Your Own Maple Syrup—from UP A COUNTRY LANE COOKBOOK

Want a taste of the fall colors? Try making your own maple syrup with this recipe from Up a Country Lane Cookbook, by Evelyn Birkby.

Your Own Maple Syrup

2 cups white sugar
2 cups brown sugar, packed
2 cups white corn syrup
2 cups water
2 teaspoons maple flavoring

Combine ingredients and cook, stirring, until sugars are dissolved and mixture boils. Simmer about 5 minutes. Serve hot on pancakes, waffles, or french toast. Store in covered jar in refrigerator. Makes 5 cups.

Excerpt from ROWS OF MEMORY: JOURNEYS OF A MIGRANT SUGAR-BEET WORKER, by Saúl Sánchez

Every year from April to October, the Sánchez family traveled—crowded in the back of trucks, camping in converted barns, tending and harvesting crops across the breadth of the United States. In 1951, Saúl Sánchez began to contribute to his family’s survival by helping to weed onions in Wind Lake, Wisconsin. He was eight years old. In this excerpt from Rows of Memory: Journeys of a Migrant Sugar-Beet Worker, Sánchez invites us to appreciate the largely unrecognized and poorly rewarded strength and skill of the laborers who harvest the fruits and vegetables we eat.

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The Mexicans that the sugar-beet companies recruited back then to work in the sugar-beet fields did not receive the same treatment that was given to the Russian Germans brought from Europe. The companies did not lend them money to buy land; they did not offer them any equipment, seed, or utensils to help them work the land bought with borrowed money…. In place of loans, they received credit in company stores to obtain their foodstuffs while they completed the harvest. And they were not paid until they finished…. They did not live in town either; there were separate labor camps for them to keep them apart from the white population. The only tools the companies allowed them, which were also purchased on credit from those same well-stocked stores, were the ones perfected earlier by the Japanese: the short-handled hoe.

For a person to be stooped or arched over (“stooped steep” as people would say with a touch of ironic humor) while hoeing with a hoe that has a ten- or twelve-inch handle for as long as eight, ten, or even twelve hours a day is how I would define the word torture…. It was a punishing way to make a living.

Excerpt from ROWS OF MEMORY: JOURNEYS OF A MIGRANT SUGAR-BEET WORKER, by Saúl Sánchez

Every year from April to October, the Sánchez family traveled—crowded in the back of trucks, camping in converted barns, tending and harvesting crops across the breadth of the United States. In 1951, Saúl Sánchez began to contribute to his family’s survival by helping to weed onions in Wind Lake, Wisconsin. He was eight years old. In this excerpt from Rows of Memory: Journeys of a Migrant Sugar-Beet Worker, Sánchez invites us to appreciate the largely unrecognized and poorly rewarded strength and skill of the laborers who harvest the fruits and vegetables we eat.

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When I was young I used to hear members of my family say that our ancestors had come to the Winter Garden Valley of Texas at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that they came from the same area: the border between Mexico and the United States. What I have been able to ascertain is that they arrived during the time of the Mexican Revolution in the case of our maternal grandfather and a little after that in the case of our paternal grandparents….

[O]ur grandparents didn’t just decide one day to abandon the cotton fields in Texas to go up north and do sugar beets. It was an incremental transition. Their method of decision making was logical for those times. People acted as members of a family rather than as individuals. And they were traditional families, they were bound by powerful family ties. The decisions made by the elders, especially the older brothers, directly influenced the lives of all the members of the extended family.