The evaporator.
When the gathered sap arrives at the sugar house it passes into the storage tank, from whence it flows into the evaporator. This, the most costly and elaborate implement of the sugar-maker's art, is an outgrowth of the shallow iron pan which began to replace the old-fashioned iron kettle some fifty years ago. The original form was a single shallow pan about two and one-half feet wide by six to ten feet long, set on a fire-box of brick. The sap was concentrated to a thin syrup, which was poured out and the process repeated. By the use of this device a more rapid evaporation of the water was maintained, less wood was used and better goods made. The lack of continuity and the neces sary interruptions of the process were an obvious disadvantage. Necessity evolved the continuous evaporator, into which a steady stream of cold sap enters, passes through a devious course, boiling furiously, and from which, periodically, the hot syrup is drawn.
The evaporator sits over a roaring wood fire burning in a long brick stove or iron fire-box which the sugar-maker terms the "arch." In some large plants steam evaporators are in use. [An evapora tor is discussed in detail in the succeeding article.] As the product leaves the evaporator it is not, as a rule, in salable condition. It is usually safer to draw the syrup from the evaporator before it gets concentrated enough to sell. So it undergoes further boiling in a special deep pan until the tem perature is about 219° or until it weighs eleven pounds to the gallon, when (after the separation of the " niter " or "sugar sand,"—an impure malate e.f lime—by filtration or sedimentation) it is sealed, usually hot, in tin cans.
The sugaring process.
Sugaring used to be conducted in the open, and it sti_ I is in the more southern maple regions. But I 1 the North the sugar-house is always in evidence. It is commonly a small, rather rough shanty-like affair, large enough to house the evaporator, and perhaps the " sugaring-off " outfit, end to roof over the wood-supply. It is placed usually at the edge
of the bush, at such a point as is most convenient for the delivery of the sap.
The sugaring-off " process is an interesting one. The thin syrup from the evaporator is boiled to a much greater density in the concentrating pan used in syrup-making. Marketable syrup carries 60 to 65 per cent of sugar ; marketable sugar, 80 to 90 per cent. The former boils at about 219°, the latter at 234' to 245', or more. The boiling fluid foams and bubbles furiously over the quick fire and, now and then, is on the point of boiling over, when by a dash of a few drops of cream, skim-milk, water even at times, lard, a bit of salt pork,—anything to break the surface tension of the foam,—instantly it ceases and is gone. Care needs to be exercised here to prevent this loss as well as to obviate scorching. The fluid is adjudged done by the ther mometer's testimony, or by the way the stuff "hairs," or "aprons," or simply by the dictates of experience and judgment. The pan is then swung from the fire and the quiescent, brownish, viscid fluid stirred vig orously until graining begins, when the semi-solid mass is poured into molds, tubs or boxes to harden.
The output.
The annual crop in this country approaches fifty millions pounds, valued at over four millions of dollars. Six states— Vermont, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire—furnish over 90 per cent of the output. Much is made in Canada, but none south of Tennessee, west of the Missouri river, or in any European country. It is the product of limited areas of territorially a very small part of the world, and the foreigner who has seen or tasted it is rare indeed.
Many car-loads, particularly of the last run goods, the dark and inferior sugar,—the blacker and stronger the better,—are picked up by sugar buy ers and shipped, mostly west, to the mixers or blenders. Hundreds of tons of such material are used in the manufacture of chewing tobacco, a trade which is said to be eager for all the maple sugar that it can get.