The tree most identified with Quebec cuisine.

This tree’s boiled sap, used particularly during “sugar season”, is highly popular: sweet, and golden to amber in colour, it’s world famous.

But do we really know it?

I signed up for a maple farming course last year and promptly understood the complexity of a sugar shack project nowadays. Anyone can make their own maple syrup for fun, but to make it according to marketing regulations is something else entirely.

First Nations peoples discovered this sweet maple sap well before the French colonists. It was when tasting the cambium in springtime that the Indigenous people realized that it was sweeter than the cambium of other trees. (The cambium is a special inner bark layer of a plant that serves as a unique type of skin to protect the plant from harm and promote plant growth. It’s a survival food in the forest.) Indigenous people used a reed or sharpened stone to start the sap running, which was collected in a birchbark container. The sap was then poured into a clay container and hot rocks were used to evaporate the excess water.

Years later, in the 1700s, maple sugar was used in coffee or tea and in Easter chocolate. In Quebec, several now-forgotten maple syrup-based recipes followed, such as tarte à la pichoune (tr. a sugar pie made with molasses or maple syrup) or tarte à la bise (tr. raisin pie made with maple syrup).

In my family, my grandmother Rose made a dessert with nuts and maple that I have featured with pride in several restaurants in the past. During “sugar season”, it’s a classic I absolutely have to make.

My famous Maple Crunch!

Whether you have a sweet tooth or not, everybody loves this dessert… which goes back further than you might think.