Rice Cakes
3 cups cooked rice 1 egg 1 tablespoon Karo 1 tablespoon Argo or Mazola Kingsford's Cornstarch Combine the rice, beaten egg, Karo and cornstarch and form in thin round cakes. Brown in Mazola and serve with Karo. ABIES live on what B they digest. One of the newest and most adequate formulas for routine bottle - feeding used successfully in hospitals, contains Karo Blue Label-one of the most easily assimilated of all energizing foods -because it is almost all dextrose. The formula may be obtained from your physician.
A leftover-rice breakfast cake from a corn-products promotional booklet, which explains why four brand names appear in five lines of ingredients. Translated into generic terms it is straightforward, though the ingredient list has been garbled in the original setting.
- The brands, decodedKaro is corn syrup (Blue Label was the light grade; modern light corn syrup is the closest match, though the booklet's "almost all dextrose" is sales copy rather than a fair description of it). Mazola is corn oil. Argo and Kingsford's were both cornstarch brands owned by the same company.
- The garbled line"1 tablespoon Argo or Mazola Kingsford's Cornstarch" is a typesetting collision of two brand names for the same product. Read it as 1 tablespoon cornstarch; the Mazola belongs with the frying, not the mixing.
- Bind and restThree cups of cooked rice with one egg and a tablespoon of starch is a lean binder. Short or medium-grain rice, cooked soft and still slightly sticky, holds together; long-grain rice will crumble unless you mash a portion of it first. Chilling the mixture 20 minutes before shaping helps considerably.
- Thin means thinPress the cakes to about 1/2 inch and no thicker. The starch and egg set at the surface, so a thick cake stays pasty in the middle while the outside browns.
- FryingShallow-fry in about 1/4 inch of corn oil over medium heat, roughly 350F, three to four minutes a side. Corn oil was the selling point here; any neutral oil behaves the same.
- YieldThree cups of rice gives eight to ten cakes, enough for three or four at breakfast. Served with corn syrup poured over, as written; warmed syrup pours better.
- Ignore the closing paragraphThe lines about bottle-feeding formulas are advertising copy that ran alongside the recipe, not part of it. Corn syrup was commonly used as the carbohydrate in modified-milk formulas in the 1920s and 1930s, but this is not current advice; infant feeding today should follow a pediatrician's guidance.
This comes from a booklet published by the Corn Products Refining Company, which owned Karo, Mazola, Argo and Kingsford's, and the recipe exists chiefly to use three of them at once. Such branded cookbooks are often said to have circulated very widely in early twentieth-century America: frequently distributed free or for a few cents in return for a label, they taught technique honestly enough while ensuring every dish routed through the sponsor's pantry. The dish itself is older than the advertising -- fried cakes of leftover rice appear in nineteenth-century American cookery as a thrift breakfast alongside similar treatments of cold hominy and cold mush, generally served with syrup or molasses. What dates this version is the corn syrup, a product commercialized in the late nineteenth century and pushed hard through the 1920s as a cheap, easily digested sugar, a claim the closing advertisement extends into the nursery.