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Caramel Sweet Potatoes
2 pounds small sweet potatoes Karo, Blue or Orange Label Salt Mazola Steam the potatoes, remove the skins and slice crosswise. Fry in deep Mazola heated to 375 degrees F., or until a bit of bread will brown in forty counts. Drain, place in a baking dish, dust sparingly with salt and add a little Karo, Blue or Orange Label. Heat and serve with pork in any form.
A brand-promotion recipe with the brand names standing in for measurements. Two ingredients are given no quantity at all, so treat the amounts below as the working assumption.
- Mazola and KaroMazola is corn oil, then as now, and any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. Karo is corn syrup; the Blue and Orange labels were colour and flavour grades, the lighter one closest to today's light corn syrup.
- The unmeasured amounts"A little Karo" for 2 lb of potatoes is roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons, drizzled over the slices rather than poured into the dish. More than that and the slices sit in syrup instead of glazing.
- Steam, do not boilBoiled sweet potatoes take on water and fall apart in hot oil. Steam them whole in their skins until barely tender, 20 to 30 minutes for small ones, then cool enough to handle before peeling.
- Dry the slicesSteamed potato surfaces are wet, and wet food in 375F oil spatters hard. Cut slices about half an inch thick, blot them well, and fry in small batches so the oil temperature holds.
- The forty countsThe bread test is a pre-thermometer gauge: a cube of bread browning in about forty seconds indicates 365-375F. A thermometer is more reliable, and the bread test is worth knowing only as a backup.
- "Heat and serve"The recipe does not say how, at what temperature, or for how long. A brief spell in a moderate oven, just long enough for the syrup to bubble and film the slices, is one workable reading; longer and the sugar tightens into something closer to candy.
- YieldTwo pounds of potatoes serves four to six as a side dish.
This comes from the promotional cookery literature of the Corn Products Refining Company, which sold both Mazola oil and Karo syrup and published booklets in which nearly every page found a use for one or the other. The recipe reflects a genuine American habit older than the brands: sweet potatoes candied with molasses or sugar and served alongside salt pork, ham or bacon, the sweetness set against the cured meat. What is distinctly of its moment is the corn syrup and the corn oil, both products of the industrial wet-milling of maize that expanded rapidly in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, and both marketed to home cooks as modern, clean substitutes for lard and cane sugar. The instruction to "serve with pork in any form" is the sort of blunt serving note these booklets favoured, aimed at a cook planning a plate rather than reading for pleasure.