On Food and Cooking

descendants of that root, melit-, include
molasses, marmalade, mellifluous, and
mousse (via the Latin mulsus, “honey-
sweet”).
Maple Syrup and Sugar Long before
Europeans introduced the honeybee, the
natives of North America had developed their
own delicious concentrated sweets. Several
Indian tribes, notably the Algonquins,
Iroquois, and Ojibways, had well-established
myths about and terminologies for maple
sugaring by the time that European explorers
encountered them. Thanks to a remarkable
document, we have some idea of how
ingenious they were at extracting and
concentrating the tree sap (see box below). All
they needed was a tomahawk to cut into the
tree, a wood chip to keep the wound open,
sheets of elm bark for containers, and cold
nights to freeze the water into pure ice
crystals that could then be removed from the
ever more concentrated sap.