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Quick Karo Nut Sauce
1 pint Karo, Blue or Orange Label 1/2 cup chopped nut meats, 3 drops vanilla 1/4 teaspoon baking soda any kind Boil the Karo five minutes rapidly, add the soda, cool a little and stir in the nuts and vanilla.
A three-minute ice cream sauce from a corn syrup promotional booklet. The only tricky moment is the soda, which makes the whole pan foam up.
- Use a deep panA pint of syrup at a hard boil will climb when the baking soda goes in. Use a roomy saucepan and pull it off the heat before adding the soda.
- Karo labelsThe colored labels marked different Karo varieties; Blue Label was the clear, nearly flavorless crystal white syrup. Any light corn syrup stands in for it, and dark corn syrup gives a fuller, more caramel-edged sauce.
- A pintTwo cups. Modern corn syrup bottles run 16 fl oz, so one standard bottle is the full quantity.
- What the soda doesIt neutralizes the slight acidity of the syrup and drives the foaming, which aerates the sauce and lightens its texture. A quarter teaspoon in two cups is a seasoning quantity, not a leavener, and more will taste soapy.
- Five minutes rapidlyA hard boil for five minutes concentrates the syrup enough to thicken on cooling without taking it to a candy stage. The recipe gives no temperature; carried much past a soft-ball stage, the cooled sauce sets hard.
- Three drops of vanillaA very small dose for two cups; there is no way to tell from the page whether it is deliberate or a misprint for a larger measure. Vanilla is volatile, so add it once the pan has stopped steaming, as the recipe directs.
- NutsToast them first if you want them to register against the sweetness. The recipe allows any kind; add them after the syrup has cooled a little, as directed.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups, enough for eight to ten servings over ice cream, pudding or waffles. It keeps for weeks covered at room temperature and will need warming to pour.
Karo corn syrup was introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company in the first years of the twentieth century, and the booklets that followed it were written to persuade cooks that glucose syrup could do everything cane sugar and molasses did. Sauces like this one were the easiest argument: corn syrup does not crystallize the way a boiled sugar syrup will, so an untrained cook could hard-boil it, cool it and get a smooth pourable sauce with no risk of graininess. The baking soda trick belongs to the same family as the soda in old-fashioned taffy and popcorn brittle, where a pinch of alkali is added to hot syrup for lightness and a faint toasted flavor.