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Hickory or Walnut Sundae
Into a sauce champagne glass turn a cone of ice cream. Over top of this stick a few hickory or walnut meats broken into small pieces. Over all pour an ounce of very strong apricot syrup. Serve with a spoon. Result is delicious beyond description.
A fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish; the only variables are the glass, the syrup strength and the nuts.
- Sauce champagne glassA short, wide-bowled stemmed fountain glass, smaller than a soda glass, used for sundaes served without soda water. Any small coupe, footed dessert glass or wide wine glass does the same job.
- A cone of ice creamNot a wafer cone; the ice cream was shaped into a cone with a conical scoop or by pressing a round dipper against the glass. One generous scoop, mounded up; the recipe gives no quantity.
- An ounce of syrupTwo tablespoons. Fountain syrups were generally heavy with sugar, thicker and sweeter than modern fruit sauce, so a commercial apricot preserve loosened with a spoonful of hot water is closer than a thin coulis.
- "Very strong" apricotThe hinge of the dish. Apricot has to carry over cold cream and oily nuts, so the syrup should taste too intense on its own. Dried-apricot syrup, or preserves boiled down briefly, gives more depth than fresh fruit.
- Hickory meatsShagbark hickory nuts were a common wild nut in American markets in the early twentieth century and are now largely a forager's item. Pecan is the nearest relative on a shop shelf; walnut, the recipe's own alternative, is the easy choice.
- Toast the nutsRaw hickory and walnut both taste flat against sweet syrup. Five to seven minutes in a 350F oven, cooled completely, keeps them crisp under the syrup instead of going soft.
- Order of assemblyNuts go on before the syrup, as written, so the syrup glazes them in place. Reverse it and the nuts slide off the dome.
- YieldOne glass. Scale by the serving; nothing here holds, and the syrup will start melting a channel through the ice cream within a minute or two.
The instruction names a specific glass and an exact ounce of syrup but never a quantity of ice cream -- the kind of shorthand that assumes a dispenser with his own dipper rather than a home cook. The nut sundae belongs to the period when American drugstores had become dessert parlours, and hickory nuts in particular mark the recipe as domestic: shagbark hickory is a North American tree, its nuts gathered and sold locally in the Midwest and upper South, and it was never orchard-grown on the scale of the walnut or the almond. Pairing them with apricot, by then largely a dried fruit from California or imported, gives a small picture of what a fountain's syrup shelf might hold.