Finding Betty Crocker Read online

  Betty’s company’s concern for quality made for boldface copy in a 1926 advertising campaign. “Last year we held back more than 5 million pounds of Gold Medal flour. Chemically, it was perfect. But our ‘Kitchen-test’ proved it varied slightly in the way it acted in the oven. It could not carry the Gold Medal Label.” What Gold Medal Flour did carry was an “Unqualified Guarantee.” “If it is not the best flour that you have ever tried and if it does not produce the most uniformly good results, you may at any time return the unused portion of your sack of flour to your grocer. He will pay you back your full purchase price. We will repay him.”

  Gold Medal Flour magazine ad, 1927.

  As competing advertisements in the October 1926 issue of McCall’s suggest, cost was a kingdom all its own. “Always a bargain at the same price,” headlined a Pillsbury promotion. “Often you can buy Pillsbury’s Best Flour at a price as low as other flours, in spite of the big difference in quality…. It is the enormous output of the giant Pillsbury Mills which makes possible the production of such a high-quality flour at such a moderate price.” To which the Gold Medal Flour advertisers replied, under the signature of Betty Crocker, “There is no better flour for cakes and pastries. Why pay more?” Yet neither miller divulged flour prices in their ads.

  In fact, Washburn Crosby was willing to pay more—to develop and disseminate the “Kitchen-test” concept that anchored the Gold Medal sales plan. The process was explained to consumers in elaborate, loving detail: “First the Gold Medal millers with their 60 years of experience carefully select the choicest wheat. Before they mill it they wash every grain in clear running water. Then samples of each batch are sent daily to the Gold Medal Kitchen. In this cheerful kitchen, Miss Betty Crocker and her staff bake from these samples.” With her firsthand experience, Betty Crocker was just the person to explain how “2,000,000 women have learned to make perfectly delicious small breads and pastries every time they bake.”

  In April 1926, “Miss Crocker” invited consumers to send 70¢ for a “neat wooden box” filled with “delightful new recipes.” By November of that same year, a new and improved offer was available—for just thirty cents more. “We will be glad to send you one of the New Gold Medal Home Service Recipe boxes, complete with recipes, for only $1.00 (less than this service actually costs us). Twice as many recipes as in original box. Just send coupon with check, money order, or plain dollar bill.”

  The ad copy was signed Betty Crocker, just as all her letters were. And the promotion, like so many more to come, proved to be what Betty’s newfound public was looking for. A woman from Randolph, Minnesota, wrote, “Never again will I fool with other flour. With Gold Medal Kitchen-tested Flour my biscuits are wonderful dainties. The cakes also, especially the sponge cake.

  I’m a Gold Medal booster forever.” From Buffalo, New York, came further testimony: “I am always singing Gold Medal Kitchen-tested Flour’s praises and I have introduced a number of my friends to use it instead of having two kinds of flour [one for baking cakes, another for general purposes].”

  Betty‘s People

  While the immediate response to Betty Crocker’s service was favorable, she was not an overnight success. For the first three years of Betty’s existence, she was little more than a signature on the bottom of a letter, recipe, or advertisement. Word of her was spread by the company’s professional, college-educated home economists. Washburn Crosby, typical of many Progressive-era companies, looked to its Home Service Department to highlight its forward-thinking policies. Operating from a tiny test kitchen at Washburn Crosby headquarters, the early Gold Medal Home Service Department (eventually known as the General Mills Home Service Department and, later, as the Betty Crocker Kitchens) was entrusted with a public relations mission of unprecedented magnitude: the shaping of Betty Crocker’s public persona.

  For $1, homemakers could send away for a little wooden box full of Betty Crocker’s recipes. From 1926-28, 350,000 Betty loyalists took Washburn Crosby up on their offer.

  Home economists Ina Rowe, Agnes White, Ruth Haynes Carpenter, Blanche Ingersoll, Janette Kelley, and Marjorie Child Husted were the “voice” of Betty Crocker in print and in person. In what would become characteristic Betty style, their communications sought to engage as well as instruct. In one how-to booklet called “What Every Woman Should Know About Baking: The New Meaning of Flour—by Betty Crocker,” the lesson followed the “heartbreaking” scenario of a cake that turned out a “wee bit flat, or with a faint suggestion of sogginess.” Thanks to the high quality of “Kitchen-tested” Gold Medal Flour, the dessert was saved—as was the day.

