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Fluffy Fruit Sauce
1/2 cup Karo, Red Label 2 egg whites 1/4 cup orange or pineapple juice, grape or loganberry juice Beat the egg whites stiff and whip in the Karo and fruit juices. Serve at once. This is excellent instead of whipped cream.
This is a raw-egg-white foam with no cooking step at any point, offered as a substitute for whipped cream on a luncheon dessert. That is the problem, and it is not fixable by adjusting proportions.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten, sweetened and served immediately. Nothing in the method brings them above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in or on the egg survives intact. Shell eggs of this period were not graded, washed and refrigerated to modern standards.
- Nothing in the recipe inhibits bacteriaSyrup and a quarter cup of fruit juice do not make the mixture safe. The sugar concentration in the finished foam is far too low to be preservative, and citrus or berry juice at this dilution does not lower the pH enough to matter.
- Served to the wrong peopleRaw-egg infection is most likely to become serious in children, the elderly, pregnant women and the immunocompromised. If you want a foam sauce, use a current recipe built on a cooked or pasteurized base.
- Karo Red LabelFor the record: Karo was sold in Blue Label (light) and Red Label (dark, with a molasses note) grades. Red Label corresponds roughly to today's dark corn syrup, and its color would have tinted this sauce beige rather than white.
- Why it cannot holdEven setting safety aside, the instruction to "serve at once" is worth taking literally. A foam thinned with a quarter cup of juice and set by neither gelatin, starch nor heat will weep and slacken quickly.
This page belongs to a genre of corn-products promotional cookery that flourished in the United States from the 1910s through the 1930s, when Corn Products Refining Company distributed booklets teaching cooks to use Karo in place of sugar, honey and — as here — cream. The pitch was economy and novelty: a sweetened egg-white foam cost a fraction of whipping cream and, in an era when many households still kept no reliable refrigeration, it could be made from shelf-stable syrup plus two eggs and a splash of juice. The choice of flavorings is telling of the period. Loganberry juice, associated with the Pacific Northwest and bottled commercially at some point in the early decades of the century, and canned pineapple juice, which is generally said to have become widely marketed as a byproduct of Hawaiian canning around the early 1930s, both signal a kitchen shopping from tins and bottles rather than an orchard. The same booklets are full of "instead of whipped cream" substitutions, a phrase that says more about dairy prices and household budgets than about the taste of the result.