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Hot Maple Sauce
Add a very little water to a pound of maple sugar and boil until it reaches the "thread" stage. Add a half cup of English walnut meats broken into small pieces. There should be sufficient nuts to make the sauce quite thick. Serve hot, with vanilla ice cream, or very slightly sweetened cold blanc mange or custard.
A two-ingredient sauce that hinges entirely on how far you cook the sugar. Pull it early and it is syrup; push it past the mark and it sets hard in the dish.
- "Thread" stageAround 230F on a candy thermometer — the point where a lifted spoon draws a fine thread rather than dropping in beads. A few degrees higher and the sauce stiffens as it cools on cold ice cream.
- Maple sugarA pound of hard maple sugar, still sold in blocks and granules from producers in Vermont, Quebec and Ontario. Grade A dark maple syrup is not a direct substitute: it already carries most of the water you would be boiling off, so if you use it, reduce rather than add liquid.
- "A very little water"Roughly 1/4 cup for the pound is enough to dissolve the sugar without a long boil. The quantity is not critical, only the finishing temperature is.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut of any supermarket; in American usage the name is generally taken to distinguish it from the native black walnut, which is stronger and more resinous. Toasting the halves briefly before breaking them may improve the sauce.
- Do not stir once boilingMaple sugar syrups crystallize readily. Wash any grains down from the pan sides with a wet brush at the start and leave the syrup alone until it reaches temperature.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup and a half — enough for six to eight servings over ice cream. Serve straight from the pan; it thickens fast off the heat and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
- Blanc mangeA cold moulded milk pudding set with cornstarch, arrowroot or Irish moss. Panna cotta or a firm cornstarch pudding stands in for it here, and the original is right that it should be barely sweetened against so sweet a sauce.
Maple sugar, rather than syrup, was long the common household form of the sweetener in North America, because a hard cake of sugar kept and travelled where a jug of syrup fermented or leaked, though syrup was displacing it by the early twentieth century. The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911 under the imprint of the pattern company, aimed at the same middle-class readership as its dressmaking guides, and its pudding-sauce chapter reflects a moment when domestic candy thermometers were still uncommon and cooks judged sugar by the old descriptive stages — thread, soft ball, crack — learned by eye and hand. Pairing a hot sugar sauce with vanilla ice cream belongs to the soda-fountain fashions of the period; the hot fudge sundae is usually dated to American soda fountains in the first decade of the twentieth century.