The Flanders
Pour over vanilla ice cream a ladleful of crushed strawberries or raspberries. Cover with whipped cream and put over all a spoonful of chopped nuts.
A soda-fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the only real variables are the proportions and the state of the fruit.
- A ladlefulA fountain ladle would have held only a small pour, on the order of a couple of tablespoons. That is the amount to aim for over a single scoop; more and the cream slides off the melting ice cream.
- Crushed berriesAt a fountain this generally indicated fruit mashed with sugar and left to stand until it gave up its juice, rather than a cooked sauce or a puree. Something like 2 tablespoons sugar per cup of berries and half an hour of standing works; frozen berries thawed with sugar behave the same way.
- Raspberries and seedsRaspberries carry far more seed per spoonful than strawberries. If that bothers you, press half the crushed fruit through a sieve and stir it back into the rest so the topping still has texture.
- The whipped creamLightly sweetened cream whipped only to soft peaks can be spooned rather than piped, which suits this. Stiff cream sits on top as a lump instead of settling around the fruit.
- The nutsChopped walnuts, pecans or almonds. Untoasted supermarket nuts taste of very little against sweetened fruit and cream, so dry-toasting or a little salt helps.
- Assembly orderFruit goes on the ice cream, cream over the fruit, nuts last and at the moment of serving. Nuts added early soften; cream added early weeps into the fruit juice.
- YieldAs written this is one sundae, built on a single generous scoop.
This comes from a collection of soda-fountain and temperance drinks. Sundaes were fountain territory rather than home cooking, and the naming convention was to attach a place or a person to what was otherwise a standard scoop-fruit-cream-nut formula; a great many such names were coined behind the counter and never recorded elsewhere, so "The Flanders" may nod to the battlefields of the war, though that is a reasonable inference rather than a documented origin. What the recipe really preserves is the fountain grammar of the period: a base, a ladled fruit, a cover of cream, and a finish of chopped nuts, endlessly recombined.