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Southern Gingerbread
1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1 teaspoon soda 1 cup Karo, Blue Label 3/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 2¾ cups flour 1½ teaspoons ginger 1/2 teaspoon each cinnamon and clove 1 cup boiling water 1/4 cup Mazola Combine the ingredients in the order given. Beat thoroughly, transfer to a medium-sized dripping pan oiled with Mazola and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F.
An eggless, butterless gingerbread built entirely from Corn Products Refining Company goods — corn syrup for the molasses, corn oil for the butter, cornstarch for part of the flour. It works, but it behaves differently from a molasses gingerbread and wants a few notes.
- The order matters"Combine the ingredients in the order given" is the whole method: dry goods and syrup first, then the cup of boiling water, then the oil last. The boiling water thins the syrup and blooms the spices; adding the oil at the end keeps it emulsified into an already-warm batter.
- Karo Blue LabelKaro was sold in several grades; Blue Label was a golden table syrup, not the palest of them (that was Crystal White). Light corn syrup is the nearest supermarket substitute, though it gives a paler, milder gingerbread; for the darker, faintly bitter cake most people expect, replace half the cup with molasses.
- Soda without acidMolasses is acidic and drives baking soda hard; corn syrup is much closer to neutral, so the teaspoon of soda has less acid to work against and will rely largely on breaking down in the oven heat. Expect a closer, moister crumb rather than a high springy one.
- Cornstarch in the flourThe quarter cup of cornstarch stands in for part of the flour and lowers the protein, which softens the crumb. Measure the 2 3/4 cups of flour by spooning and levelling; scooping adds enough extra to turn this batter stodgy.
- MazolaMazola is corn oil. Any neutral vegetable oil does the same job, in the batter and for greasing the pan.
- Dripping panA dripping pan is the shallow rectangular roasting pan that sat under a joint — for this quantity of batter, a 9 by 13 inch pan is the right size. Anything deeper and thirty minutes will not set the centre.
- Oven and doneness350 F is stated in the recipe and can be taken at face value. Start checking at 25 minutes: the top should spring back and a tester come out clean. This batter is thin going in and stays moist, so a few damp crumbs are acceptable.
- YieldAbout twelve generous squares from a 9 by 13 pan. It keeps well for two or three days wrapped, and improves on the second day as the spices settle.
This comes from one of the promotional cookbooks published by the Corn Products Refining Company, the firm behind Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, Karo syrup and Mazola oil — every branded ingredient in the list is theirs, which is the entire reason the booklet exists. Formulas of this kind, without eggs or butter and leaning on corn syrup for much of the sweetening, echo the substitutions urged by the voluntary household conservation campaigns of the First World War, when wheat, sugar and dairy fats were to be saved and corn products were promoted as patriotic stand-ins; the booklet's own date, however, is not established here. "Southern" here looks like loose branding rather than geography, and its association with dark, soft, spiced sheet gingerbreads as against crisper rolled kinds is traditional usage rather than documented fact.