  At Gold Medal Flour Cooking Demonstrations and Betty Crocker Cooking Schools, the home economists presented Betty Crocker’s solutions to common domestic woes. The first Minneapolis and St. Paul—area demonstrations proved so popular that the original staff was expanded by twenty in order to reach women’s auxiliary groups, church associations, home economics classes, and county fairs throughout the Midwest, East, and South.

  Washburn Crosby home economists traveled from town to town, often stopping for weeks at a time to hold community classes. Local newspapers advertised the Gold Medal Flour demonstrations with open invitations to men, women, and children. It was not unusual for auditoriums to fill to capacity, leaving the overflow crowds to stand in the back and line the windows outside.

  Sometimes the setup was the best part of the show. Since auditoriums did not come equipped with fully modern kitchens, Betty’s staff had to improvise. Entire towns turned out upon occasion to watch the local fire department assist in the transporting of a borrowed electric stove.

  The Betty Crocker staff of 1924 comprised college-educated, professional home economists who tested recipes, conducted cooking demonstrations, answered consumer questions, and helped shape the early persona of Betty Crocker.

  Often the entire town turned out for a Betty Crocker Cooking School class or demonstration.

  In bigger cities, the home service staff found themselves improvising on a different theme. While their primary purpose was to “demonstrate Gold Medal Flour and its superiority over other brands,” the staff also taught extended lessons on housekeeping, child care, nutrition, canning, and sewing. In 1922, staffer Mollie Gold traveled to settlement houses on the east side of New York City to “make people happier, healthier and to make their work easier.” She even instructed a boys’ class in the “art of camp cookery.”

  Back in Minneapolis, Betty’s home staff was fielding hundreds of letters and even phone calls from homemakers despairing over “baking failures.” Endeavoring to make the typical kitchen more like a foolproof scientific laboratory, Washburn Crosby home economists singled out irregular-sized baking pans as the culprit, and took up the crusade for national pan standardization. The size and shape of the pan used in cake making as well as the type of batter affected baking temperature. The Ladies’ Home Journal home economist Mabel Jewett Crosby heralded “Science in Your Oven”: “Perfect pie and pastry [are] yours if you take its temperature.” But best of all was a product guaranteed to succeed, like Gold Medal Flour, whose “Kitchen-test” saved “you from costly experimenting when you bake.”

  In this pioneering spirit, millions of American homemakers were poised on the brink of transition to the modern age. The marketers of the 1920s were up to the challenge, offering every aspect of a newer and better life, priced to sell.

  Good-Bye to Yesterday‘s Kitchen

  The goal was to banish yesterday’s kitchen in favor of a more gleaming vision, and Betty Crocker knew where to start. Reviewing a collection of Gold Medal recipes published in 1910, Betty found that changing kitchen technology had quickly put them out of date. “Since many of the ingredients and methods no longer fit the times,” she instructed home cooks, “do not try to follow the directions given. Instead, if you discover a recipe you’d love to prepare … refer to a more current Betty Crocker” recipe.

  “Times certainly have changed for the modern homemaker,
” Betty reflected on the era she called “the good old days.” But good could be better, as Betty demonstrated with her innovative test kitchens, among the first to reap the benefits of the string of inventions begun in 1916 with the introduction of the first electric refrigerator (at about $900, the appliance cost more than a new car) and continued with the first all-electric range in 1917.

  “Electrical equipment has made housework not only easier, but more interesting,” proclaimed the June 1927 issue of McCall’s. With Betty nodding her approval, the race was on, first to outfit the home with the latest inventions, then to beat the neighbors at their own game. May B. VanArsdale, professor of “Household Art,” and Dorothy E. Shank, an instructor in “Foods and Cookery” at Teachers College, Columbia University, chronicled just such a friendly neighborhood rivalry in their June 1926 article “Now Is the Time for Kitchen Adventures.”

