![]() "I'm not proprietary," Woods, 74, says of the spiral-bound recipes, many of which were gathered from friends and relatives over the decades from yellowed notecards or written on scraps of paper and left in the sugarhouse. You'll also find more than a dozen recipes for cookies and pies, including the farm's award-winning "Snowplow Pie" that's made with just four ingredients: a prepared graham cracker crust, cream cheese, whipped topping and maple sugar crumb. "I'm eager to share the craft and sell the product," she says, "but I'm more interested in people visiting the museum and reading the book" for which the sugarhouse is named, the 1957 Newbery Award-winning children's novel "Miracles on Maple Hill" by Virginia Sorensen.Ĭharmingly illustrated by Waterford artist Cynthia Beck, the cookbook includes 170 recipes, in categories that run the gamut from breakfast and appetizers to fruits and vegetables, entrees, candy and desserts. Last year, Woods only tapped 20 trees for about 55 gallons of syrup, so she could devote more time to another growing passion: the nonprofit Hurry Hill Farm Maple Museum she opened in 2009 next to the Fry Road farm in an effort to preserve, interpret and promote the region's maple-sugaring heritage. Janet Woods was recently honored by Preservation Erie for her efforts to preserve the maple heritage of Northwestern Pennsylvania.Janet Woods was recently honored by Preservation Erie for her efforts to preserve the maple heritage of Northwestern Pennsylvania.Īt its peak, Hurry Hill's old-school sugarhouse - it uses a wood-fired evaporator instead of propane or gas to heat the sap - produced about 450 gallons of artisan syrup a year. Her mother would boil down the sap they hand collected from 2,000 buckets into the night after teaching in a one-room school all day. Maple sugaring provided that opportunity, "and my father hoped to make enough income from maple syrup sales to pay the taxes and buy some cabbage seed," Woods says. During the "season of mud and snow" between winter and spring, when it's too muddy to work the fields or spread manure on soft earth, farmers were "itchin'" to get outside and work. They built a sugarhouse on Hurry Hill in 1958 to supplement their work as dairy farmers.īack in the day, Woods says, most farms in Northwestern Pennsylvania had maple trees along with tillable fields, streams and orchards. ![]() Woods has been making maple syrup her whole life on the 55-acre maple farm she grew up on, following in the footsteps of her parents, Paul and Mary, who also both grew up on Erie County farms. "Maple Syrup Recipes with Tips and Tales from Hurry Hill Maple Farm" by Janet Woods includes dozens of maple-centric recipes along with more than 100 cooking tips, anecdotes and stories about maple sugaring. There's also a new cookbook by one of the region's premier maple syrup producers that shows the home cook all the delicious ways to incorporate the sweetening liquid into just about every meal, and then some. That makes us among the top seven syrup-producing states in the U.S., according to the USDA. While Vermont reigns supreme when it comes to production (2.5 million gallons in 2022 alone), as a whole, Pennsylvania maple farmers collected, boiled and bottled a respectable 164,000 gallons of syrup this year. Luckily for those who can't get enough of the real deal, it's fairly easy to find a bottle or can of Pennsylvania-made maple syrup in and around the region. ![]() Fall is also major pancake and French toast season, and drowning the fluffy breakfast foods with maple syrup isn't just tasty: It's sacrosanct. Now is when the apples, Brussels sprouts, root vegetables and hearty winter squashes associated with autumnal eating are in ample supply at farmers markets and grocery stores, and all pair perfectly with the sweet, caramel-y flavor of maple. Maple syrup is famously made in spring, when below-freezing nights followed by warm days cause the sap stored in a sugar maple's trunk to flow up and out of the tree and into buckets or plastic tubing for boiling.īut for many, the thick, sugary liquid American Indians cooked in wooden troughs heated by red-hot rocks, long before any settlers arrived, rivals pumpkin-spice as the quintessential fall flavor.
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