Michele Le Tourneau
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 31/00) - Every little French kid learns about maple syrup at the youngest age.

It's starts with grand-mere making crepes -- the thinner the "pancake," the better, rolled around a drizzle of maple syrup, then doused with maple syrup.

What we don't know, until we have a first sleepover at an English kid's house, is that maple syrup is not the norm. The little English kid has pancakes, the thicker the better, with a squeeze of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup. Huh?

It's a matter of priorities: the crepe exists for the syrup!

Maple syrup, the queen of syrups, the nectar of the natural world, came along long before Aunt Jemima. The sap of maples has been magically transformed into sugar for hundreds and hundreds of years and was the first sweetener ever used in North America -- until sugar cane and sugar beets came along.

Discovering how maple syrup is made is like seeing your first orange grove. You've always believed that maple syrup just exists. No questions asked. Until you visit a sugar bush for the first time -- usually open from about mid-March to mid-April, when the spring-time sap starts seeping from maple trees.

Long before French people came to North America, Native people were making syrup and sugar from the sap of maple trees. Temporary shelters were set up in a maple forest. Trees were tapped by making a hatchet slash in the bark. A wooden wedge inserted into the wound would guide the sap into a birchbark basket or a hollowed-out log.

The sap would be heated in a large hollowed-out log or birchbark tray. The native method for this was to heat rocks and then drop them into the sap. By this method, the water in the sap evaporated.

Soon settlers came along. The wood wedge was replaced by a wood spile, then metal, and now, usually, miles of plastic tubing.

Sap was boiled in large iron kettles over open fires. Two boilings were usual.

But guess how the boiled sap was tested for readiness?

It was drizzled on snow. And guess what that makes? Taffy -- in French, tire.

In Yellowknife, during Caribou Carnival, the Cabane a sucre, or sugar shack -- though located on Frame Lake without a single maple tree in sight -- continues this tradition.

Entering the tent, smelling that sweet, warm and distinctive aroma of boiling maple syrup that wafts over you...imagine yourself surrounded by maple trees.

And as you walk away with your stick, heavy with taffy, remember that you're walking away with a dripping, cooling, darkly golden nugget of sweet history.