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Caramel Sauce
1/2 cup Karo, Orange Label 2 drops vanilla 2 egg whites A few grains salt Beat the egg whites until stiff, with the salt and vanilla. Then slowly and steadily beat in the Karo.
A three-ingredient corn-syrup meringue from the era when Corn Products Refining Company distributed recipe pamphlets to promote Karo. The method is sound, but the sauce is never cooked and never heated, and the egg whites go to the table raw.
- Why this one failsThe whites are beaten and served with no heat applied at any stage. Raw egg white is a recognised vehicle for Salmonella, which is carried on and occasionally within the shell; nothing in this formula — not the syrup, not the pinch of salt — reduces that risk. Sugar syrup at this concentration does not pasteurise anything at room temperature.
- The 1920s assumptionUncooked-egg sauces, boiled frostings finished off the heat, and raw-white "snow" puddings were ordinary household work at the time, and pamphlet recipes reflected that. Current guidance for uncooked egg-white preparations calls for a treated egg product; use a modern recipe written with that in mind rather than adapting this one.
- Karo Orange LabelKaro was once sold in graded types identified by label colour rather than by the words light and dark. The Orange Label grade is no longer on shelves, and how it corresponded to today's light and dark corn syrups is unclear.
- No caramel is madeDespite the title, no sugar is browned; any caramel character would come from the syrup itself rather than from any cooking, and a paler syrup would give a plainer, sweeter result.
- YieldHalf a cup of syrup beaten into two whites gives something on the order of a cup or more of soft, foamy sauce, enough for several servings, and like other uncooked foams it is likely to weep on standing.
This comes from the genre of branded cookery pamphlet that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century, when Karo's makers, like the producers of cornstarch, gelatine and baking powder, found it cheaper to teach housewives new uses for a product than to advertise it plainly. Corn syrup had a specific selling point in these booklets: it resists crystallising, so a meringue or frosting built on it stays glossy and pliable where one built on granulated sugar can turn grainy — a real advantage in a home kitchen without a candy thermometer.