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Drop Fruit Cookies
2/3 cup Karo, Blue Label 2/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup Mazola 1/2 cup milk 2 eggs 1 cup raisins 1/2 cup chopped dates 3 teaspoons baking powder 3¼ cups flour 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon clove 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon nutmeg Sift dry ingredients together and add fruit. Mix Karo, sugar, Mazola, milk and egg and beat in flour mixture. Drop by teaspoonfuls (an inch apart) onto a pan oiled with Mazola, and bake in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F., about fifteen minutes.
A corn-products promotional recipe, so nearly every branded item in it is still on the shelf under the same name. A few points need translating, and one instruction in the original is simply wrong for the dough as written.
- Karo Blue LabelKaro sold syrup under colour-coded labels, Blue Label being the light one alongside the darker Red and Green Label syrups. Ordinary light corn syrup is the direct substitute, measured 2/3 cup.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral vegetable oil works in both the batter and for greasing the pan; the oil here does the job creamed butter does in other cookie doughs.
- The cornstarchThe 1/4 cup of Argo is not thickening anything. It dilutes the gluten in the flour and gives a shorter, more tender crumb; do not leave it out and do not swap it for more flour.
- Flour quantityThe original reads "31/4 cups" and means 3 1/4 cups. That is a stiff drop dough by modern standards, so hold back the last quarter cup and add it only if the batter slumps off the spoon rather than mounding.
- An inch apartThese may spread somewhat; if the dough seems slack, give them more room on the sheet.
- Both eggsThe ingredient list says two eggs and the method says "egg." Use both, beaten into the wet mixture.
- OvenThe recipe helpfully gives its own number: 350F. Fifteen minutes is about right for a teaspoon-sized cookie, but pull them when the edges are set and the centres still look soft, as they firm considerably on the pan.
- YieldPerhaps four or five dozen small cookies. They keep well in a tin for several days.
This comes from the era when the Corn Products Refining Company published booklets whose sole function was to put Karo syrup, Mazola oil and Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch into the same bowl at once, and the recipe reads exactly like that: three house brands, three roles, one cookie. Corn syrup was promoted hard in American home baking from the 1900s onward as a sugar-stretcher and moisture-keeper, and Mazola was pitched to the modern cook as an alternative to baking with butter. The dried fruit and the clove-cinnamon-nutmeg trio place it in the long line of American spiced fruit drop cookies, close cousins to the hermit, a New England keeping-cookie often said to date to the mid-nineteenth century though printed recipes surface later in the century, and valued because raisins, spice and syrup all helped it survive a week in a covered tin.