Maple Sauce
1 cup maple syrup 1 cup water 1 tablespoon cornstarch 2 tablespoons butter Moisten the cornstarch with a little of the cold water. Heat the remainder of the water, and the syrup to boiling, stir in the braided cornstarch, and cook five to ten minutes. Add the butter, and serve hot as a dressing on hot puddings.
A simple starch-thickened dessert sauce that needs almost nothing translated, though two details in the text will trip up a careful reader.
- "Braided cornstarch""Braided cornstarch" is almost certainly a misprint for blended — the cornstarch already slaked with cold water at the start. Stir that slurry in while the syrup and water are boiling, or it may set into lumps.
- Cooking timeFive to ten minutes is longer than cornstarch needs to gelatinize; the extra time would cook off the raw starch taste and reduce the sauce slightly. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir, since a hard boil past the thickening point can thin a cornstarch sauce back out.
- Butter last, off the heatAdding it after the sauce has stopped bubbling keeps it emulsified and glossy rather than breaking into a slick on top.
- Maple syrupUse real syrup, not pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavouring and will taste flat once diluted with an equal volume of water. A darker grade (formerly "Grade B") stands up better to that dilution.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of cornstarch to two cups of liquid gives a thin pouring sauce that coats a spoon lightly. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so judge it hot.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings over steamed pudding, cottage pudding, gingerbread or baked apples. Reheat gently with a splash of water; it will have set nearly to a pudding in the refrigerator.
Maple sauce belongs to a large family of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "pudding sauces" — hot, sweet, starch-thickened liquids poured over the plain steamed and baked puddings of the period. Cookbooks of the period print them in batches: lemon sauce, vanilla sauce, hard sauce, foamy sauce, and one built on whatever sweetener was cheapest locally. In the maple country of New England, Quebec and the upper Midwest, syrup filled the role that molasses or brown sugar took elsewhere. Its appearance in a meatless cookery book is unremarkable in itself, since the sauce, pudding and dessert sections of such collections drew on the same broad repertoire.