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The Richelieu
Place a ladleful of vanilla ice cream in a suitable dish and pour over one tablespoonful of grated pineapple and two tablespoonfuls of maple syrup. Sprinkle a little crushed maple sugar on the top.
A three-ingredient fountain sundae that lives or dies on the quality of the maple syrup. Everything else is assembly.
- A ladlefulFountain ice cream was portioned with dishers and ladles; a ladleful here means a single scoop, on the order of a generous 1/3 cup. One dish serves one person.
- Grated pineappleThis is the fountain term for pineapple crushed or shredded fine, sold in cans as "grated pineapple" and now labelled crushed pineapple. Drain it well before spooning it on, or the juice will thin the maple syrup into a puddle.
- Maple syrup, not pancake syrupTwo tablespoonfuls of syrup is the whole flavour of the dish, so use real maple. A darker grade (what is now sold as Grade A Dark, Robust Taste) stands up to the pineapple acidity better than a pale early-season syrup.
- Crushed maple sugarHard maple sugar was sold in cakes and blocks and broken or grated as needed. Granulated maple sugar sold loose works directly; a block can be shaved with a rasp or microplane. Ordinary brown sugar is not a substitute here, since the point is the dry crunch on top.
- Order of assemblyFruit first, then syrup, then the dry sugar last. Sugar sprinkled under the syrup dissolves and the finish is lost.
- Chill the dishA pre-chilled dish helps; a room-temperature bowl plus room-temperature syrup will soften the scoop quickly.
Soda fountains of the early twentieth century named their sundaes after hotels, theatres, cities and public figures — hence a Richelieu, with its pineapple-and-maple pairing. Maple syrup and hard maple sugar were staple fountain flavourings in the Northeast, where sugar was still pressed into cakes for the retail trade and grated or crushed for use, and pineapple had become an everyday ingredient rather than a luxury once canned Hawaiian fruit reached the mainland in quantity in the 1900s and 1910s.