Caramel Float
Follow the recipe for Soft Custard, using Karo, Orange Label. Chill and serve with a topping of Whipped Cream. To make this go further, pour the custard into a glass dish lined with strips of sponge cake and softened with sweetened strong coffee.
This is a variation entry that assumes you have the book's Soft Custard recipe in front of you, plus a tin of a Karo syrup that no longer exists under that name. Both gaps are easy to close.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilA stirred (soft) custard sets between about 170F and 180F. Cook it over a water bath or very low direct heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon, then pull it off at once and strain into a cold bowl. A few seconds past that and the eggs curdle into grains that no amount of whisking will smooth.
- What Soft Custard means hereA typical proportion of the period is 2 cups milk, 3-4 egg yolks (or 2 whole eggs), and about 1/3 cup sweetening, with a pinch of salt and vanilla stirred in off the heat; the book's own Soft Custard recipe, which this entry refers back to, may differ. Here the syrup appears to take the place of the sugar.
- Karo Orange LabelKaro was sold in several colour-coded grades. The name of the dish suggests the Orange Label was one of the darker, stronger-tasting grades, though the recipe itself does not say so; dark corn syrup is the nearest current equivalent. Corn syrup also brings some water with it, so expect a slightly softer set and a browner colour than a sugar custard.
- Sweeten the cream lightly or not at allThe syrup already carries the dish. Whip the cream to soft peaks only, so it sits on the surface rather than sinking or standing in stiff tufts.
- "Float"In this period a float is simply a cold custard or beverage with a layer of whipped cream or ice cream floated on top. There is no separate technique to it.
- The sponge cake versionLine a glass bowl with strips of sponge cake, brush or spoon over the sweetened strong coffee until damp but not soaked, pour the custard over and chill until the cake and custard set together. The recipe asks only for 'strong' coffee and gives no timing.
- Use a glass dish for a reasonPresumably so that the stripe of soaked cake shows under the pale custard and the white cream; a straight-sided glass bowl or individual glasses show it best.
- YieldIf the book's Soft Custard is built on 2 cups of milk, it would serve about 4 as a plain float, or 6 built up with cake and coffee.
This page comes from one of the promotional cookbooks issued by corn syrup manufacturers in the early twentieth century, and it behaves exactly as such books do: every recipe is a route back to the tin, with the particular colour of label specified as though it were an ingredient in its own right. Karo, introduced in the first years of the 1900s, was marketed hard against granulated sugar as both cheaper and, in the darker grades, a flavour of its own — the "caramel" of this float is probably the molasses-ish note of a darker syrup. Booklets of this kind proliferated during and after the First World War, when sugar in the United States was under voluntary conservation and controlled distribution rather than formal rationing, and syrup substitution was framed as patriotic economy as much as thrift. The trifle-style variation at the end, cake softened with strong coffee under a cold custard, belongs to a long line of English trifles and charlottes made to stretch a small quantity of custard across more people, and it resembles the coffee-soaked layered puddings that later became familiar under Italian names.