The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky Page A

food produced exclusively in North America. It is also one of the few products of which the little state of Vermont has remained a leading producer. It was at the time of America Eats and it still is today.
    Long before Europeans, who knew much of the maple tree but nothing of the syrup produced from North American maples, arrived in North America, the people of the Northeast, the Indians, slashed the trees so that the sap would run in the first thaw. They then heated the sap with hot stones or left it to freeze so that the water would separate into ice and leave a concentrate. Vermont squirrels have a similar though cruder process, biting the tree and waiting for the sap to run and then freeze at night into icicles, which they lick.
    The sap that is harvested at the end of winter is colorless and flavorless until it is concentrated, giving no hint of what it can become.
    It is not by chance that the traditional terms in the maple industry employ the word “sugar” rather than “syrup.” For the sugaring off, the sugar bush is tapped and the sap brought to the sugar house, a process that is prolonged by a late snowfall, a sugar snow. The early settlers reduced the sap until crystallization and used it as sugar because the other alternative, Caribbean cane sugar, was more expensive. Maple sugar also took on political significance as a way of boycotting the British, especially after the 1764 Sugar Act, and as the politically correct alternative to slave-produced sugar in nineteenth-century abolitionist New England.
    But since the late nineteenth century, maple sugar has not been competitive with other sugars because an enormous quantity of sap is required to make a gallon of syrup to turn into a modest loaf of sugar. But the syrup has remained in great demand. Some remains unclassified for industrial use and the rest is graded into Grade A and Grade B. Grade A, which is finer, is sold to tourists, while for the most part the native Vermonters keep their Grade B, which has a stronger flavor. As with cheddar cheese and most local products, New Englanders like it strong.
    Maples do not produce syrup in Europe because long freezing nights and days above freezing are required. Global warming could end the maple industry in North America. Since the 1970s the winter temperature in America’s sugar maple zone has risen between two and three degrees on average and the syruping season now begins five weeks earlier than it did at the time of America Eats. The timing of New England’s famous flaming fall foliage has become unpredictable. In the first half of the twentieth century 80 percent of the world maple syrup production was from the United States, but today 75 percent is Canadian. There are fewer and fewer maple trees, and scientists suspect that climate change is not the only problem. Acid rain caused by pollution is altering the chemical composition of the soil and making it less favorable to sugar maples.
    I t is a keen morning in late March, the air like a knife, the sky clear and blue. There is still snow in the hollows and pockets of the brown earth, snow about the gray boulders in the fields and the bare trees of the woodlots. White mists rise from the snow-banked stream and fade in the early sun. Smoke plumes from the chimneys of farmhouses along the valley. Pine woods are black and somber on the far ridges, and the naked trees on the lower slopes have a gray brittle look. As the sun climbs the day grows warm. The snow patches soften and melt, the eaves drip, and in the sugar orchards sap tinkles into the pails. Farmers look at the weather and nod significantly. “She’s going to run today, boys, she’ll sure run today.” It is the perfect sugaring day.
    The sugarhouse sits in a grove of maples on the broad hilltop. It is built of unpainted boards, weathered and worn but sturdy enough. A metal-covered ventilating cupola centers the pitched shingle roof. Cords of wood are neatly stacked in the open lean-to shed at one