by Susan Marks
Inspired by the popularity of color television, Betty cross-advertised in magazines as well as appearing in CBS’s first color television commercial.
During the early cake mix years, new products were frequently added to the rotation. In 1954, Betty Crocker targeted individuals and small families with Answer Cake, an all-in-one package of cake mix, aluminum foil baking pan, and frosting that could serve six to twelve, depending on the size of the slices. “Cake Mix Magic” and “How to Have the Most Fun with Cake Mixes” instructed consumers on the versatility of mixes, which could be adapted to Betty’s most popular cake recipes. Longstanding favorites like Baked Alaska, Coconut Cream Cake, Chipped Chocolate Cake, Chocolate Cream Cake, Brown-Eyed Susan Cake, Double-Ring Anniversary Angel Food Cake, Pink Azalea Cake, and Day-at-the-Zoo Cake were born anew as Betty Crocker’s product lines evolved to fit the times.
In 1968, General Mills purchased Kenner and its Easy-Bake Oven line. For mother-daughter baking fun, the 1950s Betty Crocker Junior Baking Kit—with tiny animal-shaped cookie cutters—was reintroduced, along with a line of miniature, boxed versions of Betty Crocker mixes for “use in Mom’s Oven and in Kenner’s Easy-Bake® Oven.” In 1973, the oven was officially renamed the “Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven” and made available for the first time in Betty’s red. Two years later came Stir ’n Frost, a direct descendant of Answer Cake, followed by Super Moist, with pudding in the mix. Betty Crocker even had cakes for the health conscious, with fat-free Sweet Rewards (the 1995 replacement for the 94 percent fat-free Betty Crocker SuperMoist Light cake mix). According to Nielsen data, by the late 1990s, 60 percent of households regularly used cake mixes, a significant portion of them bearing the red spoon logo.
Betty Crocker had the answers for cooks in need of something more convenient than the “traditional” cake mix.
Valued at well over a billion dollars—nearly half of that from the dessert-mix unit—the Betty Crocker group consistently ranks among the top twenty brands in food industry surveys. But when it comes to the nostalgia market, Betty’s value is probably incalculable. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Betty Crocker cake mixes in 1998, Christine Arpe Gang recalled in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “I was only a year old when General Mills introduced its first Betty Crocker cake mixes. Like many women of her generation, my mother embraced this convenience product so wholeheartedly she rarely, if ever, made a cake from scratch again.”
Chapter Six Kitchens of the World
His Mother’s Oatmeal Cookies
Crispy, nutty-flavored cookies … sandwiched together with jelly and jam. Nora M. Young of Cleveland, Ohio, won a prize in the “plain cooky class” on these. Wonderful for lunch box and cooky jar.
Mix together
2 cups sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour
½ tsp. salt
3 cups rolled oats
Cut in until mixture is well blended
1 cup shortening (part butter)
Stir in
1 tsp. soda dissolved in ⅓ cup milk (sweet or sour)
1½ cups brown sugar
Chill dough. Roll out ⅛” thick. Cut into desired shapes. Place on ungreased baking sheet. Bake until lightly browned. When cool, and just before serving, put together in pairs with jelly or jam between.
Temperature: 375° Time: Bake 10 to 12 min.
Amount: About 4 doz. 21/2” double cookies.
From Betty Crocker’s Picture Cooky Book, 1948 $
The Betty Crocker Kitchens were once a popular American tourist destination. At least 2 million tourists—U.S. and international—stopped in to pay Betty a visit. Betty’s home economists were on hand to demonstrate Betty Crocker’s exhaustive recipe-testing procedures, and to deliver baked treats fresh from her oven. Homemakers, clubs, families, church groups, and schoolchildren were just some of the guests. Celebrities like Liberace, the Nixons and Eisenhowers, beauty pageant contestants, and visiting royalty paid their respects to Betty Crocker.
