Not long after April’s Maple started producing syrup in Canaan in 2013, owner April Lemay got a call from her mother.
“She and my dad were running the sugaring while I still had my corporate job,” Lemay recalled. “She said, ‘Jeez, there are some snowmobilers that keep finding their way down to the sugarhouse. What would you think if I serve them some hot dogs?'”
Lemay gave the go-ahead, and soon snowmobilers were eating hot dogs and watching the family boil. That summer, she turned the evaporator room into a makeshift ice cream stand serving tourist traffic from the nearby lakes.
A decade later, April’s Maple is home to a bustling year-round café that serves breakfast and lunch every day except Tuesday. Nearly everything on the menu counts maple as an ingredient, from maple dogs and maple sugar pancakes to maple-barbecue pulled pork tacos and maple creemees.
The café is one of several faces of the woman-owned, family-run maple business in the northeasternmost part of the Northeast Kingdom. Depending on the season, Lemay and her “Maple Ladies” — the business’ all-female crew — might be serving hungry snowmobilers, twisting creemees for campers, selling gallons of syrup to leaf-peeping tourists or making maple candy in whimsical shapes for holiday season wholesale accounts.
The uninitiated might think that sugaring season, which April’s Maple is in the midst of now, is the busiest time of year.
“But they’re all busy,” Lemay, 48, said with a laugh.
When Lemay started April’s Maple, she didn’t plan on the business being her full-time gig. Living in Boston, she was in the midst of a 17-year career at Deloitte, the large international accounting and consulting firm. But her mother and her five aunts had inherited an 813-acre plot on Canaan’s Cole Hill from their parents, and it was becoming a financial burden.
“There wasn’t anything on the property, and they were thinking about selling it,” Lemay said.
She had spent time on the plot while growing up in Canaan, particularly around sugaring season. Every Easter, Lemay recalled, the family would trek into the woods to her grandfather’s sugarhouse. The kids grabbed buckets off the trees, and they all boiled the sap in a wood-fired evaporator with a ham hanging over it, letting the space — and the ham — slowly fill with maple steam. They finished the day with sugar on snow, of course.
The family hoped to find a buyer for the land “who would continue to honor my grandparents’ values: love of land and appreciation for family, traditions and history,” Lemay said. As they brainstormed possible buyers, her mom mentioned that there might be enough sugar maples on the property to support a syrup business.
“I never had an unhappy moment to do with maple syrup,” Lemay said. “Just like that, April’s Maple was born.”
The property has its fair share of gravel pits and a relatively low percentage of maples per acre. But a consultant assured Lemay that there were enough to support at least one person. She bought the land in 2012 and hired her parents, Donna and Serge Lemay, as her first two employees. They built a sugarhouse with a small store and a kitchen for cooking maple products.
Lemay thought that would be the extent of the business: a seasonal operation selling syrup and a few other basic confections. As she spent more time back in Canaan, she reconnected with a high school classmate, Sage D’Aiello.
“We started dating, then got married,” Lemay said. “I didn’t want to be in two places at the same time.”
The sugarhouse business was picking up, too, so Lemay approached the head of her department at Deloitte to talk about her “little project” in Vermont and to let him know she was thinking of leaving the firm. Instead, he offered her a yearlong leave of absence.
“That made it safer for me,” she said. “I knew if I got in trouble, I could go back and have a paycheck. But I had an inclination that this was my destiny, so I took the leap.”
She never went back to that job. Now, April’s Maple employs 10 people in the café and product sides of the business and another four each winter in the sugar bush, where D’Aiello manages the tree tapping and line maintenance. It’s considered a midsize farm, with more than 300 miles of tubing connecting 14,000 trees and an average production of 3,800 gallons per year.
This time of year, when she’s not snowshoeing into the woods or busy boiling, Lemay is in the café’s kitchen making vats of soup and experimenting with maple as an ingredient. The extensive breakfast and lunch menu features expected sugar-shack fare, such as stacks of pancakes sprinkled with maple sugar; maple corn bread; and a Vermonter sandwich with cheddar cheese, maple cream and apples.
