The best taste of all ~ March 19, 1992

David Heiller

The smell in the air last Wednesday, March 11 took me back 15 years, to Tamarack, Minnesota, to Cecil Booker, to a grove of maple trees and a big pan boiling with maple sap.

The smell is sweet like maple syrup, but not as strong. It’s a smell that you want to cling to your clothes, so you can carry it with you all day. Like smoke from a campfire in an old shirt that reminds you, in the dead of winter, of a warm canoe trip. A nice smell.

Cecil Booker lived down the road that spring of 1977. I would help him with chores. He saw that I had a broad enough back to help him make maple syrup. He provided the taps and pan and buckets and brains. I provided the back

We tapped about 80 trees. My job was to empty the buckets each morning, fill the big flat pan that rested on cement blocks nearby, build a rip-snorting fire, and boil sap all day.

As it boiled, I would add more and more sap and wood, then watch the liquid turn brown and bubbly and foamy and thick. That’s when the smell of sap boiling into syrup would fill the woods and make me smile.

It was a pleasant, honest job, working in the woods, sometimes alone with my thoughts, sometimes with Cecil, who was a kind and good man. We ended up with 27 gallons of syrup. Cecil took two thirds, but that was fine with me. Nine gallons was more than enough for me. Besides, brains are always worth more than backs in this world of ours.

I had pretty much forgotten all that until last Wednesday, when the sap started boiling again, this time in a big flat pan on a stove in our driveway. Earlier this year I answered a want ad and bought a bunch of taps and a homemade pan for $20.

Malika helping to haul the sap out of the woods.

I tapped 41 trees in our woods on Sunday, March 1. That’s early. But the weatherman had said we were in for a week of warm temperatures, days in the 40s, nights a little below freezing. That’s perfect weather for sap to run.

(Deciding when to tap is a cause for much debate in maple syruping circles, I’m told. Farmers often face that same decision making process in deciding when to plant, when to hay, when to harvest.)

Cindy and I collected the sap twice in the next 10 days, getting 50 gallons total. We stored it in a garbage can and pails in the woods, a quarter mile from our house. It froze partially, which makes for a more concentrated sap. We ended up with 36 gallons of sap.

We used a toboggan and three 10-gallon milk cans to bring it in. The weather cooperated with that too, because the cold weather had formed a crust on the snow. The toboggan pulled easily.

(We might not be so lucky next time, but we’ll take good fortune any day.)

This column describes our first year of 
sugaring. This photo of David pouring sap
 into the boiler came later, when we built 
our sugar shack. Our method was still pretty 
much the same, but the shack saved a 
lot of headaches from precipitation.

I started boiling it at 8:30 a.m. on a barrel stove which two Willow River High School students had converted into a sap boiling wonder for a welding class project. Troy Magdziarz and Mark Asleson cut the top off the stove, so that the pan fit snugly inside, reinforced it, moved the stovepipe to the end of the barrel, and added a few other nice touches. It worked perfectly.

All day long, Cindy and I fed wood to the stove and sap to the pan. By 10:30 that night, it had boiled to an inch of the bottom of the two-foot-by-three-foot pan. I brought the sweet, thin liquid into the house, then finished it off on the kitchen stove, to make sure it didn’t burn.

It didn’t burn in the house, but it did boil over twice. What a mess. But I didn’t care: We ended up with 35 quarts of the best maple syrup ever made. (The ratio of sap to syrup is about 50-1.)

It’s hard to describe that taste, like it’s hard to describe the smell. It’s richer than store-bought syrup. I think it has a smoky flavor, but Cindy doesn’t taste that. Maybe we’re tasting a few extra ingredients too.

It has the chill of our wet bodies, from when we first emptied the buckets on a rainy morning. It has the cold of our fingers from the second time. It has the peace and silence of a Sunday afternoon as I bored 41 holes with a 7/16-inch bit and auger.

It has the help of neighbors like George Brabec, who lent me three milk cans, and Deane Hillbrand, who gave me the old toboggan, and Sue Thue, who found the perfect book on the subject, and Jim Sales, who gave me tips from his sugaring days at Northwoods Audubon Center, and Troy and Mark and about 10 other folks who offered tips large and small. And don’t forget Cecil Booker.

It has the taste of spring in it too. When the sap is running, spring is just around the next bend. After this long, long winter, maybe that’s the best taste of all.