But for some, the Betty Crocker Kitchens experience was a tearful one. “Betty Crocker isn’t one woman,” visitors were told, “but many women who work here under her name.” Receptionists had tissues and sympathy for guests grappling with the cold reality that it was impossible to meet Betty Crocker. Ruby Peterson, a retired General Mills home economist, compares the phenomenon to finding out there is no Santa Claus. People don’t usually travel all the way to the North Pole, meet the elves, and then find out the truth about Santa. But what happened at the Betty Crocker Kitchen was “worse because Betty was their hero.”
Humble Beginnings
The famous Betty Crocker Kitchens began quite obscurely, in the tiny space between Washburn Crosby’s Baker Service Department and its baking laboratory, housed in the chamber of commerce building in downtown Minneapolis. Filling a “long-felt want in the organization” to aid the Home Service Department in recipe development and testing, in 1924 the company added the kind of kitchen that homemakers of the era only dreamed about. According to an internal newsletter, The Eventually News, the model kitchen boasted gas and electric ranges, “mechanical refrigeration,” and running water. The kitchen’s white and Delft-blue color scheme included such functional touches as a writing desk and telephone, the better to conduct Betty Crocker’s business on the radio, in print, and through customer relations. It’s likely that visitors toured the kitchen, but no count was kept in those early days.
Washburn Crosby’s home economists in Betty’s first test kitchen in 1924.
By the mid-1930s test kitchens like Betty’s were big business, because sales—of Jell-O gelatin, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Junket’s custard, Hershey’s chocolate, PET Milk, and other products—increased dramatically when tested recipes were made available to consumers. A 1934 General Electric food preparation and recipe booklet explained, “In the kitchens of G-E Kitchen Institute, a staff of home economics experts constantly plan and test new and better ways of doing things—under actual home conditions.” Modern appliances like GE refrigerators, ranges, broilers, electric mixers, and electric dishwashers were dubbed “the new art of living electrically.”
The Campbell’s Soup Home Economics Kitchen strove to extend the brand image from reliable—“21 Kinds, 12 Cents a Can”—to adventuresome, with recipes for Gloucester Codfish Balls, Tomato Soup Cake, and Stuffed Eggs with Tomato Rarebit Sauce. Campbell’s home economists and chefs created and tested all recipes: “our main concern is the planning of more appetizing and more nourishing meals, and the creating of new and tempting dishes.”
McCall’s magazine and the H. J. Heinz Company opened their doors to visitors for tours and cooking classes. In a 1930s Heinz recipe booklet, the company extended an invitation to guests to see for themselves that “quality is paramount” for the best-selling ketchup in the world: “House of HEINZ is proud of its great kitchens as you are of yours. Every year it is our pleasure to escort more than 70,000 visitors through our plant at Pittsburgh so that these visitors may see these kitchens and HEINZ methods in operation.”
Kitchen Testing, 1, 2, 3
Within ten years of operation, the Betty Crocker test kitchen evolved into the General Mills Service Kitchens when the staff relocated to the ninth floor of the same building. From 1934 to 1946, Betty’s staff continued to grow, expanding its product-testing duties even as the home economists kept on with cooking and baking tests, producing material for the Betty Crocker radio programs, creating recipes for flour inserts and booklets, answering consumer mail, and orchestrating special Depression-era and World War II initiatives. Informal tours of Betty Crocker’s kitchens were first initiated at this new location. Betty invited radio listeners to see her new digs and observe her sixteen staff members preparing dishes and serving up meals in the formal dining room, “just as Mrs. Homemaker and her family would have them.”
In an October 3, 1934, broadcast, “Celebrating Our Tenth Anniversary in a New Home,” Betty Crocker described her new kitchen:
We have just moved into a beautiful ne
w home … high above the noise and dust of the streets, where we get cross ventilation. The windows on one side of our office look out on the downtown section of Minneapolis. The windows on the other side, in the kitchen and dining room, give us a glimpse of the Mississippi River with its bridges, and in the foreground the big Gold Medal Mills with their huge sign, “Eventually, Why Not Now?”
I’m sure all of you housekeepers can imagine our pleasure and delight in having a brand new kitchen, with everything spic and span and just exactly as we want it. … And we have a welcome mat in our main doorway, put there for all of you, so if you ever get a chance to come see us, please do! We are so proud of it all, we love to show it to those of you who are interested.
