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Fruit Syrup
1 pint Karo, Red Label Combine and use. 1/2 cup grape, pineapple or loganberry juice Heat in very cold weather.
A two-ingredient pancake syrup from a corn-syrup promotional booklet. The only real decisions are which juice and how thin you want it.
- Karo Red LabelKaro sold under colored labels: the red label was the darker syrup, a blend of corn syrup with refiners' syrup, sold today as dark corn syrup. Light (blue label) corn syrup works and gives a cleaner fruit flavor, but the result is blander and paler.
- YieldA pint of syrup plus half a cup of juice makes about 20 fluid ounces, or roughly 40 tablespoons: something like thirteen to twenty breakfast servings of two to three tablespoons each.
- "Heat in very cold weather"Corn syrup thickens sharply as it cools, and a cold kitchen or a cold pantry shelf makes it pour like cold molasses. Warm the mixture gently to serving temperature; there is no cooking involved and boiling will only drive off the fruit aroma.
- The juicesGrape and loganberry here would most likely have been bottled juices rather than fresh-pressed. Loganberry juice is hard to find now; unsweetened blackberry or black raspberry juice is a reasonable stand-in for acidity and colour.
- BalanceHalf a cup of juice to a pint of syrup is a mild flavoring. Bottled juices vary a good deal in strength, so taste and add more juice by the tablespoon if it reads as plain sweet syrup.
- KeepingCorn syrup itself is shelf-stable, and this mixture is still mostly syrup, but the added juice will not keep indefinitely. Store it in a covered jar in the refrigerator and warm what you need.
This comes from the era when corn-syrup refiners published small recipe booklets to teach cooks what to do with the product beyond baking, and the color-coded Karo labels appear in such pamphlets as a matter of course. Commercial corn syrup arrived in American kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century and was promoted hard as a cheaper, more reliable table syrup than maple, which was expensive and often adulterated. Stretching it with fruit juice was one common booklet idea for making an industrial sweetener taste like something: the syrup supplies body and sweetness, the juice supplies acidity and color. Loganberry, one of the three suggested juices, is a blackberry-raspberry cross generally traced to a California judge's garden in the 1880s, and it had a strong regional following as a bottled juice in the early decades of the century before largely disappearing from grocery shelves.