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Karo Butterscotch Almond Sundae
Fill sherbet glasses with French Ice Cream, pour Butterscotch Sauce over and garnish with whipped cream and toasted almonds.
This is an assembly instruction from a corn-syrup promotional booklet, and it assumes you already have two other recipes from the same book in hand. The work is in the sauce and the almonds; the sundae itself takes a minute.
- The two missing recipes"French Ice Cream" in these booklets generally means a custard-based ice cream — egg yolks, cream, sugar, cooked and churned — rather than a flavour name. The companion "Butterscotch Sauce" is not reproduced here; sauces of that name typically combined brown sugar, butter and corn syrup, thinned with cream, though the method and cooking stage in this book are unknown. Any good custard ice cream and a butterscotch sauce will stand in.
- Why corn syrup was specifiedGlucose syrup resists crystallisation, so a butterscotch sauce made with it stays smooth and pourable instead of turning grainy in the jar. Substituting all granulated or brown sugar gives a sauce that may set hard or go sandy on cooling.
- Sauce temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. Pour the sauce warm rather than boiling hot; very hot sauce melts a channel straight through the ice cream and pools at the bottom of the glass.
- Toasting the almondsThe book specifies nothing beyond "toasted almonds." Blanched slivered or sliced almonds toast in a moderate oven (about 350F) in roughly 5–10 minutes, shaken once, until they smell nutty and are pale gold. Let them cool completely; warm nuts weep oil into whipped cream.
- Sherbet glassesThe period sherbet glass is a stemmed bowl of about 4 to 6 ounces. Modern coupe glasses or small tumblers work; expect roughly two scoops per glass.
- Whipped creamHeavy cream whipped to soft peaks with a spoonful of sugar. No stabiliser is mentioned, and the dish was clearly meant to be eaten at once — assemble at the table, not in advance.
- YieldNone is given. A quart of ice cream, a cup of sauce and half a cup of almonds serves six generously.
This entry belongs to the genre of the manufacturer's cookbook, in which a corn products company distributed free or cheap recipe booklets to teach home cooks to reach for its syrup rather than for sugar or molasses. Karo, launched in the early twentieth century, was promoted hard through exactly this kind of publication, and butterscotch sauce was an ideal vehicle: glucose syrup keeps the sauce from crystallising, so the product solved a real problem rather than merely appearing in the ingredient list. The sundae itself was by then a fixture of American soda fountains, and household booklets like this one taught the fountain's repertoire — layered ice cream, sauce, whipped cream, toasted nuts — to be reproduced at home in stemmed glassware.