By Matthew M. Thomas
A.J. Cook’s Maple Sugar and the Sugar-Bush, the oldest stand-alone publication dedicated to providing advice and guidance in making maple sugar and syrup, was first published in 1887. The 44-page illustrated booklet was written by Professor Albert John Cook of the Michigan Agricultural College (today known as Michigan State University) at the behest of the booklet’s publisher, A.I. Root. Although Cook had been making maple sugar his entire life, he was better known at the time as a naturalist, entomologist, and expert on the business of keeping bees and making honey. You can download and read a copy of Cook’s booklet at this link.
Cook was born and grew up on his family’s farm near Owosso, Michigan. He attended college at the Michigan Agricultural College earning a Bachelor’s of Science degree in 1862, a Master’s of Science in 1865, and a Doctorate in Science in 1905. In 1867, he was appointed to the position of mathematics instructor at the Michigan Agricultural College before advancing to a position of professor of zoology and entomology in 1869. He also served as curator of the college’s museum and established the agricultural college’s extensive insect collection.
As an adult, Cook owned and maintained his own farm and sugarbush adjacent to the farms of his brothers Seth R. Cook and Ezekiel J. Cook which were along the banks of the Maple River in Shiawassee County, Michigan. Cook was a prolific author, and his breadth of knowledge as a naturalist and scientist along with his practical experience as a farmer positioned him well as a frequent contributor to a number of rural newspapers. It was common to see articles on new and improved methods of farming and rural living in such publications as the New York Tribune, the Rural New Yorker, Philadelphia Press, New England Homestead, and Country Gentleman. Some might even describe his association with these papers as that of a correspondent or editor.
In addition to his articles and letters of advice, he was the author of the popular Manual of Apiary in 1876, the first textbook on American beekeeping that was republished through ten editions over the following decade. He also published Birds of Michigan in 1893 and California Citrus Culture in 1913.
Cook recognized that despite the great interest in and economic importance of maple sugaring, there was next to nothing written about it to guide and assist the sugarmaker to make the best quality sugar and syrup possible. He acknowledges in the introduction to the booklet that, prior to being asked by publisher Root, he had no plans to write a comprehensive guide to maple sugaring, even though Professor Cook gave advice and direction on maple sugar making as early as 1884 in a newspaper column that appeared in a number of papers in northeastern US states. Interestingly, it wasn’t until nearly 20 years later with the U.S.D.A. publication of The Maple Sugar Industry by William F. Fox and William F. Hubbard in 1905, that another comparable guide book was published. For more information on the history of maple syrup manuals, see my earlier post.
The first edition of Maple Sugar and the Sugar-Bush was released in the spring of 1887. Subsequent re-printings by the publisher made the addition of three appendices, one written by A.J. Cook, one by George E. Clark, and one by the publisher A.I. Root. The booklet continued to be printed and sold by publisher Root well into the early 1900s. A.I. Root of Medina, Ohio, the booklet’s publisher, was a successful bee keeper who ran a prominent business in northern Ohio for all things related to keeping bees. Root’s bee-business activities included publishing, where he put out a wide number of booklets on bee keeping and successful farming as well as a monthly magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture that continues to this day. In addition to an extensive business in bee-keeping supplies, Root was a maple syrup buyer and packer in his corner of Ohio south of Cleveland.
As a naturalist and professor of entomology, it is expected that Cook’s guide book contains a substantial section on the current understanding at that time of the ecology and physiology of the maple tree as well as a discussion of the various insect pests that plague the maple species. When the text moves to the actual discussion of the sugarbush ,Cook leads off with the motto, “neatness and dispatch,” which sums up his overall advice for the secret to making money from the best possible maple sugar and syrup. He proceeds to describe his own sugarhouse and boiling set up, touting the overwhelming superiority and efficiency of a modern evaporator over a kettle or flat pan. In the 1870s, Professor Cook was an early user and proponent of the evaporator designed and patented by D.M. Cook of Marshfield, Ohio, who was of no relation. However, in time he began to see limits in the Cook design and in the mid-1880s, shifted to the improved design of the Champion Evaporator from G.H. Grimm of Hudson, Ohio.
Cook had the benefit of personal experience from a lifetime of making maple products on his father’s farm and then his own. Cook himself witnessed the evolution of sugaring firsthand in his family’s operation, going from wood pails, wood spiles, and open-air kettles, to flat pans on a stone arch in a crude log shelter to covered metal pails, metal spouts and an efficient metal evaporator in a wood frame sugarhouse.
At the time of writing the booklet, Cook was tapping 600 trees and by 1890 had grown to tapping 800 trees in his sugarbush. Cook advocated putting in one spout per tree early in the season and adding a second spout to each tree later in the season. He used only metal pails with wood covers and advised, where possible for sugarmakers to frequently rinse the pails with water during the course of the season. He was a huge proponent of maintaining the cleanest and freshest equipment possible with periodic washing of tools throughout the season, and to collect and boil the sap as quickly as possible. He also advocated for the need to maintain a tight and neat sugarhouse. As he wrote, “it is filth – sour sap, not later sap, that makes inferior syrup,” showing his early understanding of the real nature and sour of off flavors and poor-quality syrup.
Cook’s booklet goes on to share a plethora of practical explanation and advice about operation of the evaporator; wood storage and selection; sap collection, gathering, and storage, and tree tapping. In all areas of sugaring, he addresses the motto from the beginning, pointing out the reasons and methods for choosing modern metal tools and how to keep the equipment and resulting sap as clean as possible. He even advised those who were tapping a smaller number of trees to just busy themselves with making syrup for their griddle cakes and not bother taking the syrup down further to maple sugar. Cook understood that maple sugar was never going to compete with cane sugar and corn syrup as sweeteners and that the manufacturers of maple products needed to embrace the notion that they were making and selling a luxury product. In fact, instead of making sugar, Cook boiled most of his sap into syrup which he canned in metal tins and glazed ceramic jugs. He made no mention of bottling syrup in glass. He noted that he sold his syrup at $1.25 a gallon, with the equivalent volume of sugar getting 70 to 80 cents or at most $1.00 despite the additional labor and costs associated with boiling from syrup to sugar. Even though Cook was not a proponent of making maple sugar with the sap he gathered, he still provided a detailed description of the process of making what he called barrel sugar, cake sugar, and stirred sugar.
There is no indication Cook was influenced or sponsored by any particular equipment manufacturer when he chose to recommend items by name and cost. Instead, because this was an independent publication, outside his position with the State Agricultural College, he was free to share his own personal opinions and experiences, free of criticism of favoritism.
In 1893 Cook took on a new position as professor of biology at Pomona College in Claremont, California, a suburb of Los Angeles: leaving Michigan and his farm and sugarbush in the hands of his son, Albert Baldwin Cook. Cook later left his position at Pomona College in 1911 and moved to Sacramento when he accepted an appointment as Commissioner of Horticulture for the State of California. He continued in that role until failing health forced him to resign in 1915 and he returned to Michigan. Cook’s health never improved, and he died in Owosso, Michigan in 1916 at age 74.
Special thanks to Karl Zander for providing a digital copy of Cook’s booklet in PDF format to be shared with readers.