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Maple Sugar Sauce
One-half pound of maple sugar broken into small pieces; put it into a saucepan and with it one-half gill of water and melt slowly until a clear syrup is formed; then remove from the fire and stir in two heaping tablespoonfuls of butter cut in small pieces.
A two-ingredient dessert sauce that depends entirely on not letting the sugar go past the syrup stage. Everything else is a matter of translating the measures.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, or 4 fluid ounces, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces — 1/4 cup of water. That is just enough to dissolve the sugar without needing a long reduction.
- Maple sugarHalf a pound of hard maple sugar, sold in blocks or cakes, is the intended ingredient; it is still available from sugarhouses and specialty grocers. Breaking it small genuinely matters, as large lumps sit undissolved while the syrup around them starts to caramelize.
- The hinge: melt slowlyKeep the heat low and stop the moment the syrup runs clear with no grit at the bottom of the pan. Cooked further it climbs toward the soft-ball stage and will set rather than pour.
- Stir off the heatThe butter goes in after the pan leaves the burner, exactly as written. Off the heat the butter is less likely to separate out into a greasy layer on the syrup.
- Two heaping tablespoonfuls of butterRoughly 1.5 to 2 ounces, or about 3 to 4 level tablespoons in modern terms. Cut it cold and small so it melts into the syrup as it is beaten in.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for four to six servings over steamed pudding, cottage pudding, gingerbread, waffles or ice cream. Serve warm; it thickens noticeably as it cools and can be loosened over low heat with a spoonful of water.
Maple sugar, not maple syrup, was generally the more common form in which the sap was sold and stored for most of the nineteenth century — cakes of hard sugar kept well and travelled well, while syrup was awkward to ship and prone to spoiling in the days before reliable canning. Cookbooks of this period tend to treat maple as a sugar to be melted rather than a liquid to be poured, which is why this sauce begins with water in the pan. The butter stirred in at the end is the same trick behind hard sauce and the old "sweet sauces" served over boiled and steamed puddings: fat carries the flavor and gives the sauce enough body to coat a spoon. Its presence in a general household book like this one reflects how firmly maple belonged to the northeastern American pantry, cheaper and more local than imported cane in the sugaring districts of New England, New York and Quebec.