Last Call for Pancakes

I'm not a native New Englander, so I don't know much about maple sugaring. I do know that the sugaring industry has been struggling recently, as seasons grow shorter and shorter and the sap line* inches ever northward. Something about the earth getting warmer, I think. Apart from that, I'm a rank amateur in all things maple-sugary. It was just this year, for instance, that I learned that not all maple syrup is real maple syrup - I first cottoned on to what is, apparently, a fairly widespread conspiracy when I noticed brunch places in the Valley charging extra for "real maple syrup." What, you mean Aunt Jemima's isn't real? I thought. Then what the hell is it? Corn syrup, it turns out. I can sense all you natives out there smiling at my naivete, but I assure you I had never even considered the possibility that the syrup I'd been consuming for most of my life was anything other than real until I noticed this. And then I felt betrayed. Used and betrayed.

Well, so what? We can't all know everything about everything, right? I know quite a bit about a whole lot of other things, so what's the harm in not knowing a lot about the maple sugar industry? Well I'll tell you what the harm is, Mr./Mrs. Smartypants. I'll tell you right here in this very blog. Listen carefully.

The most significant other thing that I didn't know about maple sugaring until very recently is that the sugaring season usually begins around late February and comes to an end around early to mid-April. Or at least it did this year. This is significant in itself, of course, but its significance for me lies in a further fact. This is that during this very short period, dozens of little sugar shacks all over New England open their doors to visitors. They sell these visitors freshly bottled syrup, maple-related trinkets and doodads and gewgaws, and breakfast. That's what I said: breakfast. Here I've been, wandering all over the Valley in search of The Perfect French Toast, eating in greasy diners and getting all crunchy-organic with the Suburu-driving bourgeoisie, when I could have been eating french toast in rustic little sugar shacks, surrounded by boiling drums of syrup, taking in the sounds and smells of one of the only truly local regional economic activities we have left in this country. Bah! Humbug!

You will have gathered that I only learned about this phenomenon after all the area sugar shacks had closed for the season. Well, almost all.

Yesterday Kate and I set off for the far northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Our mission, for once, was not specifically french-toast or even breakfast-related - it was to meet up with Dr. and Mrs. D. (and toddler D.), have a picnic in the sunshine, run around chasing rubber balls and frisbees, and check out the Henri Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, which was coming to an end yesterday (the exhibit was coming to an end, not Williamstown). We were also looking forward to driving down Route 2, also called the Mohawk Trail, a ridiculously scenic road named for the Indians who once traded and raided along it and not for the hair styles of the many bikers who prowl along it when the weather's fine (although one could certainly be forgiven for believing the latter).

And we did all that. The Mohawk Trail, one of the earliest designated scenic routes in the country (it was so designated in 1914), has lost none of its scenicness, although some of the route's roadside attractions have clearly seen better days. I'd always wanted to dawdle along the trail, poke around in its souvenir shops, peek in the windows of the little red schoolhouse that dates to 1828, get within touching distance of the eponymous "Big Indian" that towers above the Big Indian Shop and the bronze elk statue that guards the optimistically named town of Florida, and so this was my chance. I took a few photos, some of which are below, and most of which are here.






We also had our picnic in the sunshine, did a bit of running around, enjoyed catching up with the D.'s, went to the museum (the Clark is, I believe, one of the best small art museums in the country) and contemplated the sexual abandon of fin de siecle Paris, and generally made the most of what was a very beautiful day.

But before all that happened, we stopped in what is probably the last sugar shack still open in all of New England: Gould's Sugar House. In fact, this was the last day that Gould's itself would be open until next season, as we learned after some careful eavesdropping. The Gould's story is a long and proud one - at least I'm assuming it is, since a book promising to tell us the Gould's story was on sale in the gift shop for $15. I didn't buy the book, so I don't really know the Gould's story, but I did learn that this was their 50th season of operation, which means they got started right around what was probably the peak of the Mohawk Trail's early glory - if the postwar, car-culture roadside kitsch of the other establishments along the trail is anything to go by. We were also able to learn that Gould's smells very strongly of bacon and maple (which is not at all a bad thing); that the elderly Mrs. Gould, though getting a little dotty, is still quite spry as she welcomes diners at the hostess stand; that Gould's does not serve french toast, but that they do serve several other things, including blueberry pancakes and something called Sugar-on-Snow; and that on this particular morning they were all out of snow, and so there was no Sugar-on-Snow to be had. This last fact made me quite sad.

Though somewhat confused by my inability to order french toast, I eventually settled on the blueberry pankcakes, as did my charming companion. And golly but they were good! They weren't all cakey like so many pancakes are, and the blueberries were real, whole blueberries (not the blueberry-flavored corn syrup mush you'll find elsewhere) that performed a vital thermodynamic function for the pancakes as a whole: they kept them hot. If you've ever microwaved a jelly donut, you know that the jelly inside will stay nice and piping long after the encasing dough has cooled - well, something like that was happening with the blueberries and the pancakes, and this made them wonderfully warm and melty. The syrup was pretty good, too.

Here's what the place looked like:




So have I become a pancake convert? Will I abandon the search for The Perfect French Toast in order to locate The Perfect Pancake (it's got a slightly better ring to it, you have to admit)? No, no, patient reader, worry not. Although this unexpected detour was indeed quite delicious, I'll remain steadfast in my original quest. For one thing, I don't like to leave things unfinished and I suck at multitasking. And for another, I already know where The Perfect Pancake can be found - and it's nowhere near the Mohawk Trail, NoHo, or the Valley. It's in Nashville - where I, too, will shortly be. As will Kate.

Yippee-Kai-Ay!

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*I just made that term up, but I think it conveys my meaning nicely.