  Their subjects were the “wide-awake homemakers”—cum—“household engineers” who called themselves the “Up-to-Date Kitchen League.” Each member reveals in turn which modern kitchen innovation she prizes above all others. Testimony begins with the kitchen thermometer; then the ante is quickly upped. Mrs. Young “feels she is a step in advance of the other members,” thanks to her regulated oven, which frees her from the thermometer. Mrs. Blank points out her ingenuity: she cooks with a bake-pot over the one gas burner in her kitchenette. A fourth member calls her fireless cooker her “greatest friend.” Finally, triumphantly, “one of the newest members” of the League brings forth her electric mixer.

  A modern kitchen called for modern appliances, each with its own set of instructions. As the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company pointed out in a 1925 campaign, electricity was the key. “Pressing a button—or pushing a plug into a handy convenience outlet—thus should a modern home—with Westinghouse Electrical Appliances—serve its mistress…. Right now is a good time to buy.”

  “Domestic Science Consultant” Sarah Field Splint, for General Electric’s Edison Mazda Lamp line, called out kitchen lighting as yet another essential. “The Kitchen is the cheapest room to light properly,” she advised. “Good light costs no more than poor light. It’s the cheapest maid you can employ.” And in an era when “more than ninety-five out of every one hundred homemakers in this country are keeping house without a maid,” who could do without? Waffle irons, warming pads, cabinet electric ranges, toasters, and even a Grecian urn percolator set were on offer to fill every available outlet.

  But Can She Cook?

  Women attending the Gold Medal Flour demonstrations may have missed their apprenticeship of the stove, but in Betty Crocker’s world, technology had rendered Mother’s kitchen techniques somewhat obsolete. Recipe adaptation proved particularly daunting to homemakers less experienced with modern appliances. For instance, a traditional recipe for drop biscuits that called for ten minutes’ baking in a “quick oven”—meaning a very hot wood-burning or coal-burning stove-now needed to be adjusted for equivalent temperature settings on a gas or electric range. As Betty’s staff was quick to point out, the trial-and-error method wasted time and money.

  With cooking information not widely available—cooks relied mostly on family recipes and limited-distribution cookbooks—the Gold Medal Home Service Department was truly living up to its name. Maria Parloa, the leading home economist with the famous Boston School of Cooking, wrote Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book distributed, in part, by the Washburn Crosby Company in 1880. The company went on to publish Washburn Crosby Co.’s New Cook Book in 1894 and, in 1903, the Gold Medal Flour Cook Book. But cookbooks were expensive not only to produce but to keep in print. Even Fannie Farmer had to pay the printing costs of her eventual best-seller, the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896), as her publisher, Little, Brown, was not enthusiastic about its prospects.

  By the time Washburn Crosby’s cooking demonstrations were popular in the early 1920s, the company’s cookbooks were out of print, yet demand hadn’t slowed for information on basic meal preparation, menu planning, grocery budgeting, and cooking techniques. Desire for new recipes was constant, given “that remorseless demand of the family for three meals a day.”

  The Home Service Department never had enough printed Gold Medal Flour recipes to hand out, nor could it keep up with the quantities of recipe requests that arrived by mail. Inserting Betty’s recipes in sacks of Gold Medal Flour was one stopgap measure. But the variety of recipes wasn’t plentiful enough to satisfy customers who wanted more of Betty. In just a few short years, Betty Crocker was well on her way to becoming Washburn Crosby’s living dream.

  Vox Feminae

  Radio was the big break Betty’s people were looking for. In 1920, 5,000 American homes had a wireless set. By 1924, radio ownership soared to 2.5 million. In the autumn of that year, Washburn Crosby decided to see how Betty Crocker would fare over the airwaves. Executives authorized the Home Service Department to launch a radio cooking show designed to take the place of the regional demonstrations and cooking school. The financial risk of Betty’s show was not insignificant, considering that neither radio nor Betty Crocker was a household staple.

