..don’t trust the syrup
Two, Three and I recently made maple candy, only not by choice. The clear sap we’d collected bubbled, boiled over, and transformed into a hardened, beige-colored concoction that resembled unsettled peanut butter fudge. The boys were crushed. They’d wasted days eagerly watching jugs fill with sap, only to find it turned into a crystallized mess. On top of that, the beige mess had an awful taste that was so vile that it clung to our tongues, despite desperate water flushes and glasses of milk.
Tapping trees wasn’t exactly our style. In fact, until my boss decided to help educate urban folks on the appeal of making their own maple syrup, I had no idea we even had a maple in our yard– a statement that seemed to illustrate why urban folks needed this education.
Annoyed, I brought the hardened candy into work and plopped it on my boss’s desk.
She peeled back the lid, popped a medium-sized piece into her mouth, and fought to keep a straight face while summoning the rest of the staff to try it.
I stood back and watched as they obligingly took a piece. Unlike me and the kids, none of them spit it out.
“It’s really not that bad when you get to the end,” one co-worker observed, with his face contorted as if he’d swallowed a lemon. “There is something off though.. an initially sour taste….almost like spoiled milk…”
His words hit me like a ton of bricks. We’d collected our sap in several not-so-thoroughly rinsed out plastic milk cartons, which were then left inside our hot shed for two days. To my utter shock and dismay, the rancid flavor I’d went on and on about wasn’t exactly a flavor. It was literally candy-coated curdled milk which I’d just fed to my boss and my family.
I pulled the container from my boss’s desk before anyone could grab another piece and dumped it into the trash. I knew I couldn’t face my colleagues, my family, and my boss, and confess that our feeble attempt at making syrup might wind up making them sick. So I did the next best thing — removed the evidence and played dumb.
“I’ll just try again,” I stammered, quickly leaving the scene of my crime.
With a pit in my stomach, I shut my office door, overnighted two sap buckets from Amazon, and prepared for another dreaded round of tapping our poor tree, collecting any remaining sap — only this time in clean, sterile containers — and then spending hours “sugaring off.” In case anyone’s interested, that process also needs to be done outside over an open flame-another sign that tree tapping is not for the urban at heart-and only produces a drop of what you gather.
In compliance with my fellow urbanites, and to save everyone’s life and palate, I secretly ordered a few bottles of pure, amber-hued, New York maple syrup as a backup as well. After all, I couldn’t let my family and my fellow urban dwellers end our first, and likely our last, tapping season with a bad taste in our mouths.
Loved it