Origins

Origins

Sugaring Off

by Dalya Goldberger

It’s springtime, the snow is melting, the sap is running and Miss Hoopty and Delilah are on the road to Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, to visit Miss Hoopty’s uncle at his sugar shack.

"Oh, Delilah, I’m so excited. I haven’t seen my uncle in over a year! He makes the best maple syrup," cooed Miss Hoopty.

"Aren’t you an eager beaver," Delilah remarked dryly, still miffed that her electricity cut out that morning before she had a chance to blow-dry her hair. Peering at herself in the rear-view mirror, she looked crestfallen.

"Don’t worry; you look fine," grinned Miss Hoopty. "But that’s quite the cowlick you have there," she said, laughing.

"Don’t get me started, Véronique," cautioned Delilah referring to Miss Hoopty’s three-quarter length, faux velvet coat similar to the robe-like wardrobe selections popularized on Veronica’s Closet. "Are we almost there?"

Within a few minutes, their car meandered up a long, wooded drive lined with religious statues. At the end stood two log cabins spewing smoke; a man in his sixties stepped out of the smaller cabin to greet them.

"Oncle Gaetan!" cried Miss Hoopty as she leapt out of the car and threw two velvety arms around his neck. "How have you been?"

"Occupé comme une queue de veau dans le temps des mouches," he replied smiling. "The sap’s running early this year and my second boiler is caput. Come in, come in — I was just about to make la tire."

The two women followed Oncle Gaetan past a thin, wooden table lined with snow and through the cabin’s two large, open doors to a steaming cauldron of maple syrup. Using a small saucepan, he deftly scooped some syrup out of the cauldron and drizzled it onto the snow. Like children, Miss Hoopty and Delilah giddily twirled popsicle sticks in the hardening sugar.

"Let me show you around," offered Oncle Gaetan motioning toward the sugar bush.

After a thorough tour through the mud and muck of the maple grove and two good helpings of sugar pie at the kitchen table, Miss Hoopty and Delilah bid Oncle Gaetan farewell and headed home.

"You know," said Delilah after they found their way back to the highway, "I really liked your uncle — he was extremely polite. The whole time we were there, he never even mentioned that piece of maple candy stuck between your two front teeth."

Sugaring off is the process of boiling maple sap into maple syrup.

Sugar shack is a Canadian term, most often used in Quebec, for a small establishment in a sugar bush that makes and serves maple-flavoured dishes. It also refers to the building in which maple sap is sugared off.

Eager beaver is a Canadian army expression that refers to the industrious beaver, our national animal. The expression was not recorded before 1940 but likely derives from similar expressions, such as "busy as a beaver." Eager beaver is usually applied derisively to someone who is overly industrious or zealous.

Crestfallen derives from the ancient "sport" of cockfighting. It refers to the defeated bird that stands waiting for death with its crest fallen to its beak. The first recorded use of this term to apply to humans appears to be in Shakespeare’s Henry VI.

Cowlick is British in origin and refers to a tuft of hair that refuses to lie flat. It likely comes from a comparison with the projecting ridge of hairs on a cow’s hide, which have been licked into that shape by the animal. The word was first recorded in 1598.

Occupé comme une queue de veau dans le temps des mouches is a French-Canadian expression that translates into "busier that a calf’s tail in fly season."

Caput, the Latin word for "head," is an English and American slang expression for "done for." During the bubonic plague in medieval times, German burial squads counted each corpse as a head. The term was used so often that the German word kaputt came to mean broke, wrecked, unserviceable, and finished.

La tire, derived from the French word tire meaning "to pull," is a French-Canadian term for toffee. However, the anglicized lateer has become synonymous with the chewy maple candy produced by drizzling thick syrup onto snow and letting it cool.

Sugar bush is a North American term for a grove of sugar maple trees.

Sugar pie is a Canadian term, most often used in Quebec, for an open-faced or lattice-topped pie baked with a filling of brown or maple sugar mixed with cream.