[Sca-cooks] New World Foods

[Terry Decker]

> snow flake wrote:
>> maple syrup perhaps... but a lot of different trees have sap that i find 
>> hard to believe no one would have tried to do something with.  Have to 
>> look at the trees across europe now.  ;c)
>>
>>
> I was looking at that a couple of years ago for a writing project, and
> while they had maples in Europe, they did not have Sugar Maples- those
> are native to what is now the eastern US. Which is not to say that the
> Europeans didn't tap tree sap, but I don't know of any instances of it
> until the discovery of the Americas.
>
> Bear, do you know more about this?
>
> 'Lainie

Looks like everyone beat me to it.

IIRC, the Europeans tapped pines for resin until they developed the 
distillation process for pine tar, so they certainly knew how to draw and 
use sap.  They also tapped marsh mallows and opium poppies for their sap.

I will admit I had forgotten about using birch sap, although I have some 
reservations about how widespread the use was.  I don't think European use 
of birch was anywhere as great as the collection of maple syrup, even in the 
18th Century.

Bear