Maple syrup drizzled over a saucer full of freshly-fallen snow, at the right temperature and in the right proportions, tastes ambrosial—a kind of gods’ ice cream. The syrup hardens slightly and the snow stays fluffy and cold. This is something surprisingly delicious, and once you know how to do it, or how you like it, easy.
There are many ways to make it. In the sugaring off dance in "Little House in the Big Woods," they harvested their own sugar maple sap and boiled it for hours to make maple syrup. Then they poured the syrup over the snow, let it harden, and ate only the hardened syrup, which they called maple sugar candy. In Vermont, this candy is called Sugar on Snow, and traditionally accompanied by pickles and doughnuts.
When three local children and I made it after sledding, while it was still snowing, we started with a bottle of real maple syrup from Tom’s. We ate the snow, too.
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“It tastes kind of like ice cream,” said Stonington resident Amanda Bury, 8.
It did, but the lightest, freshest, fluffiest, ice cream I’ve ever tasted (and probably the least fattening, too). It took us a few tries to get it right: the first time, we had too little snow. The second time, the syrup wasn’t boiled enough. Both times, we ended up with saucers full of watered down syrup. Those pleased some of the children, but not me.
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This is the method that resulted in what we called Stonington Maple Snow.
Stonington Maple Snow
(per person)
1 saucer full of freshly-fallen snow
1 spoonful boiling pure maple syrup
1 fast-running child
1 adult at the stove
1. Heat the maple syrup. Use a big pot, boiling sugar froths up high and fast.
2. When the syrup starts to foam up in the pan, have the child or children run outside and heap saucers with freshly fallen snow.
3. By this time, the syrup should have reached what candy-makers would call “the soft ball stage.” This means the syrup forms soft balls when a little is dropped in a glass of ice water.
4. Drizzle a big spoonful of still-boiling syrup over the top of the snow. It will harden slightly, but not completely—like hot fudge sauce on icecream.
The longer you boil the syrup, the harder it will become on the snow. I like it slightly chewy, so you can eat bites of snow and syrup together, and let each flavor the other.
Let it snow!
