Twain's Feast (37 page)

During the year’s first thaw, the sapwood begins releasing carbon dioxide; soon pressure builds up in the tree, pushing sap from any cut or hole. Then, when the temperature falls at night, conditions reverse; now the tree draws water in through the roots, replenishing its sap. Without the indecisive New England spring, wavering between beautiful days and frigid nights, the sap would flow only once; there might be a run for a day or two, but no real sugar
season
at all. People used to talk about sap “rising” from the roots in preparation for spring—and it’s lovely to think of walking over all that waiting sap in the wintertime—but the truth is that thick sapwood runs all through a maple. That makes for an enormous amount of sap; sugar makers take only 2 or 3 percent of a tree’s total.

Simmering all that down to make sugar (it required forty gallons to make eight pounds) would have taken days, especially for people without iron pots. Low-fired earthenwares were best suited for slowly cooking grains or stews; if the contents were brought to a high boil, the clay would eventually crack and crumble. “That’s a big loss, this time of year,” Jim says. “It’s tough to dig out the clay to burn more pots until after the final thaws.” No iron, and earthenware didn’t work well: that left boiling stones.

Beside the fire, Jim dumps a gallon of water into a six-by-fifteen-inch trough carved from a thick chestnut log, then starts fishing hot river stones from the embers with a pair of sapling tongs. When the first stone hits the water, it steams; the second raises a furious boil.

“You think it’d make a low simmer, steam coming off the surface,” Jim says. “But it’s this quite amazing, pyrotechnic boiling—if this was real sap, you’d smell the maple sugar already. You’d see it thickening around the rocks.” Erik actually stumbles back, less in alarm than delight, falling backward over a low fence of untrimmed branches and yelling, “The steam is coming
at
me!” Jim adds five more stones. Within two minutes nearly all of the gallon has boiled away, leaving a bare, hot film.

The boiling stones are incredibly effective; Jim thinks that using them means that sugaring would have had to be group work. “You’d have families coming together, working to gather the sap,” he says, “throwing in the stones, pouring in more sap as the first sap reduced and thickened.” Freezing the sap overnight might have sped the process somewhat—ice could have been lifted off the top, leaving behind sweeter, more concentrated sap. “When I’m doing this for real, I’ll keep pouring in fresh sap all day,” Jim goes on. “Finally it’ll be thick enough to finish at a simmer in a clay pot. You end with a real thick, dark sugar, perfect for traveling.”

“Dark” sugar is right; the soot from even seven stones has left the little water at the bottom gray and cloudy. A whole day of adding sap and stones might leave as much ash as sugar. “There’s no way to avoid it, really,” Jim says. “You’re putting the sap into immediate contact with the heating element.” That, he thinks, is why early Quebecois Jesuits reported that Indian sugar tasted more burned than the French product, with one opining in 1724 that “the French make it better than the Indian women, from whom they have learned how to do it.”

Jim’s sugar making follows almost exactly the process described by a Kickapoo man in 1835 after someone suggested to him that whites invented maple sugaring. He was understandably taken aback and described “the art of excavating the trees in order to make troughs of them, of placing the sap in these, of heating the stones and throwing them into the sap so as to cause it to boil, and by this means reducing it to sugar.” But Jim’s first few tries didn’t go smoothly.

“The first time I did this in public, I felt like the biggest fraud,” he says. “It was so muddy—I mean, am I conning these people? I brought the syrup home to my wife, and after the first taste neither of us would touch it. But the next morning it had settled out, and you could skim off the top and simmer it to sugar. It’s great energy, that way—I brought a lot of it with me when I paddled up to Canada.” Jim smiles at the memory; he says he closed the circle.

After cutting down his maple, Twain had written that “I comprehend & realize one little fraction of what it is to part with
all
of one’s home.” But by 1904 the house at Nook Farm had been sold; he and Livy had been unable to bring themselves to live there after Susy’s death. Once, after a rare return to the home before it was sold, he wrote to Livy that he’d looked up the stairs, and “it seemed as if I had burst awake out of a hellish dream, & had never been away, & that you would come drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after you.”

Now Livy was sick, and weakening; they sought medical care in Florence. As she faded, doctors consigned her to her room, with instructions that her husband was to see her for only two minutes a day. They’d been married for thirty-four years, and of course they cheated—passing note after note under the door, scrawling a final few words. Soon Livy died. “She was my riches, and I am a pauper,” Twain wrote.

Twain’s home was gone; he’d lost half his family. He could feel the world starting to slip.

“No more knowledge is necessary for making this sugar,” the abolitionist Benjamin Rush wrote in 1792, “than is required to make soap, cyder, beer, sour crout, etc., and yet one or all of these are made in most of the farm houses of the United States.” I love that Rush could assume such homey competence on the part of Americans—these days saying that making sugar is as simple as making sauerkraut is like saying it’s as easy as unicycling. But what surprises me more is that Rush thought it necessary to promote maple sugar at all. Americans used to make a lot more maple sugar and syrup than they do today; peak production came in 1860 with 8.2 million gallons, while today it hovers around 1.6 million in a good year. But Rush, it turns out, had a good reason for promoting maple sugar—and for wanting to see it replace white sugar completely and forever. Maple sugar, he believed, could deal a fatal blow to West Indian slavery.

