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Grilled Apples
1 quart pared, quartered apples 3/4 cup Karo 1/4 cup water Few grains salt Place the apples in a pan or baking dish oiled with Mazola, pour the Karo and water over and bake gently until the apples look clear and pale pink in color. Increase the heat to brown the top, or put the apples under the gas broiler to do this.
A brand-house breakfast dish from the corn-products era: baked apples glazed with corn syrup rather than sugar. The method is sound, but the oven directions are vague and the measurements are by volume of cut fruit.
- A quart of applesMeasured after paring and quartering, that is roughly a pound to a pound and a half of fruit, about four medium apples. Choose a variety that holds its shape — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy — since a softer apple will collapse into sauce before it goes clear.
- Karo and MazolaKaro is corn syrup (the light grade is the likely intention here) and Mazola is corn oil, both products of the Corn Products Refining Company, which issued cookbooks of this kind. Any neutral oil or butter works for the dish, and the corn syrup can be swapped for an equal volume of honey or maple syrup, though the flavor changes and both brown faster.
- "Bake gently"The book gives no temperature; read this as a moderate oven, somewhere around 325–350F. The point is to poach the apples in the syrup until translucent, not to roast them; too hot and the syrup caramelizes at the pan edges before the fruit is cooked through.
- TimingThe original gives none. Expect 40 to 60 minutes in a moderate oven, depending on the variety and the thickness of the quarters. The cue is visual, as the recipe says: the flesh turns from opaque white to clear, with a faint pink blush.
- The browning stepFinishing under the broiler takes two to four minutes and needs watching — corn syrup goes from glossy to scorched quickly. Spoon the pan syrup over the apples first so the tops glaze rather than dry out.
- Pan choiceUse a shallow dish that holds the quarters in a single layer. Piled up, the lower apples steam and the top ones dry, and the syrup will not reduce to a glaze.
- YieldServes four at breakfast, alongside bacon or on hot buttered toast. The dish reheats well and the syrup thickens as it cools.
This comes from the run of promotional cookbooks issued in the early twentieth century by the Corn Products Refining Company, which made both Karo syrup and Mazola oil; every recipe in such a book is built to use them, which is why an apple dish that would ordinarily call for butter and brown sugar calls for corn oil and corn syrup instead. Karo was introduced in the early 1900s and marketed hard as a cheaper, more reliable sweetener than cane sugar, and cookbooks like this one were one vehicle among several — alongside magazine and newspaper advertising — for teaching cooks to substitute it. The title is loose: the apples are baked, then browned under the broiler at the end, and "grilled" here means only that finishing blast of top heat. Baked apples at breakfast are often said to have been unremarkable in American households of the period, when the morning meal is generally described as hot and substantial.