Quotes Referring to Maple Syrup and Sap

Following are some tibits I gleaned from a wonderful book called The Maple Sugar Book. It is full of many interesting things about making syrup. More interesting is that much of the stuff in it is from the 1600’s to the 1800’s.

“For the trees to give their water in abundance, there should be at the base of the trunk a certain amount of snow, which keeps the water fresh. It should freeze during the night and the day should be clear, without wind and without clouds; because then the sun has more strength, which dilates the pores of the trees, and which the wind closes – so much so that it stops running.” Joseph Francois Lafitau, Mceurs des sauvages Ameriquains, 1724

“A sap-run is the sweet good-by of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.”
John Burroughs, Signs and Seasons, 1886

“When made in small quantities—that is, quickly from the first run of sap and properly treated—it has a wild delicacy of flavor that no other sweet can match. What you smell in freshly cut maple-wood, or taste in the blossom of the tree, is in it. It is then, indeed, the distilled essence of the tree.”
John Burroughs, Signs and Seasons, 1886

“In contemplating the present opening prospects in human affairs, I am led to expect that a material part of the general happiness which heaven seems to have prepared for mankind, will be derived from the manufacture and general use of Maple Sugar.”
Letter to Thomas Jefferson by Benjamin Rush, August 19, 1791

“Pure maple sugar will always command a market abroad, if we choose to part with the article.”
Walton’s Vermont Register and Farmer’s Almanac, 1847