Iced Tea
2 quarts tea, moderately strong and freshly made 1 sliced lemon 3/4 cup Karo, Red Label Juice of one lemon Chill, add Karo and lemon juice; serve with crushed ice and lemon.
A corn-syrup company's version of iced tea, sweetened with a liquid rather than sugar so nothing settles to the bottom of the pitcher. It works, though the syrup changes both sweetness and body.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold in colour-coded grades: Blue Label was the near-flavourless crystal white syrup, Green Label was maple-flavoured, and Red Label a darker, more strongly flavoured grade. Sources differ on just how dark Red Label was; light or golden corn syrup is the usual modern stand-in, while dark corn syrup is heavier and molasses-tinged and will muddy the tea.
- Sweetness equivalentCorn syrup is less sweet than granulated sugar, often put at about three-quarters as sweet by weight, but it is also much denser per cup, so 3/4 cup here is in the same neighbourhood as an equal volume of sugar in perceived sweetness while adding noticeably more viscosity. Start with half and taste before adding the rest.
- "Moderately strong"About 1 to 2 teaspoons of loose black tea per cup of water, steeped 3 to 5 minutes and strained off the leaves. Longer steeping pulls out tannin that turns harsh and cannot be sweetened away.
- Sliced lemonAdd the slices at serving, not while chilling. Rind sitting in tea for hours releases bitter pith and oil.
- Ice dilutionCrushed ice melts fast and will thin two quarts appreciably. If you are serving over a lot of ice, keep the tea and the sweetening on the strong side.
- YieldTwo quarts plus ice serves eight to ten glasses.
Karo syrup appeared in American groceries in the early 1900s, and the Corn Products Refining Company promoted it hard through small booklets of this kind, where the syrup turns up in everything from candy to iced tea to gravy. The purpose of a recipe like this is less culinary than commercial: it demonstrates that a liquid sweetener dissolves instantly in cold tea, an advantage over granulated sugar, which sinks and grits at the bottom of the glass unless you make a syrup first. Sweetened iced tea itself was already well established by then, appearing in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century; the popular story that it was invented at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is traditional rather than documented, though the fair certainly helped spread the habit.