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Mar. 2nd, 2008
Sap Happy
By OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT
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By OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT
The maple syrup you poured on your waffles this morning probably came from Quebec, where more than 75 percent of the world’s supply is produced. And it’s at least one year old. Maple trees can’t be tricked into thinking it’s harvest time, and in Canada the sap doesn’t start running until early March, when the nights are still freezing but the days are bright.
Last March, Marc Séguin, a painter who commutes between his farm in Hemmingford, Quebec, and his Brooklyn studio (where he’s finishing a series titled “I Love America and America Loves Me”), inaugurated his cabane à sucre, or sugar shack, a rough-hewn cabin for making syrup. He installed a wood-fed évaporateur, built a table that seats 12 and invited his friends to spend a Sunday eating the high-calorie peasant feast that traditionally accompanies the harvest.
The hourlong parade usually includes split-pea soup, pancakes, bacon and ham, pork rinds, omelets, eggs poached in syrup, baked beans, bread and pan drippings, pickled carrots and beets, maple-syrup pie and taffy — all washed down with an optional Molson. And while such meals once fueled workers gathering sap, they now also stoke a growing tourist industry based around the province’s hundreds of commercial cabanes à sucre. More
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