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Cocoanut Drop Cookies
1 cup Karo, Red Label 1/3 cup Mazola 1 egg, beaten 1/2 teaspoon salt ford's Cornstarch 1¾ cups bread flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Grated rind 1/2 lemon 1 cup desiccated cocoanut 3 tablespoons Argo or Kings- 1/2 teaspoon orange extract Pour the Mazola into a mixing bowl, add the Karo, egg, and the other ingredients mentioned. Drop by small teaspoonfuls onto a pan oiled with Mazola, sprinkled thickly with cocoanut, and bake in a moderate oven, 350 to 375 degrees F., fifteen minutes.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting: it reads as 1 cup Karo Red Label, 1/3 cup Mazola, 1 egg beaten, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch, 1 3/4 cups bread flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, grated rind of 1/2 lemon, 1 cup desiccated cocoanut, 1/2 teaspoon orange extract. Note that there is no sugar at all — the corn syrup is the entire sweetener, and that governs how the dough behaves.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold by colour of label; Red Label was the darker grade, blended with refiners' syrup, and corresponds closely to what is now sold as dark corn syrup. Light corn syrup works and gives a paler, milder cookie.
- MazolaCorn oil, then a fairly new product and one of the company brands this book was published to promote. Any neutral vegetable oil behaves the same way.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchPlain cornstarch. Three tablespoons alongside the flour should soften the crumb, an all-syrup dough tending to set up chewy; best not to leave it out.
- Desiccated cocoanutUnsweetened finely shredded coconut, drier and finer than the sweetened flaked coconut in most supermarkets. Sweetened flake will work but the cookies become noticeably sweeter and the coconut on the pan scorches faster.
- Bread flourModern all-purpose gives a more tender cookie. Measure by weight if you can — 1 3/4 cups is roughly 220 g.
- The dough will be slackOil and syrup with no creamed sugar produce a soft, sticky batter rather than a stiff dough. Half an hour in the refrigerator makes the small teaspoonfuls easier to drop and keeps them from spreading into one sheet.
- Oven and watchingThe stated 350–375°F is right, but corn syrup browns much faster than granulated sugar, and so does the coconut strewn on the pan. Check at ten minutes and pull them when the edges are set and golden; fifteen minutes may already be too dark on a modern thin sheet.
- The coconut bedSprinkling the oiled pan thickly with coconut is what gives these their crust, so it is not optional decoration. Lift the cookies off while still warm — cooled corn syrup glues them down.
- YieldAbout three dozen small cookies from small teaspoonfuls. They keep well in a tin and soften rather than staling, again because of the syrup.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, whose brands — Karo syrup, Mazola oil, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch — are the only ones named anywhere in the ingredient list. Books like this were given away in the 1910s and 1920s to teach cooks how to use corn-derived products in place of the ingredients they already knew, and a cookie sweetened entirely with syrup and shortened entirely with oil makes the pitch about as plainly as it can be made. Wartime and post-war sugar conservation campaigns gave the argument real force: corn syrup was promoted heavily as a way to bake without drawing on scarce or expensive sugar, at a time when conservation was largely a matter of voluntary appeal rather than formal rationing. The desiccated coconut is a period marker of its own, since cheap dried shredded coconut from Ceylon and the Philippines had by then become an everyday grocery item rather than a luxury, and it turns up in American drop-cookie recipes of the era.