Twain's Feast (36 page)

And now it’s a food that makes me think, unavoidably, of Twain. Of Twain the boy, of course, as he gathered sap and hooked finished sugar in Missouri. But also of Twain the man, avoiding the windows in his beloved home—wanting never to see the stump of the tree he’d ordered felled, wanting never to give things up before their time.

Mark Twain was a man who loved flavor and hated its lack. He loved fresh radishes, oily possum, and Southern corn bread; he detested watery cream, exhausted fruit, and the “sham” of unsalted butter.

So why on earth did he ask for “clear” maple syrup? The clearest syrup is Grade A Extra Fancy, usually from the year’s first good run of sap. Its color (the only basis for grading) has been compared to ginger ale; it’s the slightest, most subtly flavored of the syrups. Though it’s great in its own right, I’ll never understand why, if you want maple syrup, you wouldn’t go for the darkest, mapliest syrup you can get.

The answer could simply be that Twain was a man of his times. Back then, strangely enough, the most common complaint about maple syrup or sugar was that you could taste it. Officials at the 1844 New York State Agricultural Fair awarded first prize to a maple sugar whose “whole coloring matter [had been] extracted . . . leaving the sugar fully equal to the double refined cane loaf sugar.” Like most contemporaries, they didn’t want
maple
sugar, with its rich, distinctive blend of flavors—its notes of butter or vanilla or marshmallows or smoke or grass. They simply wanted
sugar,
white cane sugar from the West Indies, which tasted nothing but sweet and could be used in Twain’s “American mince pie” and “all sorts of American pastry” without making them taste much like maple. There was no hiding the presence of strong, dark, assertive sugar, which may have been best in a pot of his “Boston bacon and beans.”

True, an 1893 letter in
Garden and Forest
magazine claimed that most city people did “not want the kind of pure maple-sugar that is white,” preferring the true flavor of maple. But by then white sugar was much cheaper than it had been in previous decades, and cooks had begun to judge maple on its own terms, rather than as a substitute sweetener. When people wanted sugar for everyday use, there’s no question that most thought lighter was better.

Even Grade A Extra Fancy, if a bit less robust than I like, is genuinely layered; it can suggest cream, salt, hay, or dozens of other flavors. Twain was always an instinctive critic, his judgments as passionate as they were sometimes imprecise: Did a thing have flavor? Did it please nose, stomach, tongue? Then it was good. And clear maple syrup, light and clear, was good.

But by 1896, Twain could feel the color bleaching from the world around him—the flavor of life going watery and pale. He had often been haunted by despondency, even depression. Sometimes he made what sounded like jokes about longing for death, like the time he remembered the people who saved him from drowning in the Mississippi. “I can’t feel very kindly or forgivingly toward either that good apprentice boy or that good slave woman,” he wrote in the
Autobiography
he began in earnest in 1906, “for they saved my life.” Writing entries for Pudd’nhead Wilson’s calendar, he included the question “Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?” and answered that “it is because we are not the person involved.” “It is sad to go to pieces like this,” he reflected, “but we all have to do it.”

But as he aged, Twain increasingly dropped the wryly joking tone. Life, he said, was a succession of “labor and sweat and struggle . . . [and] aching grief,” until at last men vanished “from a world where they were of no consequence.” Only death, he wrote, brought peace; only in death would he truly speak freely. When his brother Orion died, Twain wrote that the “release from the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life had been swift and painless.” In a prolonged, inevitable progression, friend after old friend passed away; it may have been worse because he had described so many of them, vividly and repeatedly, as children with their whole lives before them. More and more often, he echoed his daughter Susy’s plaintive question, “What is it all for?”

He had good reason to wonder; the early loss of his younger brother, Henry, seemed only a hint of those he suffered through in his last years. Perhaps the worst came in 1896. By that year a series of horrendous investment decisions (especially the famous disaster of the Paige typesetting machine, which cost him what would be millions of today’s dollars) left him bankrupt. Desperate to pay off his debts, he left on a round-the-world lecture and writing tour.

Then, while still in England, he received word that Susy—by all accounts his favorite child—was desperately ill with spinal meningitis. She died before he could return home. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature,” he later wrote, “that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.”

When Erik and I reach Jim Dina’s house in Windsor, he already has a fire going. Windsor is just north of Hartford, on the Connecticut River’s far bank, and Jim and his wife live in the kind of old New England house I’d want to live in myself if I’d stayed in the state: a weathered, even beaten old building, probably once a farmhouse, probably a bit drafty on cold nights, but well loved and lived in for more than three decades. The only thing that makes the house stand out is the fact that the fire isn’t in a fireplace—it’s burning between a pair of snow-covered wigwams toward the rear of a wide backyard.

Jim is tall and thin, with long, graying hair pulled back into a ponytail. He has the air of an enthusiastic art teacher who could easily fall into a project and happily stay there all day, and, in fact, he does teach classical guitar, though he has an engineering degree from MIT. We follow him into his workroom, the one place his wife lets him fill to the ceiling with his music and crafts and projects; along with his guitars are a pair of homemade lutes, a set of recorders, panpipes, and a music stand holding a classical arrangement of “Here Comes the Sun.”

