This time, I’m afraid, there’s simply no hope of convincing the neighbors that I’m not completely insane. This morning at 7 a.m., I was outside in the swirling snow, shaking snow from a shrub into a cake pan, a bottle of maple syrup clamped tightly in one armpit. I am thirty-one years old, but the vestiges of my Little House on the Prairie fetish are still on display for everyone on my block to see.
When I was very young, my sister read the entire Little House series out loud to me, and man, did I love it. Sure, Mary was kind of a bore, but Laura was clever and charming and brave—all things that wee Shannon aspired to be. And I was enthralled with the idea of pioneer life. If my family ever had to move into a sod house for some reason, I was prepared to milk a cow, knit some mittens, and whip up some corn pone in order to help us through the long winter. I went so far as to insist that my parents buy me the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook, which explained how to make delicious treats like hardtack.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when New York was on the cusp of getting its first real snowstorm of the season; a scene from the first Little House book came back to me in a flash. Hadn’t Laura made maple candy by dripping syrup on fresh snow? Wouldn’t it be a hoot to do it myself? Alas, the timing of that storm was all wrong, and by the time I was out and about the next morning, it had turned to rain and slush. So this time, when I woke up to a couple of inches, I was determined to make it happen. Mind you, I haven’t read the book in question, Little House in the Big Woods, in well over two decades and my copy of the cookbook is probably still in a crate somewhere in my parents’ house, but as I remembered it, they just packed some snow in a pan, drizzled syrup over it in snazzy designs and—Voila! Candy!
In actuality, this is not what happens when you put maple syrup on snow. What you get is snow flavored with maple syrup, which I think anyone would be hard-pressed to call candy. Where did I go wrong? I dug my copy of the book off the shelf and started searching. I discovered that I had, in fact, conflated two scenes: one in which they go to Grandpa’s to help with the collecting of maple sap and another in which they make Christmas candy by boiling molasses and sugar together into a thick syrup and pouring it into patterns on a pan of snow.
Rats. I don’t even like molasses.
Anyway, it wasn’t a complete failure. I ate the maple snow with a spoon, which was kind of nice, like a pancake-flavored Sno-Cone. It didn’t quite have the pioneer panache of hardtack, but I bet Laura Ingalls Wilder would have liked it just fine.