In praise of all things sticky

There are few things more typically representative of the part of Canada in which I live than maple syrup. We made our annual pilgrimage to a maple sugar bush (cabane a sucre) an hour east of the city to gorge ourselves senseless on all things pig and maple, in the typical French Canadian tradition.



Like most functioning maple syrup farms, the vast majority of the sap here is collected via plastic tubing (much more efficient than manually checking and collecting from buckets) but they do still tap and hang pails from some trees. And despite the difference in the way the sap is collected the syrup itself is virtually unchanged from what our ancestors would have enjoyed more than 400 years ago.