Home › Left-Over Bread › Maple Sauce
Maple Sauce
2 tablespoonfuls but-½ cup soft brown ter sugar A few drops lemon- Scant 1/4 teaspoonful maple extract juice Cream the butter, add the sugar slowly, and beat well. Then stir in the flavoring. Set in a cool place to harden a little before using.
This is a hard sauce — creamed butter and sugar, flavoured and chilled — meant to be spooned onto hot bread pudding, where it melts into a glaze. It is never cooked.
- What the amounts come toTwo tablespoons butter to half a cup of soft brown sugar, with maple extract and a few drops of lemon juice. That works out at roughly 4:1 sugar to fat by volume, at the sweeter end for a hard sauce, and gives a firm, grainy paste rather than a pourable sauce.
- The maple extract quantity is unclearThe original specifies a "scant" fraction of a teaspoonful, but the fraction itself is not legible. Start with a quarter teaspoon of maple extract, taste, and add more.
- Soft brown sugarThis means a moist brown sugar rather than a hard loaf or crystal sugar. Break up any lumps or rub it through your fingers first; clumped brown sugar leaves the sauce gritty.
- Butter temperature is the hingeThe butter needs to be soft enough to cream but not oily; somewhere around 65F suits. If it gets warm and greasy the mixture is liable to separate and will not hold a shape when chilled.
- Add the sugar slowlyBeating the sugar in a little at a time disperses the crystals evenly through the fat, as the recipe directs. Tipping it in all at once tends to leave a sandy texture.
- The lemon juiceA few drops only, as written. It is there to cut the sweetness rather than to flavour.
- Chilling"A cool place" would have meant a larder, cellar or similar unheated spot rather than ice. Twenty to thirty minutes in the refrigerator does the same job, but let it stand at room temperature for a few minutes before serving.
- YieldRoughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for four to six servings. It keeps covered in the refrigerator for several days.
Hard sauce is the standard finish for steamed and baked puddings in Anglo-American cookery, and it appears in a left-overs book because bread pudding was one of the destinations for stale loaves in a thrifty kitchen — the sauce is what turned an economy dish into something worth putting on the table. The maple version reflects a distinctly North American preference. The lemon juice is a long-standing trick in these sauces, present in brandy and rum hard sauces too, where a small acid note keeps a nearly pure butter-and-sugar mixture from tasting flat.