Home › Breakfast › Hot Karo Syrup
Hot Karo Syrup
In very cold weather, Karo, either Blue Label or Orange Label, is even better if heated before using on griddle cakes, waffles, and with fried or browned cereals, or hot biscuits.
Pour the syrup into a saucepan. To each cupful add one-fourth teaspoon baking soda. Bring to a boil and serve.
A manufacturer's serving note rather than a true recipe, but it does tell you to do something to a food, and the one active step deserves attention.
- The soda is not optional flavouringA quarter teaspoon of baking soda per cup neutralises the faint acidity of corn syrup, softening the flavour. It also makes the syrup foam vigorously the moment it warms.
- Use a pan far larger than you thinkCorn syrup plus soda climbs the sides of the pan as it heats. Choose a saucepan three or four times the volume of the syrup and stir as it comes up, or expect it on the stovetop.
- "Bring to a boil" means barelyCorn syrup held at a hard boil concentrates and can set firm as it cools. Take it off as soon as bubbles break the surface across the whole pan.
- The labelsKaro was sold in several colour-coded grades, the lighter ones plain corn syrup and the darker ones blended with cane refiner's syrup for a stronger, more molasses-like taste; which grade each label denoted is not clear from this page. Any light or dark corn syrup works here.
- Modern corn syrupSupermarket Karo light syrup is sold with a little added vanilla, which survives warming perfectly well. It is not high-fructose corn syrup, despite the common confusion.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; it simply scales the soda per cupful. Warm the pitcher or the syrup will be tepid by the second waffle.
Karo appeared on American grocery shelves in the first years of the twentieth century, and its promotional cookbooks are the reason pages like this one exist: the aim is less to teach cooking than to widen the number of moments in the day when a reader reaches for the tin. Hot syrup on griddle cakes is often said to have been a northern winter habit, since cold syrup on a hot cake chills it instantly, and the same booklets pushed corn syrup as a cheaper stand-in for maple, which had grown expensive. The baking-soda step is a period touch, generally explained as removing a slight sharpness from the refined product; it is also, conveniently, a small piece of kitchen theatre that made a plain jar of syrup feel like something the cook had made.