Quebec

The Sugar Shack in March

The cabane à sucre opens in March, when the nights still freeze and the days thaw and the sap runs, and it stays open to the end of April. Steam pours out of the roof vent and you can see it from the road. Inside are long tables of ham, bacon, sausages, pancakes, baked beans, eggs and oreilles de crisse, and at the end sugar pie and hot taffy poured onto a trough of snow and rolled up on a stick while it is still soft.

The method is not French. The peoples of the northeastern woodlands cut into maple bark in the thaw and boiled the sap down to sugar long before any settler tasted it, and Pierre Boucher wrote the practice down in 1664. The Anishinaabe name a moon for it — a spring Sugar Moon, marked with a Maple Dance.

Quebec now makes 92 per cent of Canada's syrup, and Canada about 78 per cent of the world's, which is why the producers keep a strategic reserve in rural warehouses. Over several months in 2011 and 2012, nearly 3,000 tonnes of it went missing from the warehouse at Saint-Louis-de-Blandford. Nobody noticed until an inspector climbed the stacks at the annual inventory in July 2012 and found the barrels empty.

The odd thing on this shelf is fenugreek — a Mediterranean seed that smells exactly like maple syrup. The compound is sotolon, and it is what imitation maple is built on. From the autumn of 2005 New Yorkers kept smelling syrup in the air with no explanation; on 5 February 2009 the city announced it had traced the smell across the Hudson to a plant in North Bergen, New Jersey, processing fenugreek seed. Canadian breeders registered their first fenugreek variety in 1992, and most of what grows in the West today is CDC Canafen.

Smoked Maple Oolong, Organic is the cup that tastes of the fire and the syrup in the same mouthful, and it belongs beside the ham. Maple, Eh! Organic is the plain one. Maple Peach is the one the children will drink. Fenugreek, Whole and Fenugreek, Ground go in the beans and the pot — maple smell, no maple. Icewine is the tea named for what the same cold makes in Niagara, and it is the one to end on.

Six products. One March, and it is over by the end of April.

Smoked Maple Oolong with the ham and the beans, because it tastes of the fire and the syrup at once. Maple, Eh! plain for the people who came for the pancakes, Maple Peach for the children. Whole and ground fenugreek in the pot — the maple smell without any maple in it. Icewine at the end, while everybody is outside rolling taffy on the snow.