Sample from the portfolio of Sarah Clachar
clac@metrocast.net
Just wait one minute.
Before you savor the unique flavor of Surprise Farm Hill maple syrup, I need to tell you something.
I need to tell you what’s in this jar.
It’s not your standard list of ingredients . . .
Dip your finger inside, just take a taste. Savor. In this jar you’ll find . . .
The first hint of winter relinquishing its grip on our New England home. When the snow begins to turn into rivulets with days that creep above freezing, we know the sap is beginning to flow in our maples.
The first samples of the sap flowing from each tree. As we drill, tap in the spials and set buckets, our two children race from spial to spial, letting the slow drops drip onto their tongues and then compare each tree’s yield – which tastes sweeter? Which is dripping faster?
The afternoon sorties on snowshoe or mud boots, depending on the weather, to check our buckets, collect the sap and store it in snowdrifts we carefully pile up.
The long day of boiling. Wood gathered and split, each child with their responsibilities to keep us well supplied with fuel and sap. A whole blue-skied, clear March day outside, savoring the return to outdoor life. Sunburned faces and finally, at the end of a long day, a fire-cooked supper and sticky fingers sampling the last bits on the pan.
The return of the robins to the back woods as I check our buckets, hoping for a few more gallons, a few more days of just the right weather before the trees bud and the season is over.
The turn of the seasons – dark red buds to light green leaves shifting to a soft yellow that fills our woods with a glowing light and finally their slow fall to the ground where they feed and nurture the trees that made them.
When you taste this syrup, you will taste all of this and more. The smoky flavor of sap boiled over an open fire like the first sugar makers did centuries ago. The generations of maples that have sprung from a great old grandmother tree on our back road. The neighborly discussion of whether the weather will hold. Mud season. The sweetness of spring.
Indeed, as the old New England maple syrup song goes, “Sweeter joys indeed we sugarmakers know.”
Savor the sweetness, enjoy this bit of New Hampshire woods, distilled and sent to your table.
Yours,
The Sugarmakers at Surprise Farm Hill.
Spring 2007