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Maple Cream Sauce
Take several spoons of maple cream which now comes in jars and reduce to a pouring consistency by adding cream. Serve with blanc mange, Spanish and Bavarian Cream or with plain puddings.
A two-line sauce that depends entirely on one ingredient the original assumes you can buy. Everything else is a matter of loosening it to the consistency you want.
- What maple cream isNot a dairy product. Maple cream (also sold as maple butter or maple spread) is pure maple syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, cooled undisturbed, then stirred until it crystallizes fine and turns opaque and spreadable. It still comes in jars, usually from Vermont, Quebec or upstate New York.
- Cream, not milkUse heavy or light cream. Milk thins the sauce faster than it enriches it and can taste watery against the concentrated maple.
- A working ratio"Several spoons" is unhelpfully vague. Start with about 1/2 cup maple cream and beat in cream a tablespoon at a time until it ribbons off the spoon; roughly 2 to 4 tablespoons will get you there. That should give enough for about six small servings.
- Warm it gently or not at allMaple cream loosens readily if you stand the bowl in warm water and stir. Direct heat, especially a hard simmer, can dissolve the fine crystal structure, and the sauce may thin out and turn grainy as it cools again.
- Substitution if you cannot find itMaple syrup reduced slightly and whisked into cream gives a maple sauce, but not this one: the jarred cream carries a thicker body and a rounder, less sharp sweetness. Adjust expectations rather than boiling syrup down aggressively.
- What it is meant to go onBlanc mange, Spanish cream and Bavarian cream are all cold, pale, lightly set molded desserts. The sauce is poured around or over at the table; it wants to be cool or barely warm, never hot enough to slump the mold.
Maple cream is a softer, spoonable product of the kind that sugarmakers, long accustomed to selling hard cakes of maple sugar, put up in glass for the grocery trade. The Butterick book, published for a broad household readership in the early twentieth century, takes that availability for granted "which now comes in jars" is the whole of its explanation, and a good marker of how quickly a farm product could become a shelf item. The sauce itself is a period convenience: the puddings it accompanies, blanc mange and the molded Spanish and Bavarian creams, are deliberately bland and cool, and a sweet pouring sauce supplies the contrast.