Sugar maple trees thrive in the cold nights and warm sunny days of Quebec’s frigid winters. That’s what gets their sap to flow in the springtime, when owners of érablières or maple plantations tap their trees to collect the watery golden stuff. And every springtime, too, people in Quebec and northern New England flock to cabanes à sucre or sugar shacks to celebrate the annual “sugaring off” with a traditional meal.
Between late February and late April, groups of families and friends sit down for a brunch or lunch in which maple complements every single dish.
A cabane à sucre meal starts with a bowl of soupe aux pois, or pea soup. Then comes an array of traditional savory dishes such as maple-baked ham, an omelet or scrambled eggs, sausages, tourtière, fèves au lard(baked beans), creton (a pork-based pâté), and oreilles de crises (deep-fried pork rinds). A large carafe of maple syrup is found at every table, and you are invited to drizzle it on everything, including bread and butter. A word of advice: pace yourself and eat small portions.
You are probably wondering, what’s for dessert? So glad you asked! The answer is, of course, an inundation of maple-flavored desserts like tarte au sucre or maple sugar pie, maple donuts, and maple pancakes. A star of the show is tire d’érable or maple taffy.
At the end of the meal, you’ll go to the sugar shack, boiled and reduced maple syrup is poured onto fresh snow (or crushed ice) in rows. Once the liquid syrup sets and cools a bit in the snow, you roll it around a popsicle stick and savor it like a lollipop. No sugar shack meal is complete without this tire sur la neige.
Many sugar shacks in Québec are small and family-owned. They sometimes offer additional activities like a tour of the érablière in a horse or tractor-drawn wagon or sleigh ride to look at the tapped maple trees; walks or hikes in the woods; traditional music and dancing; petting zoos; snowshoeing; and observing the maple syrup making process.
Cabanes à sucre are numerous in Mont Saint-Gregoire, about 80 minutes from Burlington. Last year a group from the AFLCR visited L’Érablière Chabonneau and liked it very much. But many more in that area are awaiting your group’s arrival to share with you this crowning regional experience.
Photos by Patsy Jamieson.
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