The Iroquois people drank maple sap every year as a spring cleansing regimen—if you have a maple tree in your yard, you can do the same, or you can make your own syrup.
According to Seneca herbalist Janice Longboat, sugar maple sap contains all the vitamins necessary for the body to cleanse itself at the end of winter, when the blood begins to thin, mucus changes composition, and many subtle adjustments occur in the body to adapt to warming weather. In a workshop at the Green Nations Gathering, Longboat explained that native people drank maple or mulberry sap six days a week, for four weeks, each person consuming a gallon a week. It’s hard to find a source of untreated sap, but tapping your own tree is not hard, and a single tap will supply two adults with enough sap to drink for the month or so that the sap will be running.
To taste buds accustomed to the concentrated sweetness of maple syrup, the sap at first tastes like intensely vital water that is faintly sweet. As one becomes sensitized, the sap begins to taste powerfully sweet and to feel remarkably invigorating. Even red maples, with a lower sugar concentration, have slightly sweet sap, although it is probably less nourishing than sugar maple sap. Hickories can also be tapped for their sap. Sweet birch, with its fragrance of wintergreen, has its sap run about a month later than the maples, which only run when the temperature is below freezing at night and above 40 degrees in the daytime—usually February to March here in the Northeast.
Ambitious people set up evaporators in their yards and make syrup. It takes anywhere from forty to ninety gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, depending on the sugar content. You can make small amounts of syrup on your kitchen stove, but if you make a lot, the paint or wallpaper will peel from the evaporating moisture. I’ve made up to a cupful of syrup at a time, and it has an incredibly delicate and enchanting flavor. But I would bet that heating destroys some of the nutrients, and that sap, while less concentrated, is more nourishing.
When you work with a tree in this way, taking its substance into your own body, you develop a relationship with it. For the rest of the year, you will think about it differently than you used to. Do not forget to thank it by putting a bit of food or tobacco at its roots, to give something back.
