40 Fun Facts About Maple Syrup

Which US state has long been the country's largest maple syrup producer, making about half the national crop?

Vermont leads a country that made most of the world's maple syrup until the 1930s; most now comes from Canada, chiefly Quebec.

A mysterious maple syrup smell over New York City from 2005 was traced to a factory processing which seeds?

Fenugreek seeds, a common flavouring in imitation maple syrup, were being processed at a factory in neighbouring New Jersey. Some New Yorkers had feared the sweet smell was chemical warfare.

In New England, soft maple taffy is traditionally served with doughnuts, coffee and which sour food?

Dill pickles are served because their sourness counters the intense sweetness of the candy, as does the coffee.

Thieves in Quebec's great maple syrup heist refilled the drained barrels with what before returning them?

Water went into the barrels after the thieves siphoned off the syrup, and the barrels were then trucked back to the warehouse. Almost 3,000 tonnes worth C$18.7 million was taken.

Quebec's maple syrup reserve, used to support world prices, was likened by The Economist to which organisation?

OPEC was the comparison because the producers' group stockpiles barrels in rural warehouses to steady supply and prices. In 2021 it released 50 million pounds to meet demand.

Which tree, the state tree of New York and Wisconsin, supplies most of the sap boiled into Canada's famous syrup?

Sugar maple sap is roughly two to five per cent sugar, a high content that makes it the syrup maker's first choice. Trees are usually tapped from 30 to 40 years of age.

On average, how many gallons of maple sap are boiled down to make one gallon of maple syrup?

About 40 is the usual average, because fresh sap is mostly water with only a few per cent sugar. Weak or sweet sap can push the figure anywhere from 20 to 100.

In which Asian country is maple sap, called gorosoe, traditionally drunk rather than boiled into maple syrup?

South Korea also makes a little maple syrup, as does Japan, yet almost all of the world's supply comes from Canada and the United States.

Log Cabin, a pancake syrup brand introduced in 1887, was named in honour of which American president?

Abraham Lincoln was the childhood hero of grocer Patrick Towle, who named his syrup after the log cabin the president was famously raised in.

Most American pancake syrups sold as cheap stand-ins for maple syrup are made mainly from which crop?

Corn syrup, often the high-fructose kind, is the usual base. The first imitations of the late 1800s were flavoured with boiled extracts of maple wood, hickory or corn cobs.

What is the usual English name for a cabane à sucre, the cabin where maple sap is boiled into syrup?

Sugar shack dining halls now feed crowds each year, pairing fresh syrup with ham, baked beans, scrambled eggs and pancakes.

What is the name of the small spout driven into a tapped maple tree to let the sap run out?

Spile is also the word for the peg that vents a cask of ale. Early settlers used wooden ones, each with a wooden bucket hung beneath to catch the sap.

Which two months are the busiest at eastern Canada's maple syrup cabins, when the sap becomes available?

March and April bring the freezing nights and thawing days that make sap flow, and the first fortnight of April is usually the peak of collection.

Maple taffy is made by pouring hot, boiled-down maple syrup onto a clean bed of what?

Snow chills the molten syrup so quickly that it thickens into a soft candy, which is then lifted with a small wooden stick or a fork.

Which sugar makes up almost all of the sugar content of maple syrup?

Sucrose, the sugar in ordinary table sugar, accounts for about 99 per cent of maple syrup's sugars, with a little glucose and fructose created by the heat of boiling.

Which 2024 comedy series starring Margo Martindale is loosely based on Quebec's great maple syrup heist?

The Sticky was produced by Jason Blum and Jamie Lee Curtis and reached Prime Video in December 2024, twelve years after the real theft was discovered.

Which colour class of Grade A maple syrup, the lightest of the four, is labelled as having a delicate taste?

Golden maple syrup tends to come from sap gathered early in the season. Later runs give the darker, stronger-tasting classes that are used mostly for cooking and baking.

Which meat tops the maple-glazed doughnut that became a breakfast craze in parts of the United States and Canada?

Bacon and maple together have been likened to a whole camping breakfast in one bite, and the doughnut has been counted as part of the food craze nicknamed bacon mania.

Which American reform movement favoured maple sugar over cane sugar in the years before the Civil War?

Abolitionists chose maple because most cane sugar and molasses were produced by enslaved people in the South. Lucretia Mott handed out maple candies wrapped in anti-slavery messages.

Which machine, first patented in 1858, do maple syrup makers use to turn sap into syrup?

