SUGAR MAPLES.
The making of sugar from cane and beets requires elaborate machinery. It is no simple home industry. But anybody who has a few sugar maple trees, and a fair amount of patience, can make maple sugar as good as any. The rich, sugary sap begins to flow early in the year. Holes are bored into the saturated wood to lead it out into buckets. The hollow drainpipes first used were "spiles," made of the large-pithed elder-bush, and driven into the holes as they were bored.
Now spouts of tin or galvanized iron are used. Drip, drip, falls the sap into the buckets, and every day it is gathered for boiling. The trees may run for some weeks.
Maple sugar has a peculiarly delicate flavor, that adapts it for use in the making of fancy desserts and confectionery. In the markets it commands a price far higher than cane or beet sugar, even when dark in color and strong in flavor. Constant boiling of the syrup, and faithful skim ming produces the best quality of sugar, and the lightest color. Much of the year's crop is sold as syrup, canned before it reaches the density re quired for crystallization.
A delightful variation from the gritty brick sugar and the syrup is maple cream, a smooth, fine-grained, almost white paste, made by stirring heavy syrup with a wooden paddle.
The hard or sugar maple, and a closely related species, or variety, called the black maple, are the two principal sources of maple sugar. It is, therefore, an American product, bound to dwindle in amount from year to year by reason of the cutting of of the forests in the northern tier of states. Vermont and Ohio are perhaps the largest producers now. The maintenance of hard maple groves will always interest a few people who supply their own needs in this way. Canada makes a good deal of maple sugar still.
It is interesting to note that the savages of our northern woods supplied themselves with maple sugar, just as the tropical savages get this needed food from palm trees and sugar-cane.
Soft maples yield sugar, but not in quantities that pay for the hard work of evaporating their thin sap.