Extant historic sources reveal that, someday between 1536 and 1542, Jacques Cartier and his fellow explorers had been intrigued by what they thought was a big walnut tree, and minimize it down. It was, in actual fact, a sugar maple and its sap gushed out in nice amount. Tasting it, they in contrast it to a superb wine. In 1557, the cosmographer André Thévet wrote that, in response to the First Nations, the tree was often called a “couton”.

The following first-hand report about maple didn’t come till 1606, when the lawyer, voyager and author Marc Lescarbot went to Acadia. He described the harvest and (what he known as) the distillation of maple sap by First Nations. He additionally mentions the usage of sizzling stones to prepare dinner meals. A bit later within the century, Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard reaffirmed the First Nations’ use of maple sap and described a sort of evaporation course of. He spoke of it as a fortifying beverage. This concept of a drink used to revive one’s power can also be current in Father Le Jeune’s tales in regards to the Montagnais in 1634, saying they ate maple bark throughout a time of famine. He in contrast the sap to a sugar as candy as honey.

Stories about maple sap grew extra quite a few in the course of the 1600s, together with a sluggish evolution in the usage of maple sugar. Within the second half of the seventeenth and into the 18th Century, there have been rising references to the export of maple sugar to France as a sort of culinary curiosity. It needs to be famous that this coincides with a rise in sugar consumption by the final inhabitants, however we’re unable to make a definitive connection. Sugar was nonetheless a commodity reserved for the the Aristocracy and well-off. Nonetheless, sugar cane cultivation was steadily increasing in Brazil and the Caribbean. The demand for sweeteners is rising.

King Louis XIV cherished maple sugar sweet (a deal with known as en dragée) and it was a Montréaler who provided it to him: Agathe de Repentigny, an inventor and businesswoman (fairly uncommon for the interval). Probably the most placing growth of this period (often called the Enlightenment), nonetheless, was the scientific notion of the sugar maple tree and the virtues of its sap, and maple sugar. By 1749, these had been being broadly consumed in New France, in response to the Swedish biologist Pehr Kalm.

Whereas on a go to to Acadia in 1708, the Sieur de Dièreville described the rudimentary approach utilized by First Nations to faucet maple bushes. He stated they used an axe to cut a four-inch incision into which might be inserted a trough-shaped piece of wooden. The sap would stream right into a receptacle, most frequently manufactured from birch bark. In the meantime, in New England, Paul Dudley wrote a e-book dedicated to the making of maple sugar from what he known as “maple sugar juice”, thereby presenting essentially the most scientific rationalization of the method to this point. This advanced additional when Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Monseigneur de la Barre and Joseph-François Lafitau famous the addition of the iron pot to maple sugar manufacturing strategies.

The sugar maple tree, maple sap, and maple sugar reached a brand new stage of distinction by means of the work of famend scientists like Pehr Kalm, Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, whose treatise Le traité des forêts was revealed by the Académie royale de France, and Denis Diderot within the venerable Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts). They took a holistic method in explaining the pure processes that happen within the sugar maple, the making of maple sugar, and the advantages of maple to human well being. Pehr Kalm, in a nod to its rising utilization by widespread individuals, is credited with coining the lasting title: nation sugar.

The nineteenth Century witnessed the transition from the outdated methods of tapping and harvesting to new strategies made accessible by science and analysis. As a substitute of an axe, incisions had been made with a drill; wooden buckets had been changed by steel receptacles with lids; the iron pot laboriously placed on and brought off the fireplace modified to the evaporator and; the branch-covered shelter gave technique to the shack manufactured from lumber. Manufacturing finally advanced to the final mannequin that we see as we speak, if nonetheless with out the high-tech gear developed within the twentieth Century. It wasn’t till the early Fifties that we found how one can protect maple syrup, first made maple butter, and invented the 540 ml can that everyone knows and like to this present day.

Maple syrup was first categorized into 5 classes within the Twenties. Within the second half of the twentieth Century, it steadily changed maple sugar as the buyer’s favorite and might be discovered on grocery store cabinets within the new dimension extra suited to an more and more city way of life. The nook retailer was being left behind for the bigger grocery shops, as was Fundamental Avenue for the shopping center. This was additionally about the identical time that the Division of Agriculture held a design competitors for the maple syrup can. The profitable design nonetheless seems on our cans as we speak.

Quite a few developments have made life simpler for hard-working maple-producing households. These included the hiring of a chemist by the maple syrup producers’ co-op (Coopérative de producteurs de sirop d’érable), and the advents of tubing methods within the Seventies and reverse osmosis within the Eighties. These advances additionally led to a rise within the variety of faucets to fulfill the expansion in demand for maple merchandise at dwelling and overseas.

On the flip of the twenty first Century, the promotion of maple merchandise, “seasonal adjustment”, and round 2005, analysis and innovation exercise started to assist the advertising and marketing of maple merchandise. Notably noteworthy was the invention of Quebecol, a polyphenolic molecule distinctive to maple syrup.

Picture: ‘’The Indian at Work: Maple-Sugar-Making within the Northern Woods’’ after a sketch by W.M. Cary ca. 1880-1890