About the Book
The Corn Products Refining Company hired Ida Bailey Allen — cookery writer, early radio broadcaster, and one of the most widely read food authorities in America — to write a book about corn. What it got was this: a day's four meals, each introduced by a panel of American food history, illustrated by Jack Wilbur, and carrying some two hundred recipes.
It is an advertisement. Karo, Mazola, Argo, Kingsford's and Linit are named in nearly every recipe, all of them made by the company that paid for the book, and one chapter — Corn Modernized — is a straightforward sales essay. All of that is preserved exactly as printed, because it is the point: this is what a corporate cookbook of the 1920s looked like when it was made well, and Allen's history panels are genuinely good writing that happens to be selling something.
The recipes work. They are level-measured, proportioned to serve six, and specific about heat — 375°F for the frying kettle, forty counts to brown a bit of bread — in a way that many non-commercial books of the period are not.
The book carries no date and no copyright line. Allen's prologue places it about ten years after her Food Administration work in the Great War; its exact year is being established from external records before publication.
This edition is built from a dual-engine reading of the original pages, checked against the scans.