Spruce Gum

When I was fourteen I went to Vermont with my grandmother who had been born there. You could buy little boxes of spruce gum, grey blobs of chewing gum that tasted so strongly of pine that you could only keep it in your mouth for a maximum of five minutes before spitting it out and trying again later.
Gran told me that as a child, they had picked the gum from the spruce trees themselves to chew. Wild children of New England!