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On a cold but sunny spring day we piled into the car and drove up to Bruce’s Mills Conservation Area, one of the sites for the Sugarbush Maple Syrup Festival on the outskirts of Toronto.
When we were tykes, our mom would stuff us into the car and take us to the springtime maple syrup festival. It’s kind of celebrating the end of winter, although spring stubbornly refuses to make its grand appearance (it’s still cold in Toronto). We would maybe go on a wagon ride, eat pancakes with maple syrup, and eat maple taffy, my favourite.
Canada produces about 85% of the world’s maple syrup, and most of it comes from Quebec and Ontario. I suppose it could be one of our national foods. People like to add it to pancakes and waffles, bake with it, make taffy out of it, add it to tea or coffee, mixed into butter to make a sweet spread, or boil it down into sandy-coloured maple sugar. The pioneers would use cheaper, local maple sugar instead of the more expensive and imported white sugar; these days, however, maple sugar is the pricier delicacy.
We decided to go to Bruce’s Mills Conservation Area because they had a petting zoo, complete with this goofy-looking alpaca.
This excursion couldn’t have been at a more perfect time, since I had just run out of my own stores of maple syrup. I bought myself one litre of dark amber maple syrup, which is the dark, more flavourful syrup made from the sap later in the season.
‘Tapping’ a tree means boring a hole into the trunk of the maple tree and inserting a little spout to direct the dripping sap in to the waiting bucket below. The native Canadians would put hot rocks into a hollowed log full of sap, and the heat transfer would eventually boil away the water to make syrup. The pioneers would take the buckets of sap to be boiled down in giant kettles over open fires, but sap is now piped through the forest and taken to the sugar shack. It takes 40 litres of sugar maple sap to make just one litre of syrup, which justifies the steep price.
When we were kids, the staff would boil down the maple sap into a very thick syrup and then drizzle it over a tray of packed snow. The syrup would harden into a chewy stick that we would then grab and devour, hoping that we wouldn’t rip out our fillings. For the past few years, however, the centres haven’t been offering it, but we were lucky enough to buy a stick of taffy from the food stall on site.
Visiting the sugarbush is one of our family’s yearly excursions, and I never seem to get tired of sampling the maple syrup!
