Maple Sugar
A staple in the Ojibwa diet
Maple sugar was an important part of the Ojibwa diet.
Sugarmaking happened for several weeks in the Spring just as the frost broke and the sap ran up the tree. It was in the fourth moon - the Moon of Boiling, Izhkigamisegi Geezis.
The Ojibwa didn't use salt but there were many other things they used to season their food. Sugar from the maple trees was used as a flavouring for stews, tea, berries and tuberous roots.
Forty gallons of sap boiled down to about a gallon of syrup, but to make sugar it was boiled down to about three quarts in a smaller ketle.
Sugar was made two different ways.
Thick syrup for hard sugar was scooped before it turned to granules in the final boiling kettle and them it was poured onto ice or snow to solidify. The sugar was then packed tightly into birchbark cones that were sewn tightly shut with basswood or cedar fibre for storage. The hard sugar could be licked or knibbled like candy.
The second way of making sugar was to add some small pieces of deer tallow to the final syrup. Just as it was about to granulate it was poured into a wooden trough made from a smoothed out log. It was stirred there to granulate it and then rubbed with sugar ladles and hands to make sugar grains...ziinzibaakwad.
The warm maple sugar granules were into birchbark packets called makuks and could then be used as needed year round with wild rice, fish, berries and tubers. In summer it was sometimes dissolved in water to make a tasty drink. In winter it was used to flavour various root, leaf and bark teas.
- Maple Syrup
- Making Maple Syrup
- Birch Syrup
- Wild Rice
- Ojibwa Tea
- Ojibwa Food
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