In 1794 Rush wrote a letter describing sugar maples to Thomas Jefferson, who was then the secretary of state and, just as important for Rush’s purposes, vice president of the American Philosophical Society. Maple sugar, Rush wrote, was cleaner than the West Indian product and at least equally strong (one of Rush’s taste testers was Alexander Hamilton, himself born on the sugar-growing West Indian island of Nevis). The trees also provided molasses, vinegar, and the basis for a pleasant summer beer. There was much profit in it; there was reason to believe it might guard against the plague.

Then Rush began to bear down. Maple sugar, he argued, might sometimes be needed as medicine or food “by persons who refuse to be benefited even indirectly by the labour of slaves” but who enjoyed the produce of the “innocent” maple. He ended with his true hope, that maple sugar might be “the happy means of rendering the commerce and slavery of our African brethren, in the sugar Islands as unnecessary, as it has always been inhuman and unjust.”

Other abolitionists agreed. Robert B. Thomas wrote in the 1803
Farmer’s Almanack
that maple sugar was “more pleasant and patriotic than that ground by the hand of slavery, and boiled down by the heat of misery.” In 1840
Walton’s Vermont Register and Farmer’s Almanac
observed that “sugar made at home must possess a sweeter flavor to an independent American of the north, than that which is mingled with the groans and tears of slavery.” Writer after writer declared maple syrup to be free of the sweat, tears, and blood of slaves.

If abolitionists had succeeded in cutting deeply into the cane-sugar market, it would have been a true triumph. It’s easy to forget, given how completely the United States was shaped by African slavery, but the country was actually a (relatively speaking) minor importer of slaves—some 15 percent of all enslaved Africans came here, with most of the rest going to sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies. Unfortunately, maple sugar never managed to displace cane in anything like the volume hoped by Rush, and the sheer deadliness of sugarcane plantations meant a constant stream of newly kidnapped Africans up until the end of the illicit Brazilian and Cuban trades in the 1860s.

But every bit of maple sugar made did mean less slave-grown sugar bought; when a long run of sap meant a man could “make enough maple sugar to last all the year, for common every day,” that much at least did not come from slave plantations. But in the end maple syrup failed as a plantation crop on the kind of scale that might threaten sugarcane; efforts to transplant sugar maples to Germany, Russia, and even Virginia all failed (Jefferson’s trees at Monticello survived but never yielded sap). Maple syrup remained a fundamentally local food, one that might be shipped but could be made only under particular, nonnegotiable conditions.

As Rush said, private families were best equipped to make sugar because of “the scattered situation of the trees, the difficulty of carrying the sap to a great distance, . . . and the many expenses which must accrue from supporting labourers and horses in the woods in a season in which nature affords no sustenance to man or beast.” Such smallholders often used most of what they made, selling off surplus only in unusually good years. When she was sixty years old, Laura Ingalls Wilder remembered her father bursting into their Wisconsin cabin with the news that the cold snap was a sugar snow (she snuck to the door and secretly licked a bit from a nearby drift to see if it was sweet). The late, unexpected cold lengthened the spring, meaning a longer sugar season—and, for her grandfather, a welcome surplus of sugar the whole year round. It was a great occasion all through the woods, celebrated by a great communal feast and a rare dance; most of the sugar seems to have been eaten personally, and by friends and family, instead of sold.

Wilder’s grandfather was lucky, living in a section of woods where “the trees grew closer together and larger” (she may have misremembered the spacing—the best sugar bushes have well-spaced trees with high, massive crowns). Other farmers had to travel through the forest to the best groves, remaining in distant sugar camps for as long as the season lasted. They augered holes in maples, hauling sap with buckets yoked over their shoulders or on sleds drawn by horses and huffing oxen. Then they boiled the sap in kettles set over curved stone bases, or “arches” (a term still used for the rectangular iron bases of modern evaporators). Some makers used a single pot, but that could result in burned-tasting, dirty syrup; the best used a row of kettles, ladling the sap into smaller, cooler ones as it thickened. When it boiled over, the fat in a dollop of milk or cream might settle the foam; less appetizingly, a piece of salt pork hung over the kettle would slowly render into it all day long.

It was hard, heavy work. Very often the only shelter was a simple cabin or lean-to. Once boiling began, it didn’t end until the sugar was done, so someone had to be awake through the night: pouring sap, throwing on wood, pouring graining sugar into shallow pans to cool into loaves. Most of the work was outdoors, the fire roaring as it boiled off the five hundred gallons of sap needed to make a mere twelve of syrup (or, more commonly, a hundred pounds of hard sugar).

Whether sugar was made indoors or out, in a single kettle or in a diligently tended row, it took skill to judge when syrup was actually done.
Boil until thick,
instructions might read.
Until sweet. Until dark. Boil as long as you can without burning.
Sugaring was a skill gained through experience, by boiling season after season until one knew what “thick” meant, or “sweet,” or “dark.” A sugar maker might drizzle syrup on a snowball, watching to see if it filtered through; another might dip in a loop of twig, drawing it from the kettle to see how far the ribbon stretched. A third would drip syrup onto a cold ax head to see if it turned brittle. They were boiling sugar in the woods, over a fire miles from home; they had little special gear except for their kettles. Instead they used what lay on the forest floor, what grew from it, and what they’d used to cut wood.

There were farms throughout New England, but they were farms hewn from the forest, and the forest was waiting to come back. It was a land for those who loved good fires.