Evaporator design leapt ahead in 1872 with a two-pan model over a metal firebox. Around 1900, makers folded the pan floor into flues to boil sap faster still.

Many large maple syrup producers save fuel by using which process to remove water from sap before boiling?

Reverse osmosis machines, adopted in the 1970s, separate water from the sugar at high pressure, so far less boiling is needed afterwards.

Finished maple syrup must reach a density of 66 degrees on which scale used for sugar solutions?

Brix readings are also relied on by honey and fruit-juice producers, and in Canada syrup must hit the mark to be marketed as maple syrup.

Which French explorer was described by royal cosmographer André Thevet drinking maple sap on his Canadian voyages?

Jacques Cartier's taste of sap came long before Europeans took up the trade: settlers and fur traders were harvesting maple products by 1680.

In a popular legend about the origin of maple syrup, sap replaces water in a pot cooking which meat for a chief?

Venison simmered in sap is only a legend, though: there are no authenticated accounts of how maple syrup making actually began.

Pouding chômeur, a Quebec cake usually baked under hot maple syrup, was created during which period of hardship?

The Great Depression gave the dessert its name, which means unemployed man's pudding. The batter rises through the hot syrup, leaving a layer of sauce at the bottom of the pan.

Oreilles de crisse, the salty, crunchy side dish of Quebec's maple-season feasts, are deep-fried pieces of which meat?

Pork fatback is salted and deep-fried for the dish, whose name translates as ears of Christ. Its saltiness offsets a meal otherwise laden with syrup.

Maple syrup is low in most micronutrients but notably high in riboflavin and which mineral?

Manganese is the standout, yet maple syrup is still about two-thirds carbohydrate with no appreciable protein or fat.

Maple syrup urine disease, named for the sweet smell it causes, stops the body breaking down certain what?

Amino acids called leucine, isoleucine and valine build up to toxic levels, and the syrupy odour can be noticed in a newborn's earwax around 12 hours after birth.

What do maple syrup producers call a forest stand of maple trees that is tapped each year for sap?

Sugar bush canopies are dominated by maples, and once tapping ends some fill with spring wildflowers that use the sunlight before the leaves emerge.

Which tree gives a syrup far pricier than maple syrup, needing roughly three times as much sap per litre?

Birch syrup can cost up to five times as much as maple, because the sap is far less sweet and so much more of it has to be boiled away.

Who were the first known makers of maple syrup, cutting V-shaped notches in tree trunks to collect the sap?

Indigenous peoples of northeastern North America were boiling sap into syrup long before Europeans arrived, and later showed colonists how to tap the trees.

Maple trees store which carbohydrate in their trunks and roots before winter, later turning it into sap sugar?

Starch is turned into sugar that rises with the sap in late winter and early spring, and a tapped tree gives up only about seven per cent of its sap.

Early maple syrup makers first concentrated the sap by leaving it out overnight and discarding which top layer?

The ice took water with it, leaving stronger sap that was then hauled by sled to large fires and boiled in clay pots.

Which system, perfected in the 1970s, lets maple sap flow directly from the tree to the boiling house?

Plastic tubing had been experimental since early in the century, but it came into its own once vacuum pumps were added to draw the sap along.

Which old American maple syrup rating was relabelled as A Very Dark, Strong Taste in Massachusetts?

Grade B vanished when Canada and the United States harmonised their rules in 2014 and 2015, so every unflawed maple syrup is now Grade A with a colour and taste description.

Finished maple syrup is filtered to remove harmless crystals, largely calcium malate, known by which name?

Sugar sand is not toxic, but left in the bottle it would give the syrup a gritty texture.

The sugary sap that rises in late winter to be boiled into maple syrup flows through which tree tissue?

Xylem sap is reached by boring a hole into the trunk, and each tree can support between one and three taps depending on its diameter.

Elmira's maple syrup festival, once ranked the world's largest one-day event of its kind, is in which province?

Ontario has more maple syrup farms than any province except Quebec, and the Elmira festival peaked at 66,529 visitors in 2000.

Frustration with fake maple syrups in the early 1900s helped bring about which landmark American consumer law?

Pure Food and Drug Act supporters had plenty to be angry about: by the early 1900s one state's maple syrup was being sold in ten times the quantity it actually produced.

Which word do maple syrup makers use for the off-flavour of sap gathered too late in the season?

Buddy sap appears once the trees begin to form buds, and it joins fermentation, disinfectants and leaching metal cans on the list of things that can spoil a batch.