Home › Cold Desserts › Maple Marguerites
Maple Marguerites
1 1/2 cups brown sugar 1/4 cup chopped nut meats Crackers 1/2 cup water 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon maple flavoring Boil the sugar and water together until it threads or, when dropped into cold water, will form a soft ball. Allow the syrup to cool for a moment or two, add the flavoring, and beat until of the proper consistency to spread. Add half of the nuts, and drop by spoonfuls on the crackers. While still fresh, sprinkle over the remainder of the chopped nuts.
This is a maple fudge frosting spread on plain crackers — closer to candy-making than to baking, and it depends entirely on how far you cook the syrup.
- Pick one stage, not twoThe original offers "threads" (about 230F) or "soft ball" (235-240F), which are not the same thing. Go to soft ball, 238F on a candy thermometer, or the mixture will never firm up enough to hold its shape on the cracker.
- The hinge: beat until it dullsCool the syrup a couple of minutes, add the flavoring, then beat until the gloss goes and it thickens like a spreadable fudge. Stop the moment it holds a soft peak — a few seconds too long and it sets in the bowl.
- Work fast, and rescue if neededYou have perhaps a minute of spreading time. If it stiffens before you finish, stir in a teaspoon of hot water or set the bowl briefly over warm water.
- What "crackers" means hereSoda crackers or saltines: the thin, lightly salted square, whose salt offsets the sweetness. Cracker sizes vary, so the number you need will vary too.
- Maple flavoringPeriod "maple flavoring" was often an imitation extract, and modern imitation maple behaves much the same way. Real maple syrup is not a straight substitute — it would change the sugar-to-water balance. Start with 1/4 teaspoon and taste.
- Brown sugarLight brown gives a cleaner maple note; dark brown reads as molasses. Either works, but pack it when measuring or the syrup runs thin.
- NutsWalnuts or pecans, chopped fine. Toast them first; the recipe assumes untoasted, and toasting is a clear improvement.
- Yield and keepingEnough to top roughly 24 to 30 saltines. Sprinkle the reserved nuts on immediately, while the surface is still tacky, and eat within a day — the crackers soften overnight.
Marguerites appear in American cookbooks and newspaper columns from the 1890s through the 1920s: a soda cracker with a sweet topping, baked or unbaked. The better-known version tops the cracker with meringue and nuts and gives it a few minutes in the oven; this one substitutes a boiled brown-sugar fudge, which keeps it off the stove after the syrup stage and calls for no eggs at all. The cracker was the cheap, always-on-hand base of countless such improvisations before the ready-made cookie aisle existed.