Word: sap
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When you think of maple syrup, whose 2009 season is just now wrapping up, the first image that pops into your mind is probably a huge tree trunk with a few metal buckets strapped on. Maybe you picture workhorses slogging through the snow, a sleigh laden with tree sap in tow. Maybe there's a little wooden shack with a chimney emitting a plume of steam. What you might not picture are the dollar signs many are seeing around this surging agricultural commodity - maple syrup producers are celebrating high yields and record retail prices this year. (See the photo essay...
...some 300 years, however, sugaring stuck close by that rural idyll. Early settlers in the U.S. Northeast and Canada learned about sugar maples from Native Americans. Various legends exist to explain the initial discovery. One is that the chief of a tribe threw a tomahawk at a tree, sap ran out and his wife boiled venison in the liquid. Another version holds that Native Americans stumbled on sap running from a broken maple branch...
...From the 17th century onward, dairy farmers who wanted to supplement their income from milk - or who just needed a source of sweetener that was better and cheaper than sugar or molasses - drilled small holes in the trees during the brief weather window between winter and spring. (Sap typically runs out of maple trees on days when the temperature is around 40 degrees following a night when the mercury dropped below freezing.) The farmers called the maple tree stands "sugar bushes" and hung buckets under the drilled holes. Every day or two - depending on how fast the sap was running...
...takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup because sap is about 98% water. Sugar makers boiled off most of the water over a wood fire - what they were left with was brown sweet syrup. Some sugar makers heated the sap further, turning it into crystallized sugar. Over time, the industry evolved enough that companies from Quebec to Vermont produced ready-made "evaporators," essentially giant frying pans with fire boxes built underneath...
...turned wooden, like the table.” As originally conceived, this device is supposed to amplify an effect by presenting it in an unusual or grotesque way. The offhand presentation of violence and brutality certainly constitutes a form of defamiliarization, but the effect, conversely, is to sap the book of any real emotional power. Such descriptions abound in the novel in a flat, monotonous way, and the purely grotesque, after intense repetition, has neither comic nor dramatic value. Thus even those scenes which ought to be most powerful have little impact, as with the death of Senyor, a character...