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Drain the Swamp Maples
A chef and a naturalist team up to tap trees
There are two fridges in the Sugar Shack at Camp Creek Run, 50 protected acres wedged between South Jersey’s Pine Barrens and a P.F. Chang’s. Phil Manganaro has unofficially leased one as off-site storage for Park Place, his critically acclaimed 32-seat restaurant in nearby Merchantville (currently operating, like so many others during the pandemic, for pick-up only). Inside are Jersey foragings from last spring, summer, and fall preserved in deli containers and freezer bags: ramps, greenbrier, wild mustard, persimmon pulp, spruce tips, Mountain Ash berries, spicebush berries, cherry blossoms that taste like nothing when plucked and brightly of floral cherry taffy when pickled. But we’re not here for any of that. We’re here for swamp maple syrup.
Manganaro met the camp’s director, Keara Giannotti, when his son, Dean, was part of her EcoKids program a few years ago. “He was one of the only men; it’s all mothers,” Giannotti remembers. “He never really talked. Then one day I mentioned matsutakes — they grow in a secret spot here — and how I didn’t know how to cook them.”
Manganaro piped up: “In butter, and don’t forget the shallots.”
The chef and the naturalist bonded over a love of wild food. Giannotti knew swamp maples, aka red maples aka Acer rubrum, lived among the sassafras, birch, holly, cedar, and dozens of other species of flora at the camp and always wanted to try tapping them for syrup. In Manganaro, she found a willing partner and converted the camp’s old shed into the Sugar Shack.
Fringed in gravel and framed by an American holly and an oak, the cabin glows like a welcoming refuge against the brisk winter morning’s cement-gray skies. The interior is so attractively disheveled — botanical posters from the National Park Service tacked to the raw lumber walls, zip-lock sacks of recently harvested black walnuts, glazed ceramic canisters with toadstool-shaped lids, a glimmering sapphire geode, a hatchet, wicker baskets hanging from the rafters, a fragrant switch of drying juniper on a secondhand oak table — you’d think it had been styled…