But most of the room is given over to what Jim calls, with a disarming mix of guilelessness and self-deprecation, “playing Indian.” By this he means experimenting with technologies reflected in the New England archaeological record. He chips arrowheads and spearheads and harpoons from flint, sets knives in deer-horn handles, sews beaver-skin pouches, folds birch bark and seals it with pitch to make
mocuck
baskets. He decorates home-fired pottery by pressing homemade cords into the still-wet clay. Jim bow-hunts deer, turkey, and pheasant; the pelts of fisher cats and otters hang on the wall.

I know before I arrive that Jim takes all this very seriously; some twenty years ago, he told me, he built himself a birch-bark canoe and paddled it up the Connecticut River to Canada. He grows the traditional Three Sisters on two separate plots; in a few years, he’ll know whether corn, squash, and beans grow better on dry bluffs or on bottomland annually fertilized by Connecticut River silt (he’s nailed a deer skull to a tree near his lower garden to mark the last flood’s highwater). But it’s when he shows me a buckskin he tanned using the brains of a deer he killed with a homemade bow and arrow that I realize how serious he really is. The room speaks to a questing curiosity, a real, searching need to know with the hands as well as with the mind.

Getting Erik out of the house isn’t easy—Jim is generous about letting him handle anything not immediately dangerous (though, between the flint points and the self-assembled black-powder muskets, there’s a fair amount of that), and there’s plenty there to fire his imagination for a week. But we’re here to see Jim tap maples the way people might have done before white settlers arrived, as he does every year at the Institute for Native American Studies in Litchfield.

We follow him through a snowy stand of backyard trees, finally pausing before a sugar maple. “I think the way people first found out how to sugar was probably just seeing a broken branch,” Jim says. He snaps off the end of a twig; a bead of sap gathers shining on the broken tip. It’s surprisingly clear and fluid, crystal without the slightest cloudiness, and thin as water—totally unlike the kind of oozing sap that can petrify into amber. When it falls to the snow, a second droplet gathers, gleaming. I touch the twig to my tongue, then to Erik’s. If there’s sweetness, it’s only a suggestion, a bare hint that there’s more here than water; before boiling, maple sap is only 2 percent sugar, the taste so dilute as to be nearly undetectable.

Talk to any maple-sugar maker and within a few minutes you’re likely to hear the magical ratio of forty to one. This is usually said quickly, almost as one staccato word (
fortytoone
), and refers to the daunting, stubborn fact that it takes an average of forty gallons of sap to make one of syrup. Sap is so dilute that white settlers called it maple water, or sugar water; it’s not at all obvious to the eye or the tongue that what runs from these uniquely North American trees might be gathered and boiled into syrup or heavy brown sugar. One story says that the Iroquois leader Woksis killed a deer, meaning to cook it the next day; before he went to sleep, he stuck his ax into a nearby maple, which dripped sap all night into a cooking pot below. After his wife simmered venison in it for a day, the stew was sweet. An Ottawa and Chippewa story, on the other hand, says that the hero Ne-naw-bo-zhoo came upon a seemingly abandoned village; the people were lying under maples, mouths agape as they drank syrup straight from the trees. Ne-naw-bo-zhoo filled the trees with a lake’s worth of water, diluting the syrup, forcing the people to work for their sugar so they wouldn’t become slothful.

But when Jim hacks into the wood, it’s easy to imagine how the discovery happened. At the first blow of his homemade basalt ax, the lightly gashed wood begins to bleed. Soon it’s as wet as though freshly splashed. Jim cleans the edges with a knife, then a flint awl. Next he takes out a sap guide, a two-foot-long forsythia twig he’s split and scraped into a thin gutter. When he fixes the guide into place with pitch, sap flows down it, dripping into the
mocuck.
The run is quick and unwavering; I’d guess that anyone who saw such a flow, or the sap icicles that can form from broken branches, would be moved to taste and cook with it. Why not?

Plus, I remind myself, my modern palate has been pretty well shot by a lifetime of easy access to white sugar, brown sugar, sugar-in-the-raw, turbinado sugar, beet sugar, honey, and way, way too much corn syrup (not to mention, to the extent I’ve been unable to avoid them, an abominable array of NutraSweets and Splendas). Native Americans had honey and the tart sweetness of ripe berries, but other than that, sweet flavors were rare before someone first boiled down sap into its essence. That spare 2 percent of sugar, touched to the tongue, might have seemed a gift.

That’s certainly how many of the northern nations understood it. Like the booming of prairie chickens, the run of maple sap was a signal of spring, and of the rebirth of the nurturing world. The Abenaki named April’s first full moon Sogalikas, or the sugar maker’s moon. Others called it, simply, the sugar moon—the time when they knew to watch for flowing sap. Once the sugar was made, it could be mixed with crushed corn, then simmered into a nutritious pottage. It might also be mixed with water and drunk, blended with bear fat to make a sauce for strips of venison, even eaten straight. Some whites thought that many Native Americans used it more often than salt to season meat, and many acquired the habit themselves, buying golden
mocuck
s—birch-bark baskets filled with sugar—from local tribes. Others embraced dishes like Boston baked beans, probably adapted from the Native American method of burying a pot of maple-flavored beans in an ember-filled pit.

But maples, however useful and beloved in the North, didn’t run with sap everywhere; for sap to flow, the seasons had to have the proper shape. “There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather,” Twain once declared, “that compels the stranger’s admiration—and regret. . . . [The weather is] always getting up new designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.” Every year, he said, New Englanders killed a good number of poets for daring to use the phrase “beautiful spring.” Describing the New England spring, Twain was also unknowingly describing a perfect sugaring season—the long, northern springtime, when sap runs freely.