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Chocolate Toffee
Follow the recipe for Karo Toffee, using Karo, Red Label, and adding three squares of cooking chocolate. Cut in cubes. CHILD-FEEDING is as important as Baby-feeding.
Most mothers watch the diet closely the first three years alone. This is not enough. It should be regulated with equal care up to High School age. Children need and demand sweets. Karo with bread and butter is an excellent luncheon or supper sweet. With this, a dessert is unnecessary. Karo is easily assimilated, because it is Dextrose that substance into which all starches and sugars must be changed by digestion. It furnishes immediate energy.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the Karo Toffee formula from earlier in the book, and it comes wrapped in advertising copy from the syrup company that published it.
- You need the base recipeNothing here tells you quantities, temperature or timing. A plain corn-syrup toffee is generally syrup, sugar, butter, a little water and salt boiled together; without the parent recipe you are working blind on proportions.
- Red Label KaroKaro was sold under colour-coded labels, the light grades pale and the red label a darker, fuller syrup, closer to today's dark corn syrup. Substituting light syrup gives a paler, milder toffee.
- Cooking chocolate"Three squares of cooking chocolate" means unsweetened baking chocolate in the standard 1 oz square, so 3 oz total. Modern baking chocolate bars are often scored into 1/2 oz portions, so check the wrapper weight rather than counting squares.
- When to add the chocolateThe recipe does not say when the chocolate goes in. Chocolate can scorch in a hot sugar syrup, so the safer course is to chop it fine and stir it in once the syrup is off the boil, or melt it first and beat it in at the end.
- The hinge is the thermometerToffee is set by temperature, not by clock. Hard-crack is 300-310F; a chewier toffee stops around 290F. Cocoa solids darken and can taste burnt at the top of that range, so pull it slightly early rather than late.
- Cutting in cubesScore the slab with an oiled knife while it is still warm and pliable, then break along the lines once it has fully cooled and hardened. Waiting until it is cold to start cutting will shatter it.
- YieldThe page gives no quantities, so the count depends entirely on the parent recipe. Wrap the cubes individually in waxed paper; corn-syrup toffee goes sticky in humid air.
- The nutrition claimThe dextrose paragraph is sales copy, not instruction. Corn syrup is a mixture of glucose, maltose and longer glucose chains rather than pure dextrose, and current advice on sweets at children's meals runs in the opposite direction.
Karo corn syrup appeared in the early 1900s from the American corn-refining industry, and booklets like this one existed to find uses for it. The colour-coded labels - lighter grades for delicate work, red label for a darker, fuller-flavoured syrup - were part of the same marketing effort, and recipes were written to send cooks back to the tin as often as possible. What makes this page a period document is the second half: corn syrup was promoted in these years on the strength of dextrose being the sugar the body absorbs directly, a claim that let a candy recipe be presented as a child-feeding recommendation. Toffee itself is much older and much simpler, a British boiled-sugar sweet whose name is generally traced to the early nineteenth century, and adding unsweetened chocolate to a sugar-and-butter boil was one way to extend a single candy formula into a page of variations.