Part of the What Do You Know About That series
by Ruth Orr
AMERICA —It’s the run-up for Thanksgiving. You’re alone in your kitchen, frantically trying to get your rolls and turkey and stuffing and potatoes and casserole and pies all done, all while your kids pull at your apron strings and beg for tastes of whipped cream. You’re at the end of your rope, and there’s only one person who can help: Betty Crocker.
Odds are good if you’ve ever wandered down the baking aisle of your local supermarket, you’ll have seen row upon row of boxed mixes on the shelves, advertising quick and easy cakes, muffins, and brownies. Emblazoned on those boxes: a red mixing spoon, and Betty Crocker’s name across it. You may have one of her cookbooks in your kitchen, worn half to death with all the love and cookie dough grease that’s been pushed into it over the years. You may even have boasted to your friends after another successful dinner party that they may as well call you Betty Crocker.
Betty’s been a part of our kitchen culture in America for over one hundred years now. Born in 1921 in Minneapolis, Betty rapidly rose to stardom and became the premiere kitchen confidante, the go-to for all questions about baking. If an overworked housewife had an issue she just couldn’t solve, Betty had the answer, and she was more than happy to help.
At first, you had to write your questions down and send them by mail. You’d soon receive a response from Betty herself, signed on the bottom with her signature flourish. By 1924 however, Betty wasn’t just signing letters mailed to her— she had her very own cooking radio show!
Okay, hold on, I hear those of you gifted at math saying. You’re scratching your heads, wondering how all of our editors missed by obvious mixup here. How is it that Betty Crocker could have been born in 1921 and have her own cooking show just three years later? What kind of prodigal baking baby was she?
Well you see friends, Betty Crocker never had a childhood. She didn’t toddle into her mother’s kitchen and start advising her on how much flour to add, because she didn’t have a mother. In fact, Betty Crocker didn’t do much of anything, because she didn’t exist.
You see once upon a time, there was a business, the Washburn-Crosby Company, who primarily dealt with milling flour for bakers. They’ve been around since 1856, but you’d be forgiven for not recognizing the name, since they changed it in 1928, becoming the far better-known General Mills. Anyway, the point is that the Washburn-Crosby Company had a brand of flour they made that they wanted to sell more of.
To that end, the company launched an ad in the Saturday Evening Post, featuring a puzzle. If you completed the puzzle and mailed it in, they’d send you a pincushion shaped like a bag of Gold Medal Flour. Aw, cute! Wait, what’s that rumbling sound…?
Turns out, that rumbling was the sound of mail trucks, bringing over 30,000 completed puzzles flooding the company’s offices. But as the slightly overwhelmed employees soon discovered, the puzzles were not the only things being sent in. Many of the entries were accompanied by letters, absolutely full to bursting with questions and concerns about baking. As it turns out, the letter writers decided that if they couldn’t find the answers themselves, the company that sold them their flour surely must know, right?
The department in charge of answering mail was staffed entirely by men. They didn’t really know what they were doing, so they turned to their wives and the women who worked in the building, asking them to help. But the department manager, Samuel Gale, figured that the women who wrote the letters wouldn’t really want to take his advice, which was fair, since he didn’t know what he was doing. Instead of signing his name onto the responses, he decided to create a fictional woman who might conceivably know her way around the kitchen. And so, Betty Crocker was born.
Her last name came from the recently retired director of the company, William G. Crocker. They picked out ‘Betty’ because they thought it sounded wholesome and cheerful. The women staff in the company all got to have a go at coming up with Betty’s signature, with the winner being penned by a secretary named Florence Lindeberg. To add credence to Betty’s existence, that signature was added to the end of every letter the company mailed back.
It was a self-perpetuating cycle of letter writing. Anyone who had a question got an answer from Betty, and would tell all their friends, who then wrote to Betty with their own concerns, and so on and so forth. Betty helped with baking, cooking, and even advice about domestic stuff, like how to clean burned sugar gunk out of your stoves. She became insanely popular.
In 1924, the Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air started up on a local Minneapolis radio station. Before long, it was nationwide. The woman hired to give voice to Betty for the first time was Marjorie Child Husted, who also wrote and hosted the show. In 1936, Betty got her first face— a composite painting that blended the faces of all the female staff in the Washburn-Crosby home service department. That stayed her face until 1951, when Betty came to TV screens everywhere, played by actress Adelaide Hawley. She’s been updated and tweaked a few times since, but always with a version of a red jacket or sweater, a white blouse, and a brunette bob haircut.
So what about all those box mixes and cans of frosting? When did Betty branch out and expand her brand? The first grocery item General Mills put out with Betty’s name emblazoned across it was a soup mix in 1941. By 1947, she had cake mixes on the shelves, and her first bestselling cookbook came out in 1950, copies of which are still sold today. We’ve got an old beat-up one in our kitchen, and it’s my go-to for lemon bars and chocolate chip cookies. I do add my own secret twist to those though, so those of you who only talk to me because you want snacks, you still have to deal with me, because I’ll never tell what I add! Never!
My insistence on gussying up Betty Crocker recipes to make them my own is actually traditional. You see, when boxed mixes first came out, they didn’t do as well as you’d expect. What’s not to love about a quick-and-easy, all-in-one way to obtain near-instant cake? Turns out, all those home bakers of the 1930s-50s felt that using a boxed cake mix was cheating, and it didn’t really count as homemade. Darn moral values. If they were to make a box mix, they needed to add something to it to make it their own, and at that point, most of them figured they’d just make the cakes they already did.
The first mixes were truly all-in-one. They had everything, including powdered dry eggs, so quite literally all you had to do was add some water to rehydrate and plop it into a pan. The bakers couldn’t quite justify that as a labor of love, so they kept making cakes from scratch. In their defense, rehydrated egg powder may not be the tastiest thing in a cake.
The solution is so simple it’s almost stupid. A psychologist/ marketing consultant (dangerous combo) named Ernest Dichter took a look at the situation. His advice? Take out the powdered egg, and make the folks at home add fresh ones in as well as the water. All of a sudden, it’s not cheating, you had to put in work for your cake! It’s totally valid! As a bonus, the mixes actually worked better with fresh eggs.
Once cake mixes were picking up steam, the baking companies of the world decided to pre-make frosting and decorations and sell those too, and oh boy, was that a game-changer, launching us into the world of cakes and brownies and muffins in a box we all know and love today.
Speaking of today, Betty Crocker is actually still going strong. The General Mills company still employs bakers and cooks to work in test kitchens, coming up with new recipes to reflect what we as a society are into now. For example, none of us want to eat ham and cheese jello anymore. Or at least, I think that’s the case. If that’s your happy food, good for you, but let’s never have a dinner party together. They’re still pumping out new recipes and cookbooks, and they’re still there to answer questions if you have them.
So this holiday, as you bring out your Betty Crocker pumpkin pie to the applause of your family, take a moment to appreciate the bizarre series of events that led to the birth of a global icon.
