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Buffalo Nut Sundae
One-half pound grated walnuts, 2 pounds grated orange, claret syrup enough to make ½ gallon. Fill sundae glass two-thirds full of rich ice cream and pour one ladle of above over cream.
A soda-fountain topping made in bulk and ladled over ice cream, not a dessert assembled one at a time. The proportions given are for about half a gallon of sauce, so scale down hard unless you are serving a crowd.
- Yield and portioningHalf a gallon is 64 fluid ounces; if a fountain ladle held about an ounce, that is roughly 60 sundaes. A tenth of the recipe — about 3/4 oz walnuts, 3 oz orange, and enough syrup to bring the whole to about 6 fluid ounces — gives six servings.
- "Grated orange"Two pounds is far too much to be zest, so this is most likely whole orange flesh grated or shredded off the membrane, pith removed. Weigh after peeling; roughly three or four oranges to the pound of usable pulp.
- "Grated" walnutsA dry, sandy grated texture stays suspended in syrup better than chopped nut, which will settle to the bottom of the jar. A food processor pulsed briefly, or a rasp grater, gets closer than a knife.
- Claret syrupFountain claret syrup was a red fruit-and-spice syrup, sometimes made with actual red wine and sometimes imitated with cherry or raspberry and citric acid over heavy sugar syrup. It is hard to come by now; a plain simple syrup steeped with tart cherry or raspberry and a squeeze of lemon stands in for it.
- The hingeFountain syrups run about 60 percent sugar, and that sugar is what keeps the raw orange from fermenting and the sauce pourable. Cutting the syrup with water or juice to make it less sweet gives you a loose, quick-souring fruit salad instead of a topping.
- KeepingWith fresh orange pulp in it this will not hold the weeks a plain syrup would. Refrigerate and use within three or four days; the walnuts go soft and the oil in them turns after that.
- "Rich ice cream"The word points to a high-fat ice cream, custard-based or not. The sauce is acidic and very sweet, and a lean or low-fat ice cream disappears underneath it.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the home cook, which is why the quantities arrive by the half gallon and the assembly instruction is a single line about glasses and ladles. Sundae names in these collections were largely marketing: a city, a college, a hotel or a passing celebrity attached to whatever combination of nuts, fruit and colored syrup the house happened to stock, and "Buffalo" here most likely nods to the city rather than to any documented origin. Claret syrup belonged to a whole family of fountain flavors that borrowed the names of wines and cordials — claret, port, sherry, crème de menthe — while containing little or no alcohol, a habit that served the fountain well when Prohibition arrived and made the drugstore counter the respectable substitute for the bar.}