Cottonseed Oil

Cottonseed oil is a cooking oil pressed or solvent-extracted from the seeds of cotton plants, chiefly Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium herbaceum, then refined, bleached and deodorized to remove the naturally occurring toxin gossypol. Unprocessed, it is about 70 percent unsaturated and 26 percent saturated fat, rising to 94 percent saturated once fully hydrogenated, and it has a relatively high smoke point of about 450 degrees Fahrenheit, making it useful in salad oil, mayonnaise and salad dressing for its flavor stability, though it has been largely displaced in American cooking by soybean oil. Once a worthless byproduct of the cotton industry in the nineteenth century, it became a major cooking oil after innovations such as William Fee's 1857 hull separator and Procter and Gamble's hydrogenation process; in 2019 world production reached 4.45 million tonnes, with China and India together accounting for 56 percent of it.