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Central Sundae
Two pounds English walnuts, 2 pounds pecans chopped together with ½ pound of powdered sugar; add enough simple syrup to suit taste.
This is a fountain nut topping rather than a finished dessert: a bulk crush of nuts held in sweetened syrup, ladled over ice cream to order. The quantities are shop-scale and want dividing by eight or more for home use.
- Scale it downFour pounds of nuts makes something on the order of a gallon of finished topping, on the order of a hundred sundaes. A workable home batch is 4 oz walnuts, 4 oz pecans, 1 oz powdered sugar, and syrup to loosen.
- English walnutsThe ordinary tan-shelled walnut sold everywhere today, as distinct from the American black walnut, which is far stronger and oilier. The recipe wants the mild one so the pecan flavour still reads.
- Powdered sugarIn fountain usage this generally meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar in current boxes. Either works here; modern confectioners' sugar will thicken the syrup very slightly.
- Simple syrupMany fountain manuals specify a heavy syrup, on the order of two parts sugar to one part water by weight, boiled and cooled. A 1:1 syrup will taste thinner and make a runnier topping. Add it a little at a time until the nuts are coated and just barely flooded.
- ChoppingChop by hand or pulse in short bursts. A food processor run continuously turns nuts into oily paste, and the texture of distinct pieces is the whole point of the dish.
- KeepingNut oils go rancid, and syrup gives no real protection. Refrigerate in a sealed jar and use within about two weeks; bring back to room temperature before serving so it pours.
- ServingAllow about 1 to 1½ oz per sundae over vanilla ice cream. Marshmallow and maraschino were common fountain finishes, though this formula specifies neither.
Soda-fountain manuals of the early twentieth century are largely catalogues of syrups, crushed fruits and nut mixtures kept in jars along the marble counter, from which a dispenser assembled named sundaes in front of the customer. A name like "Central" was a way for a shop to put its own signature on a formula that any fountain could have made. The pairing of walnut and pecan is characteristically American: pecans were cheap and abundant in the South and were being shipped north in quantity by the 1900s, while "English" walnuts arrived from California orchards that had expanded rapidly in the same decades. Holding chopped nuts in syrup solved a practical problem as much as a culinary one, keeping them moist, spoonable and ready to portion through a long day's trade.