  With radio broadcasting still in its nascent stages—airtime scheduling was not yet standardized, and the first nationwide network, the National Broadcasting Company, would not be established until 1926—its commercial value had yet to be fully proven. Nevertheless, Washburn Crosby took a gamble and purchased a faltering Minnesota radio station, WLAG—The Call of the North. Renamed after its corporate benefactor, the “Gold Medal Station” took the call letters WCCO. With its powerful 5,000-watt AM transmitter, WCCO’s signal could reach audiences as far flung as California, Illinois, and Tennessee. The investment proved sound: by 1927 more than 6 million radios were in use. With an average listening ratio of five people per set, the potential national market topped out at 30 million. By comparison, for the first six months of 1924, Ladies’ Home Journal boasted a net paid circulation of 2,412,688-which was over 15 percent more than its nearest competitor, but just a fraction of radio’s reach.

  America had never known anything like the splendor of broadcast radio. The surreal world of radio fantasy, from comedy shows like Amos ’n’ Andy to daytime dramas like The Guiding Light, lured Americans to part with their hard-earned wages. A 1925 advertisement for RCA—whose Radiola Regenoflex and Radiola X models sold for about one quarter of the average monthly family income, between $191 and $245, depending on features—explained the magic: “Each thread of sound reaches your room as it was played or sung—in full richness. Speech is clear, voices are real.… The engineers have kept pace with the broadcasters—have improved reception to meet an ever-widening world of fun.”

  “Welcome to our circle”

  “The radio made Betty,” Fortune magazine declared in 1945. “It is fair to say that it did for her career in commerce what it did for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in politics.” The Washburn Crosby Company helped pioneer the new “Home Service” radio format when on October 2, 1924, Betty Crocker’s show debuted as a casual “womanly talk.” On that first broadcast, the home economist Blanche Ingersoll introduced herself as Betty Crocker, announcing that she would be dropping in each day for a visit and a chat about cooking and homemaking:

  Good morning. This is a very happy morning for me because at last I have an opportunity to really talk to you. To those of you who are my friends through correspondences I wish to extend most cordial greetings and good wishes, and to those of you who are making the acquaintance of Betty Crocker for the first time—I bid you welcome to our circle. This hour—10:45 every morning—is yours and I am here to be of service to you.

  Ingersoll loosely patterned Betty’s show after a popular Chicago radio program hosted by Mrs. Peterson of the People’s Gas Company. Topics ranged from cooking and “female concerns” to housekeeping and time management to husbands and beaux, friends and relatives, and, of course, Gold Medal Flour. Recipe preparations followed techniques favored by home economists, such as the pr
ecise care and measurement of ingredients.

  Like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Housekeeper’s Chats hosted by Aunt Sammy, Betty Crocker’s meal preparation advice, serving suggestions, and recipes were imbued with a philosophy reminiscent of turn-of-the-century domestic science. The shows extolled the virtues of a well-balanced, healthy meal and women’s obligation to serve it.

  Listeners to Betty’s first radio broadcast, entitled “Good Food,” learned that a woman who produced unsavory meals risked dire consequences. “If you load a man’s stomach with soggy boiled cabbage, greasy fried potatoes,” Betty cautioned, “can you wonder that he wants to start a fight, or go out and commit a crime? We should be grateful that he does nothing worse than display a lot of temper.”

  Not always did the role of homemaker come naturally. Betty observed, “Occasionally we find someone who dislikes it very much.” But the condition was not permanent, provided the woman in question was willing to adjust her attitude from the “wrong point of view”—that keeping house is “plain drudgery” that she feels “she is above”—to the more positive stance of realizing that “a good cook” has “a real influence” on the happiness of “big Bob and little Junior.”

  When it came to prescribing exacting domestic standards for the betterment of the family, Betty talked tough, but her delivery was sweet. A homemaker’s aspirations could be “as great as woman could have in any occupation,” Betty declared. The answers to these and other secrets could be had as easily as tuning in, within WCCO’s broadcast radius, over morning coffee or at work around the house.

  It may be that you are a young housekeeper eager to learn the hows and whys and wherefores of this big job of cooking for your husband. There are many ways in which I can be of service to you, not only through cooking lessons but with suggestions for serving, for planning your housework, for marketing so that you can get the most for your money. Perhaps I can even help you with your weekly washing or tell you how to remove stains from your best tablecloth, or give you some good suggestions for housecleaning.