Maple! That led me to remember grandpa's little shack in the woods near their pond. It was abandoned the vast majority of the year, but if we were lucky enough to make a late winter visit to their house, the shack might be pumping out big clouds of steam as grandpa boiled down the sap that he'd collected in the little metal "houses" (as I thought of them since they had roofs) tapped into the maple trees. And I knew on our next visit, grandma would get out the electric skillet to make stacks of golden-brown pancakes to drown in the syrup. (It takes a long time to boil down syrup-- 40 gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup.) We never had anything so fancy as this Maple Nut Mousse (and there's no way grandma would have put rum in it!), but it sounds pretty tasty. (Especially if you subbed in pecans for the walnuts.)
There's also a recipe for another thing that sounds delicious but never would have been on grandma's list of things to make: Maple Bourbon Cake.
I was excited to see these recipes not just because they brought back some happy memories, but also because the recipes were in the right month. I know it's a pedantic, who-cares problem, but in the past few years, food companies have decided that maple is a fall flavor. It seems like they whip out the maple stuff to try to distract/ mollify the people who are offended when someone somewhere has the audacity to enjoy anything with pumpkin spice. But there I am in the corner, practicing my own equally pointless form of judginess, saying "But maple is a late winter/ early spring flavor!" So I am grateful to Marjorie Page Blanchard for putting maple in with the March recipes, even though the people who bought the book better damn well already have had some maple trees if they hoped to make syrup. It's not like the gardeners in her readership could have planted some maples and been ready to tap them anytime soon!
So here's to being made happy by some pointless little detail. Take what you can get!
