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Cottage Cup Cakes
1/4 cup Mazola 3/4 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/3 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 cup milk 1½ cups flour 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/8 teaspoon salt Cream together the Mazola, sugar, eggs, well beaten, and the vanilla. Add the flour, salt and baking powder sifted together, alternately with the milk. Beat until the mixture looks bubbly, transfer to muffin pans oiled with Mazola and bake in a quick oven, 375 degrees F., about twenty-five minutes. Serve with Fluffy Fruit Sauce or Caramel Sauce.
A plain cup cake from a corn-products advertising booklet, lightened with cornstarch. The ingredient list and the method disagree in one place, which is the first thing to sort out.
- The missing cornstarchThe cornstarch appears in the ingredients but never in the instructions. Sift it with the flour, salt and baking powder; it is there to soften the crumb by diluting the flour's protein, the same trick that turns all-purpose flour into a cake flour substitute.
- MazolaCorn oil, one of the products this booklet exists to sell (the recipe also names Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch). Any neutral vegetable oil works. Note that you are creaming oil rather than butter, so there is no aeration to build; "creamed" here simply means beaten smooth.
- "Quick oven, 375 degrees"The book gives you the number, which is unusual and helpful. Modern cupcake recipes usually sit in the 350-375F range, and 25 minutes at 375F is about right for standard muffin cups.
- 1/3 teaspoon vanillaAn odd fraction to measure now. Round to a scant half teaspoon; a full teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- "Beat until the mixture looks bubbly"With oil-based batters this is a real cue rather than vagueness the surface goes visibly foamy. Do not carry it much further, as the batter is worked enough already and extra beating toughens the crumb.
- Muffin pansOil the cups directly as written, or use paper liners. Fill about two-thirds full.
- YieldRoughly 12 standard cupcakes. The batter is deliberately unfrosted the booklet expects a poured sauce, so these are closer to a plain tea cake than a modern frosted cupcake.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the maker of Mazola oil, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, and Karo syrup. Booklets of this kind were the standard way a new industrial ingredient entered American home cooking in the early twentieth century: give the cook a full set of familiar recipes in which the new product replaces butter or lard, and the substitution stops feeling like a substitution. Corn oil was a byproduct of wet corn milling, and cheap it was pressed into service against butter on grounds of both economy and, in later decades, health. The instruction to serve with Fluffy Fruit Sauce or Caramel Sauce points the reader to two more recipes elsewhere in the same book.