History Of Maple Syrup
The credit of making Maple Syrup goes to the North American Indians who initiated this process. This process evolved thousands of years ago and still continues with its ever increasing demand. The North American Indians with the help of tomahawks made incisions into the trees to remove sap from the Maple. The clear sap was then collected using birch barks.
The process of boiling was not involved in their methods of extracting syrup from the sap; instead they used two different methods. The water in the sap was evaporated either by putting hot stones in the sap or freezing the sap in the night and removing the frozen water layer in the morning.
The settlers who formed their colonies in North America were held spell bound with this sweet, delicious juice used as a natural sweetener. They developed their own methods and used iron drill bits to tap the sap and then boil in metal kettles to reduce the syrup.
Sugar could only be procured from West Indies which was highly taxed and had to pay exorbitant price. For this reason the colonists used maple syrup as main sweetener. But the scenario changed when sugar became cheap and replaced maple syrup. Now the consumption of maple syrup is one-fifth to what it was in the beginning of twentieth century.
Only in the selected regions of North America Maple syrup producing trees are grown like the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec in Canada and the states of Vermont and New York in the US
