In Canada, sugar maples are only found in select regions.Ĭanada produces about 85 per cent of the world’s maple syrup. Maple syrup production is now approximately one-fifth of what it was in the beginning of the 20th century. As white refined sugar became less expensive, it began to replace maple syrup and maple sugar as a relied-upon sweetener. Maple syrup was the preferred sweetener used by the early settlers since white refined sugar from the West Indies was highly taxed and very expensive. They European settlers had access to metals and used their metal iron tools to tap the trees and then boiled the sap in the iron or copper kettles. When the early European settlers came to North America, they learned from the Indigenous people that sap could be made into sugar. They also increased the sugar content by removing the frozen water layer after the nightly freezing of the sap. The sap could be reduced into syrup by evaporating the excess water by plunging hot stones into the sap. They would make incisions into trees with stone and bone implements their tomahawks and use birch bark containers to collect the sap. The process of making maple syrup is an age-old tradition of the First Nations people, who used it both as a food and a medicine.
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