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Breakfast Cake
2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1 cup flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup Karo 3 tablespoons Mazola Sift together the dry ingredients; add Karo, salt and cinnamon. Beat the egg and add with the milk and Mazola. Spread in a shallow pan oiled with Mazola, and sprinkle with one-fourth cup granulated sugar mixed with one and one-half teaspoons cinnamon. Bake in a hot oven, 375 degrees F. and serve warm. THE cost of living fluctuates. It depends entirely on how intelligently you select, buy and use foods. You can have delicious, satisfying results with reasonable expenditure. Try more meatless meals-supplemented with salads dressed with Mazola Mayonnaise, or with vegetables as the main course-fried in deep Mazola to make them even more substantial. Introduce delicious simple desserts, made with Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch and Karo-or omit desserts and use Griddle Cakes, Waffles, or French Pancakes made with Mazola and served with Karo-or Hot Biscuits, Sally Lunn or Corn Bread made by the recipes in this book. Such foods are not only a treat, nutritious and healthful-they also help to cut the cost of eating.
A brand-booklet coffee cake in which corn syrup does most of the sweetening. It works, but the ingredient list and method contradict each other in one place and the recipe never tells you how long to bake.
- The brands, translatedArgo and Kingsford's are plain cornstarch; Karo is corn syrup (sold in both light and dark grades, and the recipe does not specify which); Mazola is corn oil. Another neutral vegetable oil will stand in for the Mazola.
- Salt and cinnamon appear twiceThey are in the sifted dry ingredients and then again in the line "add Karo, salt and cinnamon." Use the stated amounts once, in the dry mix, and read the second line as simply "add Karo."
- OvenThe booklet calls 375F a "hot oven," which is lower than the period's usual sense of the term. Trust the number, not the adjective, and bake on a rack in the middle of the oven.
- Missing timeNo baking time is given. A batter this size in a shallow pan is done in roughly 20 to 25 minutes, when the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- "Shallow pan"The size is not given; a pan of roughly 8 inches square suits this quantity of batter, and a much larger one would spread it very thin.
- The batter is meant to be looseHalf a cup of corn syrup plus half a cup of milk against one cup of flour makes a pourable batter, not a spoonable dough. Spread it thin rather than adding flour to stiffen it.
- Corn syrup behaviourGlucose syrup browns faster and holds more moisture than granulated sugar, so the edges colour early and the crumb stays damp. Pull it as soon as the centre is set.
- YieldA small cake, enough for a handful of squares depending on the pan used. It is best the day it is made, and the instruction to serve warm is not incidental — cold, the syrup makes it slightly gummy.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the makers of Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, Karo syrup and Mazola oil — all products of the American corn-milling industry, which by the early twentieth century had turned surplus maize into starch, glucose syrup and refined oil and needed to teach home cooks what to do with them. The closing paragraph about the fluctuating cost of living, meatless meals and cheaper desserts places the booklet in the years around and after the First World War, when food economy campaigns gave manufacturers a ready-made argument: corn syrup was cheaper than sugar, corn oil cheaper than butter, and both were pressed into recipes where a nineteenth-century cook would have used the dearer ingredient. The cake itself is an ordinary cinnamon-sugar breakfast cake of a type common across American cookbooks of the period; what is distinctive is that every fat and sweetener in it carries a trademark.