Chapter 7: Sugar Snow

"In the morning the house was warm from the stove, but when Laura looked out of the window she saw that the ground was covered with soft, thick snow. All along the branches of the trees the snow was piled like feathers, and it lay in mounds along the top of the rail fence, and stood up in great, white balls on top of the gate-posts.

Pa came in, shaking the soft snow from his shoulders and stamping it from his boots. "It's a sugar snow," he said.

Laura put her tongue quickly to a little bit of the white snow that lay in a fold of his sleeve. It was nothing but wet on her tongue, like any snow. She was glad that nobody had seen her taste it."

Signs of spring are everywhere in the Big Woods. The sun is shining and the snow has all melted from the yard, leaving a sea of mud. Tomorrow Laura gets to go out and play, but that night a storm blows through and covers everything back up with snow. Pa calls it a "sugar snow", but Laura doesn't know what that means. Pa can't explain at the moment because he is hurrying off to Grandpa's house.

That evening Pa returns with a package and a big wooden bucket. The bucket is full to the brim with maple syrup and the package holds two big cakes of maple sugar, plus two little cakes for Laura and Mary from Pa's pocket. Grandpa has been making maple syrup.

Laura learns that snow this time of year is called a sugar snow because it keeps the trees from leafing out as soon and that means the maple sap will run longer. And THAT means more sap in the buckets and more syrup for the table. Yum!

Thoughts:
Maple syrup making is a long-standing family tradition of mine. Of course, I've never actually made any myself, but I am VERY professional at dispatching the results of our Wisconsin relatives' labors. So I expected to be a natural at this chapter.

The snow has actually melted at last, so there would be no snow candy (something I've always wanted to do. That is where you take boiling molasses or maple syrup and drizzle it on the snow to make fine strands of hard candy. Pretty easy, but since there was no snow, I decided to try my hand at maple sugar.

There are no maple trees out here, and the time for tapping them is long since past anyway, so I had to use store-bought maple syrup for my base. If you ask me, that is a lot easier anyway, but considerably more expensive, so I diluted it half and half with plain white sugar syrup.

It was still early in the morning before the prairie wind could really get going, but there was still enough of a breeze to interfere with the fire so I set up on the lee side of the house. There is quite a trick to laying a good fire, and as you can see from the picture, I am an expert.



Once the fire was going, I prepared the sugar mix (should have done that before) while Laura watched the fire. When I came back out, she'd set up a whole hobo camp there and was looking quite disreputable. Her improvements did make things more convenient, though.



Once the fire was going, I set the pot on the bricks and began to stir. And stir and stir and stir and stir. It was rather smokey work, and certain unflattering comparisons were raised that rhyme with "itches", but I chose to rise above those mundane and petty distractions to concentrate on my higher task, that of wondering how long it would take this stuff to boil. Besides, Laura had to take her turn, too, and as you can see, the comparisons were just as applicable.


(You can understand why I never had a career in radio...Stupid mouse voice.)

"The instant the sap is graining, Grandpa jumps to the fire and rakes it all out from beneath the kettle. Then as fast as he can, he ladles the thick syrup into the milk pans that are ready. In the pans the syrup turns to cakes of hard, brown maple sugar."

Once it started to boil I began to worry that it would get too hot. I had never made anything like this before, and I deliberately chose not to look up instructions online---I wanted to do it just from the book this time. Let me tell you, the Little House books are not intended to be recipe books! I knew that crystals should start to form, but when? And what did they look like?


The syrup was bubbling away, constantly being stirred, and I knew enough about candy making to know sugar does certain things at certain temperatures, and you NEVER want to go past the right stage for your candy. But what was the right stage? I never did see any crystals, but when I took some syrup out, it showed signs of hardening as it cooled so I decided it was time.


Laura watched as I poured the thick, bubbling syrup into the muffin cups. I was pretty sure it was going to be hard, but would it have any crystallization like real maple sugar? I had two big variables---did I boil it long enough or too long, and did adding the white sugar syrup change its reaction? After peeking into the fridge every few minutes, the candy was cooled enough and ready to come out.

"Each bit off one little crinkle, and it was sweet. It crumbled in their mouths. It was better even than their Christmas candy."

Wonder of wonders, it actually turned out. Now I can't swear this is the maple sugariest of maple sugars, but it does have crystallization and is curiously addicting. I would definitely say this one was a success. Even though Laura and I smell like we were smoked in Pa's hickory stump now!