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Maple Syrup Sauce
1 tablespoon melted butter 1 tablespoon (heaping) Five Roses flour ½ cup brown sugar ½ cup maple syrup 2 cups boiling water.
Boil till clear.
A thin pouring sauce built on a small roux, meant to be ladled hot over steamed and baked puddings. It is very lightly thickened by modern standards, which is the point.
- "Boil till clear" is the hingeThe sauce starts cloudy from raw starch and turns translucent once the flour has fully gelatinized and cooked out. Give it a good five minutes at a steady boil, stirring; pulling it early leaves a pasty, floury taste.
- Make a proper roux firstThe recipe gives no method, only an ingredient order, but the butter and flour are best cooked together briefly before any liquid goes in. Add the boiling water in a thin stream while whisking to avoid lumps, then the sugar and syrup.
- Expect a thin sauceOne heaping tablespoon of flour to two cups of water gives a sauce barely thicker than cream. If you want something that coats a spoon, use half the water, or double the flour and butter.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour milled from hard spring wheat. Ordinary all-purpose flour works as a direct substitute here; the amount is small enough that protein content makes no difference.
- Maple syrup gradePeriod syrup was generally darker and more strongly flavoured than the pale grades sold today. Amber or dark syrup carries better against the brown sugar than a delicate first-run.
- Brown sugarEarly twentieth-century brown sugar was probably nearer today's light brown than the dark. Dark brown will push the sauce toward molasses and mute the maple.
- Yield and servingAbout two and a half cups, enough for eight to ten servings. Serve hot over cottage pudding, steamed suet or bread pudding, gingerbread, or plain baked apples; it thickens slightly as it cools and can be reheated with a splash of water.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed to Canadian households that bought the flour, which likely explains why a wheat-flour thickener appears in a sauce that hardly needs one. Maple syrup was a common domestic sweetener in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, cheap in the sugaring season and stored through the year, and pudding sauces like this one were one way a cook could stretch a modest quantity of it across a whole family's dessert. The pattern here is a standard nineteenth-century sweet sauce: fat and flour cooked together, boiling liquid whisked in, sugar for body, boiled until the starch clears. Substituting maple syrup for part of the sugar is a regional variation on a formula that ran, with lemon or vanilla or wine, through many English-language cookbooks of the period.