I stumbled across this the other day in a huge batch of old cookbooks and found myself drawn to it. It's a tiny little thing from 1927, and has this sweet art deco design on the cover. The tiniest bit of inspection of the book's interior reveals the purpose for its existence. Every single recipe, when some sort of oil or fat is needed, calls for Mazola corn oil. When sweetener is needed, it calls for Karo corn syrup. Yes, indeed, this is a book to glorify and extol the virtues of corn when the corn industry was trying to gain a foothold as a main agricultural product. It was even published by Corn Products Refining Company, and has a little card in the front where you can put the names and addresses of five of your friends and (if you send ten cents per person) they'll send each of them a copy of the book. It was like early viral marketing.
