The following is from a book off my shelf called Frontier Living written and illustrated by Edwin Tunis. I was reading it while boiling down maple sap this afternoon and I thought this section was interesting.
"Communication was established with New Orleans by river about 1790. Until then true molasses wasn't to be had at any price. The backwoodsmen gave the name molasses to maple syrup and to a sweet liquid they managed to extract from pumpkins..... Maple syrup, maple sugar, and honey were the common "sweet'nin's." Every family had a maple grove, and sugaring was an early spring job of men and boys. They tapped the trees crudely and wastefully with an ax and drove homemade buckeye (horse chestnut) spiles into the cuts. The sap dripped into pails hung on the trees and stopped at night. It was collected at dusk in a barrel lashed to the kind of simple sled known as a pung and dragged to the fire.
The sap, thickening as it cooked, boiled all night in an iron pot in front of a half-faced camp. Some of the syrup was further boiled in the morning and "grained" into sugar in molds. Such sleep as the workers got, they caught in cat naps while the sap was running, but nobody minded that. The whole business was a lark, and to sit in the camp in the firelight and drink spicewood tea with maple syrup was pure bliss for a backwoods boy. The tea was made from the swelling buds of the spice bush and was probably very good."
We have made spice bush tea before, and I must say, it is very good! In the past we have only sweetened it with honey, however, but I must try using some of our maple syrup! The spice bushes around here are one of the first plants to bud out, but I don't think they have just yet. I'll have to check soon.
Well, I just wanted to type this out while back at the house on a break from sugarin' to eat dinner. Lisa made home-made pizza, my favorite! Now I must get up the road to feed the cows as it is starting to get dark. I'll try to write more about our sugarin' this year later.
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