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Maple Sauce. Imitation
Golden syrup made hot, two ounces of butter to each quart and flavoring of vanilla and nutmeg Glace, ice, glace, glass, glaze, gloss; glace, iced, glazed, glossed over. That is all very slippery. When a bill-of-fare instead of saying a dish has a sauce describes it as glace the glossy sauce is required to be thick enough to coat the article and barely run enough to settle down smooth. With all sugar sauces like the list preceding it is hardly practicable--they would be almost candy. The next sett are better for gloss.
A two-line sauce with a paragraph of trade commentary attached. The recipe itself is golden syrup, butter and flavoring; the rest is Fanny Farmer-era kitchen French being sorted out for the pastry cook.
- The proportionsTwo ounces of butter per quart of syrup is about 4 tablespoons to 4 cups — roughly 1 tablespoon butter per cup. That is a gloss and a softening agent, not an emulsion; expect a thin buttery film on the surface if it sits.
- Golden syrupLyle's-style golden syrup, a light amber cane inverted syrup, is still sold and is what is meant. Corn syrup is not a substitute in flavor terms — it is far blander and lacks the faint caramel-butterscotch note doing the work here.
- Why it imitates mapleNutmeg and vanilla against a caramelized cane syrup gives a rounded, woody sweetness that reads as maple to the palate. Quantities are not given: start at about 1 teaspoon vanilla and a scant quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg per quart, then adjust.
- Heat, briefly"Made hot" means warmed to melt the butter through, not boiled. Boiling drives off the vanilla and concentrates the syrup toward candy. The author's following paragraph makes a related observation — that sugar sauces thickened to a coating consistency would be "almost candy" — though he is describing the glace problem rather than warning against overheating this sauce.
- Glace, decodedIn this book glace on a bill-of-fare means a sauce thick enough to coat the item and settle smooth, not a frozen ice and not a poured icing. The author's point is that sugar sauces of this type will not reach that consistency without crossing into candy.
- YieldThe quart is given as a proportion rather than a stated batch size. Scaled down to a cup of syrup with a tablespoon of butter, it will sauce roughly half a dozen portions of pudding, waffles or ice cream.
- ServingServe warm. Cold, it stiffens and the butter separates; rewarm gently and stir rather than whisking, which will aerate it and dull the gloss.
Imitation maple flavorings were a standing preoccupation of American professional bakers around 1900, when real maple syrup was seasonal, regional and priced well above cane. Commercial bakeshops turned to cheaper substitutes — among them the fenugreek-based imitation maple flavorings — to get the color and body at a fraction of the cost, and cooks are said to have patched in the missing aromatics by hand. The attached digression on glace is characteristic of the trade manuals of the period: American hotel and restaurant menus were written in a half-understood French, and books like this one spent as much ink teaching cooks what the menu terms obliged them to produce as they did on the cooking itself. The author's complaint is a practical one — a kitchen told to send out a dish glace could not do it with a sugar sauce, because sugar concentrated to coating thickness stops being a sauce.