Waffles
1 egg 2½ tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons Karo, Red Label 1 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/3 cups flour 2½ tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3 teaspoons baking powder Separate the egg. Beat the white stiff and the yolk till creamy. Add to the yolk the Mazola, Karo and milk. Sift together the flour, cornstarch, baking powder and salt. Beat into the first mixture. Add the egg white whipped stiff and continue beating until bubbly. Turn into a heated waffle iron, close and bake. If using a gas or coal waffle iron, it will be necessary to oil it with Mazola and the iron should be turned after the first three minutes. If using an electric iron, oiling is unnecessary and the waffles are never turned. Serve with Karo or fruit syrup.
A brand-house waffle from the corn-products era, and a sound one: the cornstarch cuts the gluten and gives a crisper waffle than flour alone. Two things need attention before you start, the flour quantity and the syrup.
- The flour figure is broken"1/3 cups flour" against 1 cup milk and one egg cannot be right; the line has almost certainly lost a digit and should read 1 1/3 cups. That ratio, with the 2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch, gives a batter that pours thickly from the cup.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral vegetable oil works; 2 1/2 tablespoons is roughly 37 ml.
- Karo, Red LabelRed Label was generally the darker, fuller-flavoured Karo syrup, Blue Label the light one. Use dark corn syrup for the batter if you want the original flavour, light if you would rather taste the egg.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchOrdinary cornstarch. Sift it with the flour as directed rather than stirring it in, or it clumps into white beads that survive the iron.
- Beating the whites in"Continue beating until bubbly" overstates it. Fold the stiff whites in with a spatula until no white streaks remain; beating them into the batter knocks out the air you just built and gives a dense waffle.
- Iron heatA modern electric iron on a medium-high setting, preheated until the indicator clears, is right. The instruction not to turn an electric iron and not to oil a seasoned one still stands, though a very light brushing of oil on the first waffle of the day does no harm.
- YieldRoughly four waffles in a standard square iron, fewer in a large Belgian-style one; the recipe itself gives no yield. Serve straight off the iron; held waffles steam themselves soft, and a rack in a low oven is the best way to keep a batch.
This comes from a promotional cookbook of the kind the Corn Products Refining Company issued in quantity through the 1920s, and the recipe reads like what it is: Mazola, Karo and Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch all named in a formula of eight ingredients, three of them house brands. That was standard practice -- manufacturers gave away recipe booklets to teach cooks uses for products that had no traditional place in the kitchen, and corn oil and corn syrup both needed the introduction. The double instruction for gas or coal versus electric irons dates the page closely. Electric waffle irons came into American kitchens over the 1910s and 1920s and were among the early small countertop appliances, but stovetop irons that had to be greased and flipped remained in use for years afterward, so a book of this moment could not assume either.