Home › Unusual Recipes › Lemon Icing
Lemon Icing
1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon top milk 1 tablespoon Mazola Few grains salt 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Sifted confectioner's sugar to spread, about 1½ cups Combine the ingredients in the order given, adding the sugar about two tablespoonfuls at a time-beating thoroughly.
A quick uncooked glaze built on brand-name products from a corn refiner's promotional booklet. It comes together in one bowl, but two of the five ingredients need translating.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral oil works; the point is a fat that stays liquid at room temperature so the icing spreads without creaming.
- Top milkThe cream that rose to the top of a bottle of unhomogenized milk, roughly the richness of half-and-half. Use half-and-half or light cream rather than whole milk.
- The cornstarch is the hingeIt is going in raw, as a thickener and a matte-ing agent, and raw starch tastes chalky if you use more than the tablespoon called for. Sift it with the first addition of sugar so it does not sit in lumps.
- Add the sugar slowlyTwo tablespoons at a time with thorough beating is not padding; adding all the sugar at once makes it much harder to beat smooth. The recipe's roughly 1 1/2 cups is the guide.
- Sugar quantity is a guideAbout 1 1/2 cups is the starting point, but confectioner's sugar varies in how much cornstarch it already contains and lemons vary in juice. Judge by consistency.
- It stiffens on standingAn icing this heavy in sugar firms up as it dries. Spread it soon after mixing, or loosen with a few drops of milk.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities make roughly a cup of icing, enough to spread over a single small cake layer.
This comes from the era when American cookbooklets were written by ingredient manufacturers to sell ingredients, and the tell is right there in the ingredient list: Mazola, Argo, and Kingsford's were all brands of the Corn Products Refining Company, formed in 1906, with Mazola corn oil introduced a few years later. Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch were labels the company ran side by side, which is why a recipe can offer them as alternatives to each other. The dish itself is unremarkable — an icing of a kind found in any period cake chapter — but naming three house products in five lines, and using oil where a cook would ordinarily reach for butter, is what makes it worth a second look.