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Scotch Cup Cakes
1¾ cups rolled oats 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/3 cup Mazola 3/4 cup Karo, Blue Label 1 egg 1/4 cup milk 1/3 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 cup each chopped nuts and raisins Combine the ingredients in the order given, beating well. Transfer to muffin pans oiled with Mazola and bake twenty-five to thirty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 to 375 degrees F.
A brand-driven oatmeal muffin from a corn-products promotional booklet: the corn syrup does the sweetening, the corn oil the shortening, and the cornstarch softens the crumb. A few of the named products no longer exist in the same form.
- Karo Blue LabelKaro was sold in several colour-coded grades; Blue Label is generally identified as the darker syrup, cut with refiners' syrup, rather than the pale one now sold as light corn syrup. Dark corn syrup is the closest current match.
- Mazola and ArgoMazola is corn oil, so any neutral vegetable oil works. Argo and Kingsford's Cornstarch is plain cornstarch; here it is doing the work of a soft, low-protein flour, so do not leave it out and do not swap in flour by volume.
- OvenThe book helpfully gives numbers, and they hold: 350-375F. At the lower end expect the full thirty minutes.
- The oatsRolled oats of the period were what we now call old-fashioned rolled oats. Quick oats will absorb the liquid faster and give a pastier crumb; instant oats will turn the batter to mush.
- Soda measurementThe "1/3 teaspoon soda" is not a measure any modern spoon set makes; a rounded 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda is the closest practical reading. The refiners' syrup in a dark corn syrup is mildly acidic and may be what it reacts with.
- Rest the batterThe recipe moves straight from mixing to the pans, but ten minutes standing lets the oats take up the quarter cup of milk. Otherwise the batter looks alarmingly dry and the baked cake can be gritty.
- Pans and yieldOil the tins as directed rather than using paper liners. Fills about twelve standard muffin cups two-thirds full.
- Sweetness and keepingThere is no granulated sugar at all, so these are moderately sweet and taste of oat and spice. The syrup keeps them moist for two or three days in a tin, longer than a sugar-sweetened muffin.
This comes from the era when a cooking booklet was an advertisement: the recipe names Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch, Mazola oil and Karo syrup, all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and such recipes exist to demonstrate that corn syrup can sweeten a cake and corn oil can replace butter. The "Scotch" in the title is doing the same work it does in Scotch oatcake — it signals oatmeal, long the grain of Scottish baking, rather than any particular Scottish recipe. Oatmeal cakes and cookies spread quickly in American home baking in the first decades of the twentieth century, helped along by wartime campaigns to use oats and other grains in place of wheat flour, and by the appearance here of only half a cup of flour to nearly two cups of oats you can see that thinking still at work.