April is the cruelest month. It is also the stickiest. Between mud season and the last gallon of boiling sap humming on the kitchen stove, my kitchen is a mess. No wonder God invented spring cleaning.
Of course, if we weren’t having a drought the mud would be a sight worse than it is. Wondering just how we are going to manage without more rain to recharge the sole source aquifer that most of us islanders live atop, especially once we start sharing it with summer people who take showers after every tennis and golf game and cannot live without acres of brilliantly green lawn, really would make me more tolerant of shin-deep mud in my driveway. Still, I’ll own up to being grouchy about any tracked into the house via the kitchen door.
This kitchen door is the main entrance to the house. We know this has always been true because it has the big, engraved metal door bell which emits a resounding clang when the knob is pulled. So the most mud is deposited in the kitchen. Here four adults regularly slog through the driveway’s clayey mass. Let’s do the math: the average adult foot is about 12 inches long and, with boots on, maybe up to four inches wide, so that is 48 square inches per foot, times two times four. Add the cat at one square inch times four, and – well, never mind, it is a lot of mud. Thank goodness it doesn’t stick to absolutely every square inch it possibly could. Thank goodness that my howling results in their using the boot brush sitting outside.
You’d think mud is the last thing anyone would use as a clever name for comestibles. But consider Mississippi Mud Pie and Mud Slides. Think of other dirty desserts, like that flower pot one with chocolate cookies ground up on top of chocolate pudding. Or Rocky Road ice cream which melts into a muddy mess, just as our dirt roads do in spring. Then there are all those cookie bars and other confections with earthy names.
Next to the mud of spring, maple sap seems sublime and refined, coming clear from the tree, plinking into the buckets, until we start boiling. We always boil it off inside the house. No, we never had our wallpaper fall off the wall because this old and drafty house, after a winter of heating with wood stoves, thirstily sucks up the moisture. Still it can feel a little like Florida in here as the air thickens with maple odor, and after a month it feels sticky. The worst is having a pan full get away from us and boil over. Hard cooked maple sugar welds stove parts together. The process of pouring it off through the big felt filter, and into canning jars inevitably means clear, glossy drips deposited on the floor, counter, table, and stove.
We usually aim for a few gallons of syrup, preferring the pale golden stuff for our pancakes and waffles. I use some for maple crème caramel. I try to cook some, at least, to the maple candy stage and let it harden in a cast iron muffin tin. This is for a divine little dessert I first tasted in Quebec City, which went by a name that translates roughly to “A Tart of Country [or Rustic] Sugar.” It was simply a thin, crustless square of white bread floated on a layer of heavy cream, covered thickly with shaved curls of maple sugar, and drizzled over with a little more heavy cream.
When I mention this to people they look aghast. But it is wonderful and terribly easy to make if you buy maple candy. I recommend, say, a three inch square of bread, or a circle cut with a three inch diameter cookie cutter. Put as much maple sugar on it as you like. It melts a little, but not as much as you’d think. This is not something, of course, that you can eat every day but it is a grand way to celebrate maple sugaring and reward yourself for enduring mud season.