Real Maple Syrup

Sugarbush Spring by Marsha Wilson Chall (2000) is a carefully crafted story beautifully illustrated with paintings by Jim Daly. This story teaches readers how pure maple syrup is made. In the beginning of the book, Grandpa hitches up two huge horses to a “cutter” to carry empty buckets through wet snow into a forest of maple trees, the sugarbush. Grandpa and child tap tap tap into selected trees to tap them for sap. Next day, the sap collected in the buckets cooks in a huge, wood-fired device inside a large shack. The young narrator says, “Around the cook fire, we eat dumplings, roast marshmallows, and tell stories while the cold sap flows into the pans, heats through, and thickens and boils.” Water evaporates from the boiling sap and thus transforms into maple syrup.

I didn’t fully appreciate Chall’s text until I watched a few YouTube videos about how pure maple syrup is made. (Although I was taken aback by one video of a huge production facility in Vermont, that one did appear to create real maple syrup.) Background knowledge really helps with comprehension here. For example, on the first page the young girl telling the story says, “the snow’s too wet for angel making, icicles rain from Grandpa’s roof”, and “no mittens today.” Grandpa comments a few pages later that the trees stop dripping sap because it’s getting colder as evening approaches. Next morning, “frost is melting on my window . . . the temperature is rising.” Chall employs these important details to teach us that maple tree sap flows when the nights are cold and the days are warm.

I was surprised to discover that many bottles of syrup which look like maple syrup on the shelves of my local grocery store are not labeled as such. Original Log Cabin syrup has “no high fructose corn syrup, no artificial flavors” on its label. It’s not labeled “maple syrup.” The list of ingredients on the back reads: “corn syrup, water, sugar, contains 2% or less of: salt, natural flavor, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid (preservatives), caramel color, phosphoric acid, mono-and diglycerides, sodium hexametaphosphate.”

At a time when many people are questioning how “real” our food is, Sugarbush Spring is a beautiful book that teaches the source of real maple syrup.