Home › Pudding Sauces › Hot Maple Sauce
Hot Maple Sauce
½ cup water
1 pound (2 cups) maple sugar
½ cup English walnut-meats or 2 cups brown sugar
Add the water to the maple sugar and boil until it reaches the small "thread" stage. Add the English walnut-meats broken into pieces. This sauce is good with vanilla ice-cream, blanc mange or custard.
A two-ingredient syrup that lives or dies on how far you boil it. The only real decision is where you stop, and the original gives you a candy-stage name rather than a number.
- The "thread" stage in degreesCandy charts generally put thread somewhere in the 223-234F (106-112C) range, the point where syrup drawn up on a spoon falls in a fine thread rather than in drops. The book gives no number; if "small thread" is taken as the low end of that band, stopping around 223-225F should give a sauce that stays pourable when it cools.
- Use a thermometer, and test anywayMaple sugar varies in moisture, so the thermometer is a guide and the spoon is the verdict. Lift a spoonful clear of the pan and watch how it falls; if it sheets or drops rather than threading, keep going a minute at a time.
- Maple sugarHard cake or granulated maple sugar, sold by weight; a pound is about 2 cups packed. If you can only find maple syrup, this is a different recipe and the water should be omitted, not adjusted.
- The brown-sugar versionThe line reads as an either/or in the original list: 2 cups brown sugar stands in for the pound of maple sugar. It gives a caramel sauce rather than a maple one, and dark brown sugar is closer in flavor than light.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinct from the American black walnut the book's readers also had access to. Half a cup, broken by hand rather than chopped, so the pieces stay large enough to feel.
- Add the nuts off the heatThe original simply says to add them once the syrup has reached the stage. Stirring them in after the pan leaves the burner is a reasonable precaution, since nuts left in syrup over direct heat can catch and taste scorched.
- Yield and servingNearer 1 1/2 to 2 cups once the nuts are in, enough for six servings spooned over ice cream or custard. Serve it warm; it thickens as it cools and may need gentle rewarming with a teaspoon of water if it sets up.
- Blanc mangeA cornstarch or arrowroot milk pudding, molded and turned out cold. Any plain set custard or panna cotta takes this sauce the same way.
Maple sugar, not syrup, is generally said to have been the more usual form of maple sweetening in nineteenth-century North American kitchens, a preference often explained by the keeping and traveling qualities of a hard cake. Recipe books of the period treat it as a sugar to be measured by the pound alongside loaf and brown sugar, and the interchangeability offered here, maple sugar or brown sugar, reflects a household economy in which the two occupied the same shelf and the same role. The Butterick company, better known for dress patterns, published this collection as part of what is generally described as a broad move by pattern and magazine publishers into domestic reference around the turn of the twentieth century, when a section of pudding sauces was a common feature of general household books: the sauce was where the flavor and the occasion came from.