When we conduct visitors through, we show them the tasting room first, furnished in Early American furniture, then on to the kitchen. They all speak of how sunshiny it looks! The end of the room is entirely taken up with the sink and tiled drain boards, in various shades of yellow … around the border is a simple design in deep blue tiles. The minute you see it I’m sure those of you who are loyal users of SOFTASILK Cake Flour, BISQUICK and WHEATIES will recognize that we have used the same colors in our kitchen that you see in our packaged foods.
Betty Crocker characterized the décor as charming and homey; she cited colorful pieces of pottery, Dutch gingham curtains, a paneled archway, a tomato-red watering pot, and a copper teakettle. But the quaint ambience was almost an afterthought; the main event was the kitchen’s modern amenities:
Next comes the huge electric refrigerator. We ordered it unfinished so it could be finished the same color as the rest of the woodwork. It really looks beautiful. I notice that every man who comes in the kitchen makes immediately for the refrigerator and opens the door and then is properly delighted when the light goes on!
An ad for Betty Crocker’s All-Purpose Baking recipe book included an invitation to tour Betty’s kitchens.
In Betty Crocker’s next broadcast, “The Tasting Test,” the tour of the Home Service Department’s “lovely new quarters” continued, with Betty placing careful emphasis on the dining room’s symbiotic relationship with the kitchen. “Wherever there is a kitchen-test of a new recipe, you can imagine there must be a tasting-test too. The old saying still holds true that the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ So we have this new and charming little dining room in which to conduct our tasting tests.”
“We really do bake all day long,” Betty proudly assured her audience. That is “how much testing we actually do.”
Not to be outdone, Mary Hale Martin for Libby’s explained how her test kitchen yielded “My Best Recipes”:
The recipes in this book are not merely KITCHEN-tested—they are DINING ROOM—tested too. I have made up the dishes in my kitchen—very carefully, I assure you—and then, next door in my Early American dining room, they have been served as meals…. From the comments of my guests I learn which dishes are generally popular, which seem most unusual and appealing.
Martin claimed herself “unusually fortunate” to conduct such rigorous recipe testing in a charming, homelike atmosphere with knotted pine paneling, leaded casement windows, nice pieces of pewter, copper, and china, and gay hooked rugs.
Betty’s staff agreed with its Libby’s counterparts that special guests—women’s magazine editors, representatives from home economics organizations, and food industry colleagues—were best entertained in the dining room. But at Betty’s table, innovations in market research were on the menu. The Home Service Department invited unsuspecting General Mills executives to “luncheons” that were experimental taste tests. Home economists never divulged the true intent of the invites, all the better to discerningly observe their guests throughout the meal. “Men-folk” approval of any given recipe cleared it for consumer distribution.
Home economists mix it up in Betty’s second home on the ninth floor of the chamber of commerce building in downtown Minneapolis.
The Betty Crocker Kitchens are something to write home about.
Triple-testing enabled Betty’s staff to guarantee the results of Betty Crocker recipes.
According to the Home Service Department, good recipes didn’t just happen. Betty’s “famous tested recipes” were the result of the most painstaking kind of culinary work. “Care and thought and science … back our products,” Betty explained. Recipe ideas typically originated within the department, but some came by way of consumer suggestions. Old standards with plenty of room for variation and improvement were candidates for adaptation. Home economists tested any given recipe about a dozen times, varying the amounts of ingredients and altering baking time and temperature. Once Betty’s staff was satisfied with a reworked recipe, home testers continued the process.
As early as 1925, Washburn Crosby employed home testers for recipe trials, commonly known as “Insurance Testing.” Homemakers from varying geographic regions and socioeconomic groups were eligible to participate, provided that they held no professional home economics credentials. The rationale was simple: any homemaker, under any set of circumstances, must have the same chance as a professional of succeeding with a recipe. Upon completing each recipe, home testers completed a questionnaire: Did you like the recipe? Did you find it easy or difficult to follow? Was it easy to make or complicated? Were the ingredients too expensive or just right? How would you improve it? How did your family react to the new recipe? Would they want it often—or never again? What were their comments?
