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Black Hawk Sundae
Mix crushed blackberries with grated black walnuts. Pour over ice cream and top off with whipped cream and one maraschino cherry. Serve in sundae cup.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: no quantities, because the soda clerk worked from bulk crushed fruit and a nut shaker on the counter. A few notes on scaling it to one dish.
- ProportionsFor a single sundae, figure two generous tablespoons of crushed blackberries and a scant tablespoon of grated nuts over two scoops of vanilla. The fruit should coat the ice cream, not flood the cup.
- Crushed fruit at a fountainFountain "crushed fruit" generally meant fruit mashed with sugar and held in a jar rather than raw berries; commercial packs were often cooked or preserved, but the counter version was close to a loose sweetened mash. Mash the blackberries with a fork and about a tablespoon of sugar per cup, then let them stand fifteen minutes until syrupy.
- Black walnutsBlack walnuts are not English walnuts and the substitution changes the dish entirely -- they are sharper, almost musky, and stand up to the berries. They are sold shelled by mail and in some American supermarkets, more reliably in the Midwest and South; keep them frozen, as their high oil content turns them rancid quickly.
- Grated, not choppedGrating gives a fine, almost powdery texture that clings to the fruit rather than sinking. A rotary nut mill or the fine side of a box grater does it; a food processor will turn oily nuts to paste.
- The ice creamUnspecified in the original, which at a soda fountain would most often have meant plain vanilla. Vanilla is still the right choice -- black walnut ice cream would double up on the same flavor.
- Maraschino cherriesThe original maraschino was cured in maraschino liqueur, closer to a cocktail cherry than the bright red, brine-and-dye product that displaced it; the dyed imitation was already common in American fountains by the 1910s. A dark Luxardo-style cherry is nearer the original intent.
- YieldOne sundae. The berry and nut mixture keeps two or three days refrigerated, so it is worth making enough for four.
Soda fountain sundaes of this period were named freely and often locally, and "Black Hawk" most likely nods to the Sauk leader whose name attaches to a county, a war and a great many businesses across Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin -- black walnut and wild blackberry country. Fountain manuals of the era are full of such names, since a clerk with much the same stock of syrups as everyone else competed on invention and on the chalkboard. The recipe is also a reminder that the black walnut was once an ordinary American pantry item rather than a specialty: the trees grow wild through the eastern and midwestern states, the nuts were gathered in autumn and cracked through the winter, and their strong flavor made them a common fountain and baking ingredient before the milder English walnut came to dominate commercial baking.