Golden Sauce
1 1/3 cups Karo, Blue Label 2 egg yolks 1/3 cup water 2 drops vanilla Combine the water and Karo. Boil and pour onto the egg yolks slightly beaten. Cook over hot water until thickenedabout two minutes, stirring constantly. Add vanilla and serve.
A two-minute egg-and-syrup dessert sauce of the sort corn syrup pamphlets promoted for pudding, gingerbread and steamed fruit puddings. The whole thing hinges on tempering: the boiling syrup goes into the yolks, never the reverse.
- Karo, Blue LabelKaro was sold in several graded labels in this period, differing in color and flavor rather than in function. Ordinary light corn syrup is the closest thing on a modern shelf; dark corn syrup will work but will muddy the pale gold color the name is describing.
- The ambiguous first line"1/3 cups" is almost certainly 1/3 cup, matching the 1/3 cup water, but the original as printed could also be read as 1 1/3 cups. Treat it as 1/3 cup unless you want a much sweeter, thicker sauce.
- Tempering is the whole recipeBeat the yolks first, then pour the boiling syrup in a thin stream while whisking without stopping. Dumping it in at once scrambles the yolks and no amount of later stirring will smooth them.
- "Over hot water" means below a simmerThe bowl should sit over water that is steaming, not bubbling against its base. Direct heat or a hard boil curdles the yolks in seconds.
- Judge by thickness, not by the clockTwo minutes is a rough estimate. Cook until the sauce coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn through it, around 160-165F on an instant-read thermometer, then pull it off the heat immediately.
- Two drops of vanillaThat is a genuinely small amount by modern habit, meant only to round the flavor of the syrup rather than to flavor it. Take it literally: two drops from the bottle, far less than even 1/8 teaspoon of extract, which would already be many times the amount called for.
- Yield and servingAbout 3/4 cup, enough for four to six servings poured over cottage pudding, gingerbread, baked apples or plain cake. It is best warm; it will thicken and stiffen as it cools, and reheating over hot water while whisking loosens it again.
Golden Sauce belongs to the large family of promotional recipes that Karo's makers, the Corn Products Refining Company, circulated in small pamphlets in the early twentieth century to teach American cooks to reach for corn syrup where they had previously reached for sugar or molasses. Corn syrup was a relatively new industrial product, cheap, shelf-stable and unusually well suited to sauces because it resists crystallizing. The technique underneath the branding is much older: pouring boiling syrup onto beaten yolks and thickening them over water is the same method used for sabayon. Sauces named "golden" may well signal egg yolk as the coloring agent, in the same way a "white sauce" announces milk and flour, though that is an inference rather than a documented convention.