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Butterscotch Bread Squares
2 cups bread flour 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 cup Mazola 1¼ cups milk 1 cup Karo, Blue or Orange Label 1/3 cup chopped nut meats Sift together the dry ingredients. Stir in the Mazola and milk. Oil a medium-sized dripping pan with Mazola and put in the mixture one-half inch thick. Bake in a hot oven, 375 degrees F. When almost done spread with Karo, Blue Orange Label, boiled until it forms a thread, and stirred until creamy. Sprinkle with chopped nut meats and finish baking.
A promotional recipe from a corn-products cookbook, so every branded item is simply a corn derivative under a trade name. The one thing to get right is the syrup topping: it has to be cooked to thread stage and stirred only until it turns creamy, then spread while it is still soft enough to move.
- The brand namesMazola is corn oil; Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch is ordinary cornstarch; Karo is corn syrup. Nothing here needs a substitute beyond the generic version of each.
- Karo labelsKaro was sold in several grades identified by label colour, with the lighter grades pale and neutral and the darker ones stronger and more caramel-like. Light corn syrup gives the closest result; dark corn syrup will read more strongly of molasses, which suits the "butterscotch" idea.
- "A hot oven, 375 degrees F"The book supplies its own number, which is useful, though 375F would now be called moderately hot rather than hot. Trust the figure, not the adjective.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting or sheet pan. Since the batter goes in only half an inch deep, a 9x13 pan or a quarter sheet pan is the right size for this quantity.
- TimingNo time is given. A half-inch layer at 375F is nearly set in about 18 to 22 minutes; spread the syrup then and return it for roughly 5 minutes more to fix the topping and the nuts.
- Thread stageCorn syrup boiled until it spins a thread is around 230 to 235F. Stirring as it cools clouds it and thickens it to a spreadable, fondant-like state; if it sets hard in the pan, warm it briefly to loosen before spreading.
- Why the cornstarchA quarter cup of cornstarch replacing part of the bread flour cuts the gluten and softens the crumb, the same trick used to make a substitute for cake flour. It is doing real work here, not padding.
- The batterThere is no egg and 1 1/4 cups of milk to 2 1/4 cups of dry ingredients, so this is likely a thick batter rather than a dough. Expect something between a batter bread and a sheet cake.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantity would cut into roughly 12 to 16 squares.
This comes from one of the cookbooks issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the maker of Karo, Mazola and Argo, whose recipe booklets appeared in large numbers in the 1910s and 1920s and existed to show cooks how to use corn syrup, corn oil and cornstarch in place of sugar, butter and wheat flour. That substitution was not merely commercial: wartime and postwar sugar shortages made corn syrup a genuinely practical sweetener, and household cookery of the period is full of Karo cakes, Karo frostings and Karo candies. "Butterscotch" here refers to the flavour and colour the boiled syrup takes on rather than to any butter, of which there is none in the recipe at all. The name is generally traced to nineteenth-century Yorkshire confectionery, and by this period it had loosened to mean almost any brown-sugar-and-caramel note.