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Mock Maple Syrup
Take 2 quarts very small potatoes. Wash very clean, without breaking skins. Cover with water and boil till done, but be sure to drain before the potatoes break. Take 1 cup sugar to every one of potato water and boil 15 minutes. Season with vanilla.
A thrift syrup that turns potato cooking water into a pouring sauce for puddings, pancakes and steamed desserts. It works, but the proportions and keeping qualities need a little translation.
- The hinge: drain before they burstThe recipe is explicit that the potatoes must come out whole, which suggests the aim is a clear, faintly starchy water rather than a cloudy one. A split skin will release more starch into the pot, and the syrup will likely be cloudier and thicker for it.
- What the measurements meanTwo quarts is the volume of raw potatoes, not of water. The recipe says only to cover them, so how much liquid you end up with depends on the pot; measure the drained water and match it cup for cup with sugar.
- Small potatoesNew potatoes or creamers, walnut-sized, skins on and thoroughly scrubbed. Larger potatoes cut down will not do; the cut surfaces leach starch immediately.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingAt an even, uncovered boil this should thicken the syrup enough to coat a spoon while staying pourable when cool. Judge it by consistency rather than the clock, since pan width changes the rate of evaporation.
- Getting the maple colourWhite sugar alone gives a pale, neutral syrup. Brown sugar, or part brown and part white, would add colour and a faint caramel note; a spoonful of molasses does the same job.
- SeasoningAbout a teaspoon of vanilla for each quart of finished syrup, stirred in off the heat so the flavour is not driven off. Maple extract gets far closer to the thing being imitated.
- Yield and keepingAt roughly half sugar by weight this is not shelf-stable the way a true boiled preserve is, so refrigerate it and use it within two or three weeks.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and much of its content came from Canadian households who sent recipes in, which is why practical economies like this one sit alongside company-approved bread formulas. Maple syrup was a Canadian product but not a cheap one, and "mock" recipes -- mock turtle soup, mock duck, mock cream -- were a standing feature of nineteenth and early twentieth century cookery, imitating an expensive thing with what was already in the kitchen. Potato water in particular was treated as too useful to throw out: it went into bread sponges to feed the yeast, into soups for body, and here into a sugar syrup, where its faint starch gives a slightly heavier, clingier pour than plain sugar and water would. The result tastes of caramelised sugar and vanilla rather than maple.