CrossRoads Farm

Sugar-On-Snow

28 March, 2005 - 8:32 am

Well, it’s sugaring time up here in the Green Mountains. The snow has receded from the front yard and the side garden. Our dooryard is a lake of mud and the roads are rutted and mucky. The car is so covered with grime you can’t read the license plate and I have to be extra careful, especially when wearing a skirt, not to touch the outside of the vehicle with my clothes. The days are warmer, the sun has been out, but it’s still good to have a fire in the stove in the evening when it’s cold.

I checked on my gardens. Tiny sprouts of mullein and yarrow are poking through the ground and there are crocuses around the lamppost in the front yard.

Saturday we were invited to a Sugar-On-Snow Party. It is an annual event at nearly every farm that makes syrup and all the big sugarhouses that cater to tourists. I was excited because I’d never tried Sugar-On-Snow before.

Anne was our hostess. A very sweet, capable woman, born and raised right there on that piece of land in Montpelier. She was shocked when I said I’d never tried Sugar-On-Snow so she took me into the sugar house to show me how it’s done.

The sugarhouse is a shack on the edge of the woods. A pipe runs into the back of the sugarhouse from a reservoir full of sap. D told me there had been a steady 17 gallons of sap in the reservoir even through all the boiling done that day and the 5 gallons of sap that the family gave D to make beer with. The reservoir is filled from lines coming down from the trees on the back of the property. One drip at a time, the sap runs down the lines and into the sugarhouse. Inside is a woodstove with a pan on the top of it. It is made of stainless steel and fitted precisely to the top of the woodstove - so no energy is wasted. The sides of the pan are high, 8-10 inches anyway. This front pan is fed from the back pan. A much larger, deeper stainless steel pan that collects the sap running in from the reservoir. Apparently it smells magnificent inside the sugarhouse but I have a pretty bad head cold and I couldn’t smell a thing. The family was disappointed for me because they say that’s the best part.

So the sap boils down to syrup in the front pan. And boils and boils and boils. It takes hours to boil sap down to syrup. If D and I did our math right – 5 gallons of sap yields less than a pint of syrup.

In a separate pan on a propane burner in the corner was a large pot with about a gallon of syrup in it. Anne explained how you take some syrup and a little butter and boil it down further until it reaches the softball candy stage – then you are ready for Sugar-On-Snow. She sent my girls and I outside with small bowls and told me to fill them with clean snow. Then we got a fork and headed back to the sugarhouse. Anne poured a few ladlefuls of candy syrup on the snow and told us to swirl it around with our forks. The syrup turns almost instantly to maple taffy. If you don’t eat it quickly, it turns to hard candy. Delicious but unbelievably sweet. I guess that’s why Sugar-On-Snow is traditionally served with dill pickles and plain doughnuts. K and H didn’t even like it.

Yesterday we all took a walk. It had started with just H and I but we came back to share our discovery. There is a huge and ancient maple, half dead, just up the road from here. It has four buckets hanging from it with no covers. So we stuck our fingers under one of the taps to get a taste of the sap straight out of the tree. It looks just like water and the maple taste is there, of course, though it is very faint. Delicious.

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