SC - Sugar Maples

[Cindy Renfrow]

                      RE>>SC - Sugar Maples                        3/24/98

snip 
> You *can* get a sweet syrup from birches, but I don't know if it was done in
the middle ages.

There is some precedent in using tree sap as a fermentable sweetener. In her
text, A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food & Drink: Production & Distribution
(page 229), Ann Hagan notes "Saps were apparently fermented: Bartholomew
Anglicus observes that birch and honey would make a strong drink, and sycamore
saps could be fermented with ale or yeast." C. Anne Wilson further comments,
"Birch tree wine was fermented from the spring sap tapped from tree trunks in
Sussex and in the Scottish highlands. The sap could also be brewed as ale with
only a quarter of the normal allowance of malt." in Food and Drink in Britain
from the Stone Age to the 19th Century (page 383).
<snip>

OOH! ooh! Birch-beer period!? Oh Joy! That would be lovely!
- -brid

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