Back at the Kitchens, Betty’s staff reviewed and compiled the home testers’ comments. In this third phase, the home economists used the suggestions of the home testers to finalize the recipe, then performed another series of tests similar to the first round. The goal was to close the margin of error. If the consensus was positive, the recipe became a Betty Crocker Triple-Tested recipe. If not, the recipe was filed away and used for internal recipe research and reference. Triple-Testing epitomized home economic principles applied by the Betty Crocker staff because it practically guaranteed customers cost-effective success. Through Triple-Testing, Betty’s staff believed that they were perfecting the equivalent of a “time-tested” and cherished family recipe handed down through generations.
The Polka Dot Kitchen
By 1946, there were once again too many cooks in the Kitchens. That year, Betty’s forty-eight staff members set up housekeeping in the General Mills Building in another part of downtown Minneapolis. This new—but certainly not last—incarnation formally took the name Betty Crocker Kitchens. Occupying the entire fifth floor of the building were several themed test kitchens, a large dining room, a terrace, and a spacious reception area for cooking demonstrations and screenings of food-related films—as well as a large editorial office, a mail division, a radio division, and a library.
For staff members, workdays began in the dressing room. Individual hatboxes, coat hangers, and cubbyholes stored personal items, and full-length mirrors were available for last-minute checks before one emerged into the public spaces as a “Crockette,” as staffers fondly called one another. Tour groups large and small—made up mostly of women—visited the Kitchens year-round, eager for a taste of Betty’s world-class hospitality. Guests entered an inviting blue-and-yellow reception area, where they were greeted, relieved of their coats and hats, and offered refreshments. While they waited for the tours to assemble, they were welcome to browse Betty’s extensive library of cookbooks or ask the home economists questions about baking.
One showcase was the large, light blue Terrace Kitchen, used for general testing and meal preparation for specialty luncheons. “Terrace,” so called for its adjoining faux patio terrace, complete with “garden furniture,” was equipped with a window where visitors could observe the “hum of activity.” The baking unit was outfitted with every conceivable ingredient and utensil; specially designed cabinets had a roll-up door for spices, slots for cookie sheets, and built-in flour sifters. Tourists were notorious for opening drawers and peeking into cupboards, hoping fo
r a glimpse of Betty’s secrets.
Also on display was the ever busy Kitchen of Tomorrow, two kitchens in one. Decorated with Swedish motifs, Tomorrow was equipped with a combination of older and state-of-the-art appliances. One side of the kitchen was reserved for experimental baking and the development of new methods and new products—such as Betty Crocker’s Crustquick—while the other was the domain of General Mills’ quality-minded Products Control division. The most unusual feature of this double kitchen was a huge rotating stainless-steel oven able to accommodate ten to twelve cakes simultaneously. The oven’s motion generated air circulation ideal for cake baking and thus for testing recipes.
The “gayest” of Betty’s kitchens-Polka Dot-was used to test her line of small appliances.
The Kamera Kitchen had three self-contained work units where food stylists prepped food for advertisements, promotions, recipe booklets, and package labels. As the photographers snapped away, Betty’s staff worked diligently to save their works of art from melting away under the hot lights. In Kamera, the emphasis was not on taste but on appearance. However, General Mills’ tradition of high standards barred nonfood material—like shaving cream standing in for whipped cream—in photo shoots, so stylists had to work quickly and efficiently with the photographers to ensure appetizing images. If the photographs didn’t turn out just right, Betty’s staff went back to the beginning and started from scratch.
Betty’s most crowd-pleasing kitchen was her red and white Polka Dot Kitchen, described as the “gayest, most colorful of all.” The polka-dot theme extended to appliance literature, packaging, and advertising, and the inherent playfulness of the color scheme made it a perennial tour favorite. The testing site for Betty Crocker’s line of home appliances, such as the Betty Crocker Thru-Heat Iron and Pressure-Quick Saucepan, Polka Dot had a glossy sheen, heightened by the “stainless steel counters and a laundry unit for experimental work with appliances.”