Everything is homemade, and almost everything has maple in it — even the salad dressing, the chili, the butter and the rolls. Lemay once had a customer who was allergic to maple; it took some finagling to make a breakfast sandwich she could eat.
“Maple is so much more than a breakfast treat,” Lemay said. “We’ve found all these ways to incorporate it, sometimes more subtly than others.”
Word of the maple-coated menu got me in the car on a recent bluebird day, with a GPS estimate of three hours and 13 minutes to Canaan. The drive provided views of New Hampshire’s White Mountains and took my husband and me close enough to Canada that my phone threatened roaming charges.
When we pulled across the bridge into the parking lot, it was clear we’d taken the wrong form of transportation. The lot was full of snowmobiles.
For years — since the hot dog days — trail groomers in the local club have maintained the runs down to the sugarhouse. As of this year, April’s Maple is an official trail on the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers system.
Inside the shop, metal racks labeled “Snowmobile Gear Here” were loaded with diners’ helmets. The café was packed, so we put in our name for a table and browsed shelves full of syrup jugs, chocolate-maple truffles, butterfly-shaped maple candies, scone mixes and souvenirs.
After a short wait, we sat down in the cozy dining room. We already knew our order: a breakfast-lunch hybrid of maple sugar pancakes ($6 for two), a maple hot dog with maple mustard ($3), a maple-barbecue pulled pork sandwich ($8) and a side of maple-apple coleslaw ($3).
Lemay comes from a long line of cooks on both sides of her family, and many of the dishes are based on recipes that have been passed down through generations.
“The menu leans towards what I like to cook and what I like to eat,” Lemay said. The pancakes are an exception: Her husband urged her to offer them, but she pushed back at first. For many years, the kitchen didn’t have a grill; to make stacks of pancakes, she hooked up two-by-three electric griddles from Walmart. The pancakes took forever to cook, which prompted Lemay to add an “allow 10+ min” warning to the menu.
There’s a real grill in the kitchen now, and our pancakes came out well before 10 minutes, steaming hot, fluffy and glistening with maple sugar. Honoring some sort of proper meal order, we dove into them first.
I slathered the slightly sweet maple dog in maple mustard and took a bite before handing it over. It tasted like the hot dogs we traditionally boil in sap during a backyard DIY boil, without all the work.
The pulled pork was a perfect combo of savory and slightly sweet, topped with melty cheddar on a nicely griddled homemade bun. I snuck a bit of the coleslaw onto the sandwich for extra tang.
Between the café’s rustic wooden décor, the shuffle of our snow pants-clad fellow diners and the Maple Ladies’ friendly service, the sweet feast felt like a perfect celebration of sugaring season. After all, if you’re going to eat a meal full of maple, why not do it at the source?
The only thing sweeter was dessert, which we couldn’t resist. I ordered a piece of double-crust, custardy maple syrup pie ($5) for the road, a maple-chocolate milkshake ($6) for my husband and a maple creemee in an April’s Maple cone for myself ($3.50 for a small).
I may have been supremely sugared up, but the creemee was among the best I’ve ever had. The creemee itself is made with a 10 percent butterfat base and nothing but April’s Maple — no extract for extra color or flavor. The special cone takes it to the next level: a cake cone with maple cream around the upper edge and down the inside, rolled in big granules of maple crunch.
“It’s decadent beyond decadence,” Lemay said. It’s no surprise the creemees are in demand year-round.
I missed out on one of Lemay’s favorite maple-season treats: a Monte Cristo sandwich (French toast with ham and cheddar cheese) dipped in hot syrup fresh off the draw. But there’s still time, Lemay reassured me. It’s early in the sugaring season in the NEK; March 14 was only the second boil day this year, and given the wintry weather, she didn’t expect to boil again for a week.
“Every year, you’re just waiting to see what happens, but I try not to worry about it,” she said. “I know that we will make maple syrup because spring has always come in the past.”
April’s Maple, 6507 Route 114, Canaan, 266-9624, aprilsmaple.com.
Want to check out a sugarhouse near you? Vermont’s Maple Open House Weekend runs March 25 to 26 and April 1 to 2. Learn more at vermontmaple.org/mohw.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Sap It to Me | April’s Maple serves a sugaring-season feast in Canaan”
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This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2023.
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