DIANA HENRY'S STAR INGREDIENT: THE MAGIC OF MAPLE

This month Diana shares three recipes using one of her all-time favourite ingredients

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It’s hard to think of an ingredient – except for nuts – that seems more autumnal than maple syrup. It’s the colour of turning leaves, it flows languidly (suggesting comfort and lazy afternoons on the sofa), it tastes of pecans and brown sugar. But maple syrup is a product of the cusp between winter and spring. Maple sap flows when the temperature is above freezing during the day but below freezing at night. If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘sugar snow’ in New England or Quebec that’s what they mean, a snow which gives the right conditions for ‘sugaring’. The real experts can even smell it in the air.

Mom-and-pop operations still tap the sap by drilling holes in the maple trees and hanging buckets into which it can drip. Drive around Vermont at this time of year and you can see metal buckets gleaming in the moonlight, and furls of smoke from the fires under the troughs in which the sap is boiled in the cold air. Everything looks bright, even at night, as light is reflected off the snow. Small producers work in their sugar ‘shacks’, small huts where they have their equipment, boiling the sap until it reduces to the required consistency. They keep going round the clock, helped by their family, dozing alongside the boiling sap. It only runs once a year so there isn’t time to sleep much.

Commercial companies use a network of plastic tubing – it has to be inspected daily as squirrels gnaw through it and suck the sap – which doesn’t look as cute but is much more efficient. The sap is pumped via these into huge stainless steel containers where, just as in the mom-and-pop outfits, it’s boiled. It takes 35 gallons of clear sap to produce a gallon of amber syrup, which explains the high price tag.