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Plain Confectioner's Icing
1/2 tablespoon Mazola 2 tablespoons top milk 1/4 teaspoon flavoring Few grains salt 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Sifted confectioner's sugar to spread, about 1½ cups Combine the ingredients, beating thoroughly.
An uncooked spreading icing from a corn-products promotional book, built on oil rather than butter. It is simple, but the ingredient list carries three trade names and one orphaned fragment that need sorting out before you start.
- Mazola is corn oilMazola was, and is, refined corn oil. Any neutral vegetable oil works identically; the icing will stay soft and glossy rather than setting firm the way a butter icing does.
- Top milkBefore homogenisation, the cream rose to the top of the bottle and "top milk" meant the richer few inches poured off first. Half-and-half is the closest modern match; whole milk will work but gives a thinner, less opaque icing.
- Argo and Kingsford's are cornstarchBoth were brands of the same company. Use plain cornstarch. Here it is a bulking and body agent, not a thickener, since nothing is cooked.
- Raw cornstarch has a limitA full tablespoon of uncooked starch reads chalky on the tongue to modern palates. Beat it very thoroughly into the liquid before any sugar goes in, and consider that half the amount gives a smoother mouthfeel.
- Sugar to spread"About 1 1/2 cups" is deliberately loose. Sift the confectioner's sugar and add it gradually until the icing falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and holds a shape briefly. Humidity will move the figure either way.
- FlavoringA quarter teaspoon of unspecified extract, meant to be vanilla, almond or lemon at the cook's discretion. With this little dairy behind it, almond and lemon both read strongly.
- The second ingredient listThe five lines beginning "1/4 cup Mazola" belong to a different recipe entirely and have no method attached to them. They are not part of the icing and should be ignored; the icing is complete at "beating thoroughly."
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. On these quantities it should be roughly enough to cover the top of one eight- or nine-inch layer, or a dozen small cakes. It will not hold piped detail.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the firm behind Mazola oil, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, and Karo syrup. Books of this kind were sold or given away by the thousand in the first decades of the twentieth century, and their purpose is visible in every line: the recipes generally find a place for at least one house brand, here two. The plain confectioner's icing is a genuinely useful thing, though. One common household choice lay between a boiled icing, which required a sugar thermometer or a practised eye for the thread stage, and an uncooked one stirred together in a bowl. This is the second kind, with corn oil standing in for the butter or cream a nineteenth-century cookbook would have specified, and cornstarch apparently added to give the thin oil-and-milk mixture enough body to sit on a cake.