Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff

everything with a bleach solution and triple rinse. About five car lengths long, my driveway that day parked tens of galvanized buckets. It was pure drudgery, and I usually recruited Alan and sometimes my preteen son to help. I saw it as compensation for the comfort of the sugarhouse. Lastly, everything had to be packed carefully away like Christmas decorations awaiting the next season.

       Carrot-Ginger-Maple Soup

      Yield: 8–10 servings

      INGREDIENTS

      2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

      2 large onions, diced

      1 clove garlic, minced

      6 large carrots, peeled, cut into 1-inch lengths

      4 large potatoes, peeled, diced

1½-inch piece of gingerroot, peeled, shaved*

      9 cups chicken or vegetable stock (more or less as needed)

      ½ teaspoon salt or to taste

      ½ teaspoon pepper or to taste

      ⅓ cup maple syrup

      Garnish, for serving*

      DIRECTIONS

      1. In large, heavy saucepan, heat olive oil. Add onions and garlic. Cook on medium heat, stirring frequently, until onions are almost translucent, 5 to 6 minutes. Do NOT let either onions or the garlic brown.

      2. Add carrots, potatoes, and gingerroot to saucepan and cook 5 minutes to coat well with oil, stirring frequently.

      3. Add stock just to cover. Add salt and pepper. Cook over medium heat for about 30 minutes, or until vegetables are soft.

      4. Purée vegetables and stock in blender or food processor, adding more cold stock if necessary.

      5. Return purée to saucepan. Stir in the maple syrup. Add more stock, as needed, for desired consistency.

      6. Adjust seasoning. Heat through and serve.* Add a dollop of sour cream or yogurt with chopped parsley or thyme for garnish if desired.

*Variation: If you like curry, use only ½ inch of gingerroot and add ½ teaspoon of ground curry. Add it with the vegetables to the saucepan.

       Recipe by Kay Carroll

       Roasted Shallot-Maple Vinaigrette

      Yield: ⅓ cup

      INGREDIENTS

      2 tablespoons olive oil

      1 small shallot

      1 clove garlic

      ½ teaspoon Dijon-style mustard

      ½ tablespoons maple syrup

      2 tablespoons sherry (or balsamic vinegar)

      1 teaspoon salt

      Freshly ground black pepper

      DIRECTIONS

      1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.

      2. In a small baking dish, combine the olive oil, shallot, and garlic.

      3. Cover with aluminum foil and roast for 15 minutes or until easily pierced with a fork.

      4. Strain the olive oil and set aside, reserving the shallot and garlic. Let cool.

      5. In a blender or food processor, combine the reserved shallot, garlic, mustard, maple syrup, sherry or vinegar, and salt. Blend until smooth.

      6. With the machine running, gradually add the reserved olive oil in a thin stream.

      7. Season with pepper.

       This recipe can be used as a salad dressing but also tastes especially delicious drizzled over warm vegetables!

       Recipe by Kay Carroll

• • • • •

The Joys of Drudgery

• • • • •

      “IT’S A MADNESS,” Rob Lamothe says of sugaring. “It possesses you.” Laughing heartily and dressed in trademark red suspenders and baseball-style cap, he radiates woodsy, avuncular warmth. Now one of the largest producers in Connecticut with about fifty-six hundred taps, he started in the 1970s making less syrup than I once did. An experimental toolmaker by trade who worked on rocket guidance systems for Hamilton Standard, he’s not only a Pied Piper of maple hobbyists leading curious dabblers to tap backyard trees; he’s a kind of Johnny Appleseed of small-scale commercial sugaring in northwestern Connecticut and beyond, responsible for the creation or expansion of many operations by selling, installing, and repairing equipment, giving freely of his knowledge, and, most important, infecting customers with boundless enthusiasm for sugaring and life.

      Sugaring involves lots of hard work, sometimes downright drudgery. In an age where strenuous physical labor is increasingly avoided, making syrup is paradoxically growing in popularity, perhaps because technology makes it easier than it was years ago. Though its intensity is ameliorated somewhat by the season’s brevity, even the ebullient Lamothe gets worn down in January with dawn-to-dusk days of tapping, tubing repairs, and various system upgrades. Once sap begins flowing, his season becomes crazily busy. It’s not only from long hours collecting sap and boiling, but due to forty-five hundred visitors coming through the gambrel-roofed sugarhouse sided with yellow clapboards that he and his family built. Despite exhaustingly long hours, Rob entertains people of all ages and stripes as if they were guests, whether individuals, families, or tour groups. The sudden advent of warmer weather and budding trees late in March or early April is a huge letdown, leading to four weeks of tedious cleanup, equipment repairs, and readying the sugarhouse for next season.

      However described, maple people feel tied to something larger than themselves, fueling an enthusiasm transcending the normal aversion to backbreaking toil and making the labor its own reward. Exhausting as the work can be, many sugarmakers find it a refreshing refuge from the typical routines of life. Perhaps this is because, like artists, sugarmakers typically have a day job, at least until they hit it big. Sugaring is a passion, a respite from life as usual, a means of self-expression that makes an increasingly abstract world comprehensible. I’ve heard sugarmakers rhapsodize about connecting to nature, being in touch with earth’s cycles, bonding with their great-grandfathers, finding God, or communing with the past. The exact expression of the sentiment doesn’t matter. Sugaring seems to evoke a kind of spirituality entwined with and manifest through physical work. Producers may measure the success of a season in gallons of syrup, but it’s the process, not the product, that sustains them.

      A deeply religious man, Lamothe attends church in Collinsville, just a short walk from my home. When I had a question or problem during my sugaring days, he’d often make a house call after Mass, when his connection to the creator was elevated. On one of those Sunday mornings Lamothe described tapping in the woods on a bitter cold day with a fierce northwest wind. Powdery snow was blowing off the branches as they bent and creaked. Hearing a limb snap, he turned to see penumbral light radiating from behind a tree where it danced and glistened with prismatic colors in the rising sun. All the season’s busy effort seemed collapsed in that instant of serenity and peace. Years later, the moment remains vivid, and emotion catches in his throat as he tries to explain. “I know that God had made that moment. It’s etched in my heart forever.”

      • • • • • • •

      REVERENCE FOR sugar making often takes a secular twist. From nostalgic perceptions of Native Americans, Currier and Ives prints, notions of laconic Yankees spinning yarns in billows of steam,