Sugartime: The Hidden Pleasures of Making Maple Syrup

Sugartime is not only a how-to but also history and health and happiness in nature. Of the task of making syrup, the foreword explains, "I had stumbled upon good work, the kind that slows time and deepens the spirit." With instructions that go "from tree to table," Susan Carol Hauser describes the process and the pleasures of sugaring, from the early Ojibwa sugar camps, to the depiction of the hardening of sweet syrup in Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Sugar-on-Snow," to the 20th-century return to this ancient harvesting. Various gathering techniques and several recipes for maple syrup and other uses of the sugar are illustrated in this charming book.