Cabane à Sucre
Canadian comfort food.
At the end of March, we participated in a local seasonal tradition for the late winter and early spring – getting out of the city to visit a cabane à sucre (“sugar shack”) in the Québec countryside. Let’s start with Maple Syrup 101. Maple syrup is made from the sweet sap of sugar maple trees. Maple syrup does NOT flow directly out of the tree, as many people mistakenly believe – the sap is boiled down to get the syrup.
The sap flows in late winter and early spring, when the nights are below freezing but the days are sunny and above freezing (what Canadians call “warm” in the winter). In Quebec, the sweet spot (yes, pun intended) is March and April, but the full “sugaring season” can run from late February to early May.
As the snow starts to melt and the days get longer and brighter, a hallmark of the spring season is a visit to a sugar shack. In the fall, we got out of the city to go apple picking; in the winter, people jump town to go skiing, snowshoeing, and sledding; and now it’s time to leave the metropolis behind once again to get a whiff of spring and indulge in the maple harvest.
Which, basically, means visiting a rustic barn-style setting in the countryside, sitting at long farmhouse tables and benches, covered with red-and-white checkered cloths, side-by-side with all walks of life, and eating all sorts of hearty, high-fat foods designed to fill the hungry stomach of a farmer or early settler who has been laboring outside in the cold all day (err, not me). Think eggs, sausages, bacon strips, back bacon, potatoes, beans, soup, white bread, and crunch tasty pork rinds that you can’t stop snacking on.
In the middle of the table is the masterpiece, a large glass jar of maple syrup tapped locally on the erablière (maple grove), which can and should be poured generously over everything. After the meal – as if you have any room left – they will bring dessert, which can be pancakes, donuts, maple syrup pies, maple butter cones, or other maple candies.
No. More. Maple.
Some sugar shacks will let visitors try tapping the maple sap from the trees, and demonstrate how the maple sap is cooked down into maple syrup. The one I went to years ago in college made maple syrup candies onsite – we saw how they were made by boiling maple syrup, which is then cooled and crystalized and poured into little maple-leaf-shaped molds.
The one I went to more recently in March didn’t have any bells and whistles. It was delightfully basic and that’s just what I wanted – a no-nonsense, salt of the earth sort of place that only took cash and debit cards and didn’t make any pretense at being fancy or catering to the city crowd (some of the cabanes à sucre have apparently gotten quite shishy and trendy). They didn’t have any menu (the waitress brings everyone the same thing) and the only modifications allowed were “boiled potatoes on request” (instead of pan cooked) and “onions on request.” We were surrounded by a lot of flannel and thick Québécois accents that forced me to keep asking the waitress to repeat herself and my daughter to ask, “Mommy, I thought you spoke French?”
After you’re done stuffing your face, the sugar shacks often have a variety of farm-style family-friendly fun, like a horse-drawn hay ride, pettings zoos, a fire on a cold day, and the tried and true Québécois treat: tire d’érable. For the unfamiliar, this is hot maple syrup, poured over snow in a line, allowed to cool and harden slightly, then rolled up around a little stick to form – voilà! – a fresh maple taffy lollipop. Because, there’s never too much maple.
