Feb 26, 2019 4 min read

Growing up in Newbury, Ohio, Linda Shefcheck came from a multi-generational family of maple syrup makers.

The family’s culinary craft started in 1890 when her great-grandfather started tapping maples in the spring for family use. Following in his footsteps were two of his sons and a third generation descendant – one of her great-grandfather’s great-nephews, who continued the practice until the latter passed in the 1990s.

“The family had the same operation at the same location for nearly 100 years,” said Shefcheck, who began “helping” out and watching what they were doing at the age of 6 or 7. “I began by carrying wood for the fire, then gradually did other things as I got older.”

As a child, Shefcheck admits to having looked forward to having more maple syrup each spring to put on her pancakes. Living in Ohio’s snow belt, she also enjoyed making maple snow, by spilling some hot syrup from the evaporating kettle onto the snow.

“The syrup cooled quickly to make a taffy-like candy,” said Shefcheck, who now resides in Dry Tavern.

On Feb. 9, Shefcheck tapped into her childhood experiences and gave a presentation titled “Making Maple Syrup” at the Town and Country Garden Club’s monthly meeting at Hewitt Presbyterian Church in Rices Landing.

“You should start tapping maple syrup in February or March, depending on when the sap starts running,” Shefcheck said. “Making syrup is temperature dependent. The nights should be below 32-degrees and the days above 40. To tap a tree, it should be more than 10-inches in diameter for one tap, 16 inches for two and 22 inches for three.”

Depending on the weather, each tap should provide about 20 gallons of sap over a two to four week period, according to Shefcheck. Once the trees start budding, you should stop tapping because the flavor of the syrup isn’t as good.

After the maples are tapped, the syrup should be boiled right away because it will sour if kept too long at a warm temperature. Surprisingly, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, which accounts for its hefty price.

“The best trees for tapping are sugar maples, followed by Norway maples,” she said. “People who tap annually know where their trees are, but those who don’t should mark the trees they plan to tap by tying a ribbon around them in the fall. That’s when the trees can be identified by the color and shape of their leaves. The sugar maple, for instance, has five lobes (blades or points of the leaf).”

Shefcheck admits that tapping maple syrup takes a lot of work, but doesn’t require a lot of equipment. She recommends boiling the sap outdoors or in a sugar shack because the steam from the kettle is very sticky and gets over everything. The finished product comes in four grades, depending on color – very light, light, medium and dark.

“Dark is considered best for cooking because it has the most robust flavor,” she said. “But I like to put the lighter one on my pancakes.”

Shefcheck said she can tell the real thing from the artificial imitations. In addition to adding syrup to her pancakes, she also cooks with maple syrup to sweeten things. For example, she uses maple syrup in her pecan pies instead of corn syrup and especially likes maple roasted pecans to snack on.

“Mix the pecans with some maple syrup, then put them in a 375-degree oven until they get toasty and dig in,” she said of her recipe.

A garden club member since 2011, she grows flowers along her house while her husband plants a vegetable garden.

“Every year I try to grow something different, but as you get older, it gets harder and harder to get up and down,” she said.

Shefcheck said she met her husband in Ohio when he was working around Newbury. After they married, the couple moved back to Jim’s hometown of Crucible. When he retired, they moved to their current home in Dry Tavern.

For the past 45 years, Shefcheck has been sewing and doing alterations under her unofficial business name “Forever Yours.” Her patrons come to her largely by word of mouth.

After all these years, Shefcheck says she still gets her maple syrup from the Newbury, Ohio area.

“I still know people there who make it real good,” she said.