • • • | The Joys of Drudgery | • • • • • |
“IT’S A MADNESS,” Rob Lamothe says of sugaring. “It possesses you.” Laughing heartily and dressed in trademark red suspenders and baseball-style cap, he radiates woodsy, avuncular warmth. Now one of the largest producers in Connecticut with about fifty-six hundred taps, he started in the 1970s making less syrup than I once did. An experimental toolmaker by trade who worked on rocket guidance systems for Hamilton Standard, he’s not only a Pied Piper of maple hobbyists leading curious dabblers to tap backyard trees; he’s a kind of Johnny Appleseed of small-scale commercial sugaring in northwestern Connecticut and beyond, responsible for the creation or expansion of many operations by selling, installing, and repairing equipment, giving freely of his knowledge, and, most important, infecting customers with boundless enthusiasm for sugaring and life.
Sugaring involves lots of hard work, sometimes downright drudgery. In an age where strenuous physical labor is increasingly avoided, making syrup is paradoxically growing in popularity, perhaps because technology makes it easier than it was years ago. Though its intensity is ameliorated somewhat by the season’s brevity, even the ebullient Lamothe gets worn down in January with dawn-to-dusk days of tapping, tubing repairs, and various system upgrades. Once sap begins flowing, his season becomes crazily busy. It’s not only from long hours collecting sap and boiling, but due to forty-five hundred visitors coming through the gambrel-roofed sugarhouse sided with yellow clapboards that he and his family built. Despite exhaustingly long hours, Rob entertains people of all ages and stripes as if they were guests, whether individuals, families, or tour groups. The sudden advent of warmer weather and budding trees late in March or early April is a huge letdown, leading to four weeks of tedious cleanup, equipment repairs, and readying the sugarhouse for next season.
However described, maple people feel tied to something larger than themselves, fueling an enthusiasm transcending the normal aversion to backbreaking toil and making the labor its own reward. Exhausting as the work can be, many sugarmakers find it a refreshing refuge from the typical routines of life. Perhaps this is because, like artists, sugarmakers typically have a day job, at least until they hit it big. Sugaring is a passion, a respite from life as usual, a means of self-expression that makes an increasingly abstract world comprehensible. I’ve heard sugarmakers rhapsodize about connecting to nature, being in touch with earth’s cycles, bonding with their great-grandfathers, finding God, or communing with the past. The exact expression of the sentiment doesn’t matter. Sugaring seems to evoke a kind of spirituality entwined with and manifest through physical work. Producers may measure the success of a season in gallons of syrup, but it’s the process, not the product, that sustains them.
A deeply religious man, Lamothe attends church in Collinsville, just a short walk from my home. When I had a question or problem during my sugaring days, he’d often make a house call after Mass, when his connection to the creator was elevated. On one of those Sunday mornings Lamothe described tapping in the woods on a bitter cold day with a fierce northwest wind. Powdery snow was blowing off the branches as they bent and creaked. Hearing a limb snap, he turned to see penumbral light radiating from behind a tree where it danced and glistened with prismatic colors in the rising sun. All the season’s busy effort seemed collapsed in that instant of serenity and peace. Years later, the moment remains vivid, and emotion catches in his throat as he tries to explain. “I know that God had made that moment. It’s etched in my heart forever.”
• • • • • • •
REVERENCE FOR sugar making often takes a secular twist. From nostalgic perceptions of Native Americans, Currier and Ives prints, notions of laconic Yankees spinning yarns in billows of steam, to today’s syrup containers shaped like log cabins, sugaring emanates a romantic mystique. Regardless of today’s interconnected realities, the literature and lore of sugaring have shaped the image of an individualistic, off-the-grid, self-sufficient activity where a deep relationship with the land is paramount. “It is that happiest of combinations, a commercial affair which is also an annual rite, even an act of love,” wrote Dartmouth College English professor Noel Perrin in his elegiac 1972 book, Amateur Sugar Maker.
The ever-ebullient Rob Lamothe
Perrin, who died in 2004 at age seventy-seven, grew up in and around New York City but in 1963 bought a farm in Thetford Center, Vermont. It served as home and writing muse. Here he built an eighty-eight-square-foot sugarhouse near a dirt road roughly a hundred feet from the Pompanoosuc River “in conscious admiration of Henry David Thoreau.” Like his mentor, he vividly records the process of construction and meticulously accounts for costs down to the penny.
Perrin bought a two-by-six Grimm evaporator and made as much as fifty-seven gallons of syrup from 104 taps, some of which he sold to the Globe Corner Bookstore on Boston’s Freedom Trail, where his books were also available. Perhaps no one has rendered sugaring in such straightforward yet poetic terms. We share in his worry that a dirt floor may thaw during a boil, causing his evaporator to tilt and burn, and his pleasure in using a hydrometer, an instrument of science that “makes sense to the eye.” He relates some sugaring history, rails against weather that produces a “deceitful” season, and delights in chickadees, snow fleas, and other natural phenomena. He describes his rural neighbors with affection and humor, from the town selectman and builder who helped install his evaporator to the man from Corinth who collected sap with two horses and a sled.
Capturing in few words the essence of his world for the sophisticated, urbane readers of the New Yorker, where part of the book first appeared, Perrin notes that “gravity and wood are the chief natural resources of a Vermont farm.” Reinforcing long-held attitudes among the public and many small-time sugarmakers, he writes: “When you’re producing a sacred article, you don’t have to maximize your cash return.”
A couple generations before Perrin’s experiment as a gentleman farmer, Scott and Helen Nearing tapped America’s back-to-the-land homesteading vein, stepping out of the mainstream and into a somewhat ascetic life built around sugaring as a self-reliant means to earn a living. Scott was an economist and passionate exponent of country life, labor, peace, and leftist causes. His beliefs cost him a college professorship. Helen was a musician. Both of them strong and preternaturally energetic, they “thumbed their noses at city life” in the heart of the Great Depression and bought a rundown farm “on a side hill of a valley directly facing Stratton Mountain” near Jamaica, Vermont. They did so out of deeply held philosophical yearnings to simplify life, control their livelihood, make contact with nature, and find time for “study, teaching, writing, music and travel.” They grew much of their own food and constructed several stone buildings during two decades on the land. Sugaring, as well as lecturing and writing, were their source of cash. They found that even “novices in maple production can turn their energy and ingenuity into a craft that offers scope for imagination and new ideas, and pays sufficient financial returns to provide a simple, but adequate living.”
By their example and writings, the Nearings became icons of back-to-the-land homesteading and were influential in the 1960s agrarian commune movement. Published in 1950, The Maple Sugar Book: Together with Remarks on Pioneering as a Way of Living in the Twentieth Century probably contains the most comprehensive history of sugaring available, along with instructional advice on making syrup and sugar, a guide to marketing, and recipes. “A life as well as a living” was their passionate call to self-sufficiency and contact with nature. “Anyone who has ever sugared remembers the poesy of it, to the end of his days,” the Nearings wrote lyrically. “When the time of year comes round with sap rising and snow melting, there is an insistent urge to take one’s part in the process—to tap the trees, to gather the sap, to boil out the sweet syrup of the maple.” In such words I find СКАЧАТЬ