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Creamed Ham, Tongue or Corned Beef
2 cups diced, cooked ham, tongue or corned beef 2 tablespoons Mazola 1 pint milk 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/3 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Make a sauce of the Mazola, cornstarch, seasonings and milk. When boiling, stir in the meat. Let stand ten minutes, and serve on toast with boiled rice or boiled or mashed potatoes. THE Average Diet needs bulk, which green salads supply -they provide vitamins and minerals for they are sun foods. Serve at least one green salad a day-dressed with Mazola and vinegar, or served with Mazola Mayonnaise. Salads can act as the main part of the meal if they contain nuts, hardboiled eggs, fish, meat or cheese, and are put together with Mazola Mayonnaise, for Mazola Dressings contribute reserve force, the motive power of life. Mazola is a pure oil pressed from corn. It is deliciously flavored-pleasing to the eye, and a true food.
A cornstarch-thickened white sauce carrying diced cooked meat — the standard American breakfast dish for using up a Sunday joint. The recipe comes from a Corn Products Refining Company booklet, so the brand names are doing promotional work; ordinary pantry staples substitute exactly.
- The brandsMazola is corn oil, still sold under that name. Argo and Kingsford's were the company's cornstarch labels; any plain cornstarch works. Butter gives a rounder sauce if you have no reason to keep it dairy-light.
- Cook the starch outWhisk the cornstarch into a little cold milk before adding the rest, or it will lump. Once it comes to a boil, keep it there a full minute while stirring — cornstarch needs that to lose its raw, chalky edge and reach full thickness.
- ProportionsTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a medium sauce that coats but still pours. If you want it thick enough to mound on toast, go to three.
- SaltThe odd 1/3 teaspoon is an unusual measure and can be treated as approximate; with corned beef or tongue you may want none at all. Salt at the end, after the meat has warmed through and given up its own seasoning.
- "Let stand ten minutes"The recipe doesn't say where; best read as off the direct heat, covered, so the meat warms without toughening rather than sitting on a boiling burner, where the sauce can skin over and scorch on the bottom. The meat is already cooked; it needs heating, not cooking.
- TongueWhole beef tongue is a special-order item at most butchers now, and takes about three hours of simmering plus peeling before it is the "cooked tongue" this recipe assumes. Sliced deli tongue, diced, is the shortcut.
- YieldTwo cups of meat in a pint of sauce serves four generously over toast, or four to six stretched over rice or potatoes.
This is a promotional cookbook: the Corn Products Refining Company published booklets like this through the 1910s and 1920s to teach cooks to use Mazola oil and Argo cornstarch, both relatively new consumer products from the corn-milling industry. The salad paragraph tacked onto the end of the recipe is advertising copy of its period — "reserve force, the motive power of life" fits the vitamin enthusiasm that followed the identification of the "accessory food factors" around 1912. The dish itself is likely older than the booklet: creamed leftover meat on toast was a familiar way of using a large boiled or baked joint later in the week. Substituting oil for butter in the white sauce, and cornstarch for flour, are the brand-driven changes here.