Spruce Chewing Gum

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Natural causes for bark ruptures and scars include fire, lightning, frost, wind, and wildlife damage. Man-made marks can result from tree-harvesting activities, snowplow injuries, and "recreational" damage caused by the traffic around camping facilities and boat launching ramps.

Even though nineteenth-century lore insists that amber-colored raw gum is the best, I make no such distinction. Instead, I scrape off all the solid resin (the soft kind is unacceptable) that I can reach with my putty knife—whether it's yellow, brown, cream, or pink—since it all looks the same after processing.

In the course of a typical two-hour outing, I can usually collect over one pound of the raw gum. This yields enough of the finished chewy treat to last me well over a year!

PROCESS IT!

The processing of your raw spruce product (which is done in two stages) will accomplish only one thing: It cleans the raw gum of bits of wood, bark, dirt, and other impurities.

First of all, dump your foraged forest product onto a large square of cloth spread out on any hard, flat surface. Then, using a mallet, smash the resin repeatedly until it's reduced to a sandlike consistency. Hard raw gum will pulverize easily . . . but bits of wood or bark won't, so these impurities can be easily spotted and removed by hand.

During the second step, you'll melt and strain the material, but—before doing so—you must prepare a cooling pan for later use. I find that a 2"-deep, 5" X 7" bread pan is ideal, although any shallow metal container will do. I simply tape one end of a long, 7"-wide strip of cheesecloth or cotton muslin to the pan's outside bottom ... wrap the cloth up and around the container four or five times, making sure most of the pan's opening is covered on each pass . . . and then securely tape down the other end of the strip. Later, when the melted gum is poured into the container, the cloth acts as a strainer.

With the cooling pan ready, you can melt the gum. You'll need a small pot . . . preferably one you can spare, since it will be somewhat difficult to clean after the operation. Put in an inch of the pulverized spruce drippings . . . add enough fresh water to make a soupy mix . . . then set the utensil on a slow fire. As the water comes to a boil, the gum will begin to melt and float on top. When continued heating has liquefied all the resin particles, remove the pot and quickly pour its contents into the cooling pan.

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