Maple Syrup

Now that we are in Canada, we can see maple products everywhere. Here's a little blog about how exactly maple syrup is made, and it's history.
Maple Syrup is a sugar extracted from the sap of maple trees, except the sap only contains about 2 or 3% of sugar, the rest being water. Forty litres of sap, after a long process, would only create one litre of maple syrup. There exists seven different maple trees, only three of which can produce maple sugar. Out of the Silver Maple, the Red (or Soft) Maple, and the Sugar Maple, the Sugar Maple produces the most sugar out of all the maples.
The sap is said to have been collected by the Indians, long before the Europeans arrived to America. The legend is that a god created maple trees, and the syrup would trickle out completely ready. However, another god believed that if the Indians could get this gift from nature so easily, they would become lazy. So he poured water into the tree, diluting the syrup, forcing the indians to work to obtain their 'sinzibuckwud' (word for maple syrup, literally means 'drawn from wood'). I didn't specify the names of the gods, or the tribes, because these legends all have the same basis, but names, places, and times change from one tribe to another.

Older Version of collecting the Sap

To be able to obtain the rich sugary substance we know as maple syrup, a lot has to be done. Firstly, the syrup cannot be harvested whenever we want, we have to wait for the end of winter/early spring thaw. This is when the tree produces the most sugar, but the days must be very warm, and the nights must still be very icy. Methods to extract the sap have very little evolved over time, only the materials used have changed. The Indians created a v-shaped cut in the wood and used 'buckets' made with bark to collect the sap. The sap is almost tasteless at first, but the Indians decided to heat the sap, and eventually, after reaching a temperature of 104º C, they created maple syrup. The more they heated it, the more it became harder and darker.

Tubes collecting the sap and bringing it directly to the heating rooms.

When the Europeans came, they liked the maple sugar because it was nice, but also because it can be kept all year long, and importing sugar from Europe was just too expensive. Back then, maple syrup was not really something fancy to put on top of pancakes, it was a common sugar which most people, even some of the poorer ones, had. The extraction method developed, first with tools of wood, then various metals, and then plastic. Now, a series of tubes connected to the trees interconnect, and they meet up into one bigger tube which sucks out the sap, making the extraction much quicker. Before any sap collecting can be done however, the tree must be at least 40 years old until he can give a sufficient amount of liquid.
Maple Syrup is mostly associated with Québec, and if you visit Canada at all, or even if you don't, I suggest you treat yourself to some maple syrup, or maple candy. I certainly am!

References: Middle picture from Dad, First and Last pictures: http://www.eskerridge.com/bj/syrup/MapleSyrup.html, http://www.land-of-snow.com/maple_syrup_production.html

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