Fudge Squares
1/2 cup Mazola 2 squares chocolate, melted 1 cup Karo, Red or Blue Label 2 eggs, beaten 1/2 cup sugar 1/3 teaspoon vanilla 1/3 cup milk 1½ cups bread flour 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3 teaspoons baking powder Few grains salt Pour the Mazola and Karo into a mixing bowl. Add the eggs, chocolate and vanilla. Beat and fold in alternately, the milk, and the dry ingredients. Beat in the sugar and stir till the grain almost disappears. Pour, one-half inch deep, into a medium-sized cake pan oiled with Mazola, and bake about thirty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. Cover with Chocolate or Mocha Icing and cut in squares.
A brownie-adjacent sheet cake from a corn-products advertising booklet, which is why every branded ingredient is named. It works, but the transcription carries a few of the printer's ambiguities.
- The garbled fractions"11/2 cups bread flour" is 1 1/2 cups. The "1/3 teaspoon vanilla" and "1/3 cup milk" may be misprints for 1/2, though there is no way to know; a scant 1/3 to 1/2 cup milk and 1/3 to 1/2 teaspoon vanilla all give a workable batter.
- Mazola and KaroMazola is corn oil, so any neutral oil serves. Karo Blue Label was the light corn syrup still sold today; Red Label was darker and more strongly flavoured, closer in effect to today's dark corn syrup. Either works; the red gives a slightly molasses-ish note.
- Squares of chocolateA square means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. This is not sweetened chocolate — the sugar and the full cup of corn syrup are carrying all the sweetness.
- Flour plus cornstarchBread flour cut with two tablespoons of cornstarch is the standard period workaround for cake flour. Modern all-purpose flour is softer than 1920s bread flour; use 1 1/2 cups all-purpose and keep the cornstarch, or simply use 1 1/2 cups cake flour and drop the cornstarch.
- The pan is the instruction that matters"One-half inch deep" is the real direction, not the pan size. Poured thicker, this batter will still be underbaked at thirty minutes. Spread it half an inch deep in a 9x13 or a jelly-roll pan and ignore "medium-sized cake pan."
- OvenThe book gives 350F outright alongside "moderate oven." At half an inch deep, start checking at 18 to 20 minutes; thirty is the outside limit.
- "Stir till the grain almost disappears"Most likely a direction to beat until the sugar crystals have largely dissolved into the syrup and oil, rather than until the batter is smooth as such. Stop there; further beating develops the flour and toughens the crumb.
- YieldA 9x13 pan cut into squares gives roughly 24 pieces. Ice while the sheet is completely cool, then cut with a hot dry knife.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, which owned Mazola corn oil, Karo syrup, and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch — hence a single short recipe naming four house brands by label colour. Booklets of this kind circulated free from the 1910s onward, and their purpose was to show that corn oil could replace butter and that corn syrup could replace part of the sugar in ordinary home baking, a case that mattered a great deal during and just after the First World War, when both butter and refined sugar were subject to conservation campaigns. The result here is characteristic of syrup-based cakes: they stay moist for days, because corn syrup is hygroscopic and resists crystallising. Placing it under "Supper" reflects the older American sense of supper as the lighter evening meal, where a tray of iced squares was a reasonable thing to put on the table.