When did we figure out how to...

Native Americans probably devised this process, though no one’s certain just how. We do know that maple was an important ingredient in some Native American cooking. The Indians taught the first settlers how to tap trees for the sap and cook it down. Over the years, white settlers and Indians no doubt perfected the process. Maple syrup and maple sugar became staple products for early residents of New England, and at one time the colonists hoped to replace all imported sugar with maple sugar.