March 26, 2009
Sugar on Snow
Kids eating their snow with a side of maple sugar, courtesy of Flickr user redjar
What do pickles, donuts, and a freezer full of snow have in common?
If you know, you’ve probably been to Vermont around this time of year. As Lisa wrote yesterday, it’s maple sugaring season in New England, when sap flows from the trees and steam blows from the tops of those little shacks (“sugar houses”) in many backyards. (Locals also call this time of year “mud season” because of the condition of the defrosting dirt roads, but that doesn’t attract as many tourists for some reason.)
My family doesn’t have a sugar house, but a few of my childhood friends did. I have happy memories of “helping” gather sap buckets, drinking paper cups full of piping hot syrup, and hitching rides on the little zipline used to transport firewood between the yard and the evaporator. (In retrospect, I bet our antics exasperated the adults, but it was fun! And we never had a mishap, other than that one time some kid fell into the sap storage tank while trying to snitch a taste. Don’t worry, she was okay. But she sure felt silly.)
The height of maple bliss, as far as I’m concerned, is the caramelized concoction that occurs when you pour very hot syrup onto a bowl packed with snow (or crushed ice if you must, but it isn’t quite as good). Vermonters call this “sugar on snow,” and we love it so much that we theme entire parties around it. We pack garbage bags full of fresh, clean snow into our freezers in the depths of winter, dreaming of a sweet spring. We buy candy thermometers so we can boil a pot of syrup to just the right temperature to congeal on a bed of snow.
We eat it by the forkful, traditionally with sides of dill pickles, coffee and donuts. Why? Hmm, never really thought about that before. I guess it’s because the pickles and coffee cut the sweetness, so you can go back for seconds. (And where there’s coffee, there must be donuts, obviously. Homemade buttermilk ones, ideally.)
State pride aside for a moment, I realize there are maple trees beyond Vermont, so it’s possible this tradition exists elsewhere. Has anyone else encountered sugar on snow, by that name or another?
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Reminds me of something we made in Tennessee many years ago: Snow Cream.
It was a concoction of snow, sugar, vanilla flavoring, and I think eggs. In any case, TOTALLY CRAZY GOOD.
I miss it. You just don’t see that many snows in our part of Tennessee anymore. Global warming? Ah, that’s another post.
Thanks for reminding us all of the joys of the snow.
Sure, have you read any of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books? This blog entry (it’s not mine) has the excerpt when Laura has sugar on snow
http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/food-in-books/the-hungry-reader-maple-syrup-and-the-little-house-in-the-big-woods-045424
I read these books many times as a kid, and her description of the hot syrup being poured on the snow has always stick with me, even though I have never been able to try it myself.
If you haven’t read her books, and enjoy reading you may want to give them a look, they are descriptive in a way that will give you a better idea of life in the late 1800′s than many autobiographies written for adults.
Reminds me of something we made in Tennessee many years ago: Snow Cream.
It was a concoction of snow, sugar, vanilla flavoring, and I think eggs. In any case, TOTALLY CRAZY GOOD.
I miss it. You just don’t see that many snows in our part of Tennessee anymore. Global warming? Ah, that’s another post.
Thanks for reminding us all of the joys of the snow.
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.
In Canada, it is called Maple Taffy in English, or “la tire sur la neige” en Français (which means approximately “draw on the snow”).
Eating snow out of a trough, no thanks. I do enjoy Vermont maple creamees, though.
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