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Maple Sugar Sauce
Melt over a slow fire, in a small tea-cup of water, half a pint maple sugar; let it simmer, removing all scum; add four tablespoons butter mixed with a level tea-spoon flour, and one of grated nutmeg; boil for a few moments, and serve with boiled puddings. Or, make a "hard sauce" of one table-spoon butter to two of sugar.
A simple thickened syrup sauce for steamed and boiled puddings. Two things need translating: the volume measure of sugar, and the alarming quantity of nutmeg.
- Half a pint of maple sugarMaple sugar was commonly sold as a cake or block and grated or broken down before measuring, so this is a volume, not a weight — half a pint is 1 cup. The weight varies with how coarsely it is grated, so measure by volume. Modern granulated maple sugar works directly; pure maple syrup does not substitute one-for-one, since the water is already accounted for separately.
- A small tea-cup of waterA tea-cup in this period runs 4 to 6 fluid oz, and "small" pushes it to the low end. Start with 1/2 cup and hold back a spoonful or two, since the sauce should finish thick enough to coat a pudding.
- Slow fireLow heat, and genuinely low. Maple sugar carries non-sugar solids that can catch on the bottom of the pan, and a scorched batch tastes bitter all the way through with no fixing it.
- The nutmeg"One of grated nutmeg" means a level teaspoon, matching the flour above it. That is enough to overwhelm the maple entirely in a cup of sauce. A quarter teaspoon, freshly grated, is closer to what a modern palate reads as seasoning rather than medicine.
- Butter and flourThe butter is creamed with the flour before it goes in — a beurre manié. Work it smooth off the heat, add it in small pieces, and whisk each one in before the next, or the flour will set into lumps in the hot syrup.
- Boil for a few momentsOnce the flour is in, the sauce needs about a minute at a bare boil to lose the raw flour taste and thicken. Longer than that and the butter breaks out of suspension.
- Removing all scumUnrefined maple sugar throws a grey foam as it dissolves. Skimming it is cosmetic rather than necessary with today's product, which is much cleaner, but it does give a brighter-looking sauce.
- The hard sauce alternativeThe second sentence is a different thing entirely — butter and sugar creamed together, uncooked, served cold in a mound so it melts over the hot pudding. Use softened butter and confectioners' or very fine sugar, or it stays gritty.
- YieldA cup of sugar, half a cup of water and four tablespoons of butter gives appreciably more than a cup; reckon on about a cup and a half, enough for six to eight servings of pudding. Serve it hot; it stiffens considerably as it cools and reheats gently with a spoonful of water.
Maple sugar, not maple syrup, was the default form of the sweetener through most of the nineteenth century — sugar keeps without canning and ships in blocks. That a Southern collection like The Dixie Cook Book carries a maple sauce says less about regional cooking than about how these compilations were assembled: they borrowed freely from Northern household manuals and from each other, and a great many entries traveled unchanged from book to book. The dish it is meant for, a boiled or steamed pudding turned out of a mold or cloth, was the standard winter dessert of an era when a pudding could be cooked over the same fire as the rest of dinner without needing oven space. The paired offering of a cooked sauce and a "hard sauce" is the usual convention of the period, letting the cook choose according to whether the pudding was already rich.