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Karo-d Carrots
1 3 bunches carrots (2 pounds) Salt 1/2 cup Karo, Blue Label 2 tablespoons Mazola Mace Scrape the carrots, then cut in halves or quarters lengthwise, place in a baking dish, dust with salt and a little mace, pour in the Karo and Mazola mixed, add a little boiling water-enough to make a thin syrup to barely cover the bottom-and bake until tender in a moderate oven.
A simple glazed carrot dish from a corn-products promotional booklet, built around two branded ingredients that both still exist. Almost nothing needs translating except the oven and the syrup grade.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. At that temperature thick carrot batons need roughly 40 to 50 minutes; thinner quarters closer to 30.
- Karo, Blue LabelKaro was sold in several labelled versions; Blue Label was the light grade (others were darker, and at least one was maple-flavoured). Use ordinary light corn syrup, half a cup.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral oil works, and 2 tablespoons of butter gives a better glaze if you are not bound to the original.
- MaceGround mace, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and slightly more floral than nutmeg itself. A scant quarter teaspoon over 2 pounds of carrots is a "little"; more turns soapy.
- Quantity of carrotsThe parenthetical 2 pounds is the figure to trust. Buy by weight rather than by bunch, since bunch size varies wildly.
- The waterEnough boiling water only to film the bottom of the dish. Too much and the syrup never reduces, leaving you with poached carrots in sweet liquid instead of a glaze.
- Covering and bastingThe recipe leaves the dish open. Cover with foil for the first two thirds so the carrots steam through, then uncover and baste once or twice while the syrup thickens and colours.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. It is markedly sweet by current standards; a squeeze of lemon at the end balances it.
This comes from the era when food companies published recipe booklets as advertising, and the pairing of Karo syrup with Mazola oil is the giveaway: both were products of the Corn Products Refining Company, which spent the first decades of the twentieth century persuading American cooks that corn syrup belonged in everyday cooking rather than only in candy and baking. Glazing root vegetables in sugar and fat was already old practice, and the technique here is essentially the classic braised-and-glazed carrot with corn syrup standing in for sugar or honey. The mace is a period marker too, being far more common in American kitchens then than now, when nutmeg has largely displaced it.