The trouble with the maples

Origin stories fascinate me. Everyone and everything has one; they have to, or else nothing that is would be. (Huh?) But the geneses of certain things are shrouded in mystery and probably always will be, which makes them both enticing and deeply frustrating. Like a gorgeous woman who wouldn’t notice me if I was on fire and wrestling a polar bear.

Lately I’ve been pondering the origin of maple syrup. Partly this is due to the current maple season and a crack-like addiction to pancakes, but it was a recent trip to a nearby sugarhouse that made me wonder: How the hell was this stuff discovered? Not even the Internet can say for sure, and that’s how you know you’ve got a Holmes-level mystery on your hands.

It’s not like the stuff is easy to make. Production of the viscous treat is such an involved process that its discovery couldn’t have been pure chance; it’s unlikely that someone stepped in a puddle of sap, accidentally set their boots on fire, licked the bottom ’cause they were a weird goober and then said, “Hmm, this is actually quite tasty. Start production immediately!”  There’s way too much science in play, requiring a heap of shiny equipment that looks as though it could power the lunar module of Apollo 11.

One of the contraptions employed by a lot of modern maple producers is this thing called a reverse osmosis machine, and no, that’s not a device Lex Luthor uses to read the minds of Superman and the Justice League. In basic terms, it removes moisture from the raw sap so it can boil at a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Apparently this is important. Exactly why, I couldn’t say – it sounds super technical, so it must be – but it reflects an understanding of the syrup-making process which is the end result of centuries of the craft’s evolution. The first person to make it certainly wasn’t using a reverse osmosis machine, but they understood something about maple sap that, once refined by subsequent generations, culminated in a gizmo that rivals the complexity of an early car motor.

And that’s pretty amazing.

Which makes the fuzzy origin even more vexing. There’s comfort in knowing how things started; it gives us a frame of reference, some orientation. Peter Parker became Spider-Man because he was bitten by a radioactive spider, giving him arachnid-like abilities, such as scaling walls and breathing through a thick film of cotton underwear. Cell phones became smartphones when late Apple CEO Steve Jobs decided that people were making way too much eye contact on the subway. These are things that have clear, definable beginnings. Heck, even the origins of the universe itself are less mysterious than those of maple syrup; once an infinitely hot and dense nugget of plasma, it exploded into being, giving rise to galaxies, stars, and J. Edgar Hoover. Tie it up with a bow, Mavis.

The best we can do with maple syrup is trace it back to the indigenous people of northeastern North America. Archaeological evidence suggests that these natives were processing sap long before Europeans arrived in the region; when the Europeans did come, they apparently liked the sweet goo so much that they set to work refining production techniques. Good thing, too, because by that time most of the natives were sick with influenza.

But there are no authenticated accounts of how it first crossed someone’s mind to boil sap into syrup. Wikipedia, my lazy source for most of this information, says that various origin myths and legends exist, most of them involving mystical spirits or anthropomorphic squirrels. As much as it pleases me to imagine a talking squirrel boiling sap in a pan over a roaring campfire, I’m more inclined to believe in a tooth fairy, or a fast food burger that doesn’t taste like a foot.

There are a lot of things we enjoy in everyday life whose stories have pages missing from their inaugural chapters. Beer was brewed at least as far back as the ancient Mesopotamians, but it’s not like there are historical accounts of some dude named Billy Beernuts deciding his fermented cereal grains had a nice kick to them; scientists had to pin down the general era of beer’s inception by performing chemical tests on old pottery jars. Coffee, same deal. Like maple syrup, mythical stories of coffee’s origin abound. The most interesting concerns a Yemenite Sufi mystic named Ghothul Akbar Nooruddin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, whose insatiable appetite for consonants resulted in a name longer than most of the puzzles on Wheel of Fortune. “Joe,” as I like to call him, allegedly spotted birds of unusual vitality while traveling in Ethiopia, and after consuming the berries the birds had been eating, got a jolt that’s surely familiar to anyone who’s stayed up all night playing Nintendo and guzzling Mountain Dew. A cute story, but it smacks of B.S. Like other staples of modern life, its beginnings have been fuzzied by the sands of time.

The appeal of these mysteries is that they may never be solved, but that’s also what makes them so maddening. We don’t think about why we douse our pancakes in syrup; we just do it, as part of a practice handed down to us by the ancient mists. The way I see it, I’ve got two options. The first is to build a time machine and dedicate my life to pinpointing the long-lost genesis of maple syrup, skipping through the decades like a stone on the surface of a pond. The second is simply to shut up and enjoy my damn waffles.

It’s settled, then. Please pass the Eggos.