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Karo Toffee
1 pint Karo, Blue or Orange Label 2 cups sugar 1/2 cup rich milk Few grains salt 1 tablespoon Mazola 6 drops vanilla Combine the ingredients with the exception of the vanilla, and boil until the mixture forms a fairly firm ball when tried in cold water, 252 degrees F. Add the vanilla, beat a few min utes until the mixture is beginning to cream and looks thick, then pour one-half inch deep into a pan lightly oiled with Mazola and let stand several hours to become firm. Cut in sections with a sharp knife and wrap in waxed paper.
A straightforward boiled corn-syrup caramel from a corn products promotional book, so both branded ingredients are simply corn syrup and corn oil. The temperature is given, which makes it easier to reproduce than most candy recipes of the era.
- The hinge: 252F, and check your thermometerFirm-ball stage is narrow. A few degrees under and the toffee will never set past a sticky chew; a few over and it hardens to a tooth-breaker. Calibrate the thermometer in boiling water first and treat the cold-water test as the confirmation, not the guess.
- AltitudeSubtract about 2F from the target for every 1,000 feet above sea level. At 5,000 feet you are aiming closer to 242F.
- Karo labelsBlue Label was the crystal-white light syrup; the Orange Label appears to have been one of the company's other grades, though exactly which is not clear from the book. Use light corn syrup for a pale toffee, dark for a molasses-ish one. A pint is 2 cups, roughly 22 oz by weight.
- MazolaCorn oil, then and now. Any neutral oil works for the tablespoon in the batch and for greasing the pan; butter will brown differently but is not wrong.
- Rich milkWhole milk at minimum; 'rich milk' in a period kitchen usually meant unskimmed milk, sometimes milk with cream added, so half-and-half is a reasonable reading. The milk solids are what brown and give the toffee its flavour, so use a heavy-bottomed pan and stir at the bottom to keep them from scorching.
- The beating stepBeat only until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens slightly, which is what the recipe means by 'beginning to cream'. Take it much further and the candy can turn opaque and grainy like fudge instead of setting as a chew.
- Pan and yieldThe batch runs to roughly 2 lb. An 8-inch square pan is about right for the half-inch depth specified; a 9-inch pan will give a thinner, harder sheet.
- Wrapping is not decorationCorn-syrup candy pulls moisture from the air, and cut pieces left unwrapped will soon stick together into a mass. Wrap each in waxed paper or cellophane and keep them in a tin.
Karo syrup and Mazola oil were both products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and books like this one existed to demonstrate that a household could cook almost anything with corn derivatives — syrup in place of sugar, corn oil in place of butter and lard. That commercial logic explains why a toffee here uses a full pint of corn syrup: its glucose and dextrins interfere with sucrose crystal formation, so the candy stays chewy and smooth rather than turning grainy, which made corn syrup genuinely useful to home confectioners rather than merely cheap. Toffee itself is an English word of uncertain origin, generally traced to the early nineteenth century and to the same family as "taffy"; by the time this book appeared it covered any boiled sugar-and-butter or sugar-and-milk sweet cut into squares. The precise Fahrenheit reading is a sign of its period, when candy thermometers had begun to replace the older practice of judging stages by eye and by cold water alone.