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Quick Muffins
4 tablespoons Mazola 1 cup milk 1/4 cup Karo, Red Label 1¾ cups bread flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's 1 egg, well beaten Cornstarch 4 teaspoons baking powder Put the ingredients in a bowl in the order mentioned. Beat until bubbly, transfer to muffin pans oiled with Mazola and bake twenty-five minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F.
A branded batter from a corn-products promotional book, so every ingredient is a trade name. The proportions are sound; the flour, the syrup and the baking time need translating.
- The brand namesMazola is corn oil, Karo is corn syrup, and Argo and Kingsford's were the company's two cornstarch labels. Any neutral oil and any cornstarch will behave identically.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold under several coloured labels, the Blue Label being the pale syrup and the Red Label the darker, more strongly flavoured one, blended with refiners' syrup. Dark corn syrup is the nearest current match; light corn syrup will work but gives a blander, paler muffin.
- The garbled ingredient lineThe list has been jumbled in printing: the cornstarch quantity is 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch, and the egg is separate from it.
- Flour and starch togetherBread flour plus a quarter cup of cornstarch is a period way of softening a strong flour. Two cups of ordinary all-purpose flour, with no cornstarch, gives much the same crumb if you would rather not keep two bags open.
- Beat until bubbly, but no furtherBecause this is an oil-and-syrup batter rather than a creamed one, brief beating is fine, but stop as soon as the flour is wet and the surface shows bubbles. Working it past that point develops gluten and gives tunnels and a rubbery top.
- Oven and time375F is what the book calls hot; by modern reckoning it is moderately hot, and it is correct for muffins. Twenty-five minutes is long for standard cups — check at eighteen to twenty minutes, when the tops spring back and a skewer comes out dry.
- PansOil the tins well and fill each about two-thirds. The syrup makes these prone to sticking; paper liners solve it outright.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffins, or eight to nine large ones. They are best within a few hours of baking.
This comes from the run of cookbooks published in the 1910s and 1920s by the Corn Products Refining Company, whose whole catalogue — Mazola oil, Karo syrup, and the Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch brands — was pressed into every recipe on the page. The genre is worth noticing: the free or near-free branded pamphlet was one way new industrial ingredients were introduced to American home cooks, and corn oil is likely to have needed the help, at a time when butter and lard were the familiar baking fats. Sweetening a breakfast muffin with corn syrup rather than sugar, and thinning strong bread flour with cornstarch, both serve the advertising as much as the baking — and yet both work.