Maple Sauce
½ cup maple syrup cup beaten cream few grains salt Beat yolks until thick; add maple syrup and cook until it thickens. Add beaten cream, salt. Chill and serve. 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon arrowroot
The text as printed is missing part of its ingredient list — the egg yolks are cooked but never listed, and the last line belongs to the recipe that followed it on the page. What survives is a straightforward cooked maple custard sauce, thinned with whipped cream.
- The missing yolksThe method calls for beaten yolks that the ingredient list omits. Two to four yolks would suit ½ cup of maple syrup, though the original quantity is unknown.
- The stray last line"1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon arrowroot" is not part of this sauce; it most likely belongs to a neighbouring recipe picked up in transcription -- ignore it.
- "Cup beaten cream"A fraction before "cup" has dropped out. About ½ cup heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks, is a reasonable reading. Cream sold for whipping then was broadly comparable in fat to modern heavy cream, though it varied.
- Cook it over waterYolks and syrup thicken between 160 and 180F and scramble not far above. Use a bowl over simmering water, stir constantly, and pull it when it coats the back of a spoon.
- Chill before foldingThe recipe adds the beaten cream before chilling. If you want the cream to stay light, cool the base to room temperature or colder first, then fold.
- Maple syrupMaple syrup was not graded to modern standards in this period. A dark amber (Grade A Dark) gives flavour depth that carries under the egg; a delicate early-season syrup will be less noticeable.
- YieldHard to fix given the missing quantities; roughly a cup or a little more, enough for several servings of steamed pudding, gingerbread or baked apples.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many house cookbooks that trade firms issued to keep their product in domestic circulation. Maple sauce belongs to the New England end of that book's sensibility: maple sugar and syrup were a regional staple long before they were a luxury, and a cooked yolk-and-syrup sauce lightened with whipped cream was one way to dress a plain steamed or baked pudding when a household wanted something richer than hard sauce. The technique is a soft custard, close kin to the sabayon and to the boiled dressings that fill the sauce chapters of American books of this period.