Log Cabin Baked Ham With Sweet Potatoes

Featuring everyone’s favorite sort-of-maple kind-of-syrup.

A scan of the back is to the left. But the merits and detriments of feeding cod liver oil to babies will have to be a discussion for another day, because we’ve actually got a fair bit to talk about on the front of this page.

While I haven’t found the specific source of this clipping, I did find another advertisement with the same recipe–this one from the October 7, 1929 edition of the Chicago Tribune:

 
The recipe should still work, but I don’t know how much “matchless maple flavor” you’ll get out of it.

It’s the Log Cabin double-maple blend… New England maple, plus rich Canadian maple smoothly mellowed and blended with pure southern cane… that gives that double rich flavor… that matchless maple flavor you have been yearning for, for years. No wonder Log Cabin Syrup is the family favorite! No wonder it glorifies griddle cakes and whets waffle appetites in thousands of homes every day!”

 
See, in the years since 1929, there’s been a bit of a reformulation. And even that was a reformulation from the original blend that Patrick J. Towle came up with in 1887. Towle was actually a wholesale grocery dealer in Chicago before moving to Minnesota and coming up with the idea to blend syrup the way you might make a blended scotch, and for the same reason: to come up with a consistent product that masked some of the more unpredictable nuances of the production process.

By 1929, that blend used a substantial amount of cane sugar. Labeling laws weren’t as detailed as they are now, but let’s compare the labels from 1929 and now:

1929	2014
“Made of granulated sugar and maple sugar.”	Ingredients: corn syrup, liquid sugar (natural sugar, water), water, salt, natural and artificial flavor (lactic acid), sodium hexametaphosphate, preservatives (sodium benzoate, sorbic acid), caramel color, phosphoric acid.

 
So the closest the modern Log Cabin syrup has gotten to a tree is when they put the picture of the log cabin on the label. That said, you can absolutely cook with it, and most people do prefer the thicker consistency (not that they’d ever admit it). So if you’re inclined to try the other recipes, here they are.

From a box sold in Quincy, Massachusetts.