We’re just a few days out from World Baking Day.
So today we’re going to look at the story of a woman who’s been helping people find their way around the kitchen for more than a century… even though she isn’t a real person.
Her name is Betty Crocker, and this fictional icon came about to handle a very real situation.
The Washburn-Crosby Company, which would later become General Mills, had put a puzzle into an ad in the Saturday Evening Post, encouraging people to send it to their headquarters in Minnesota to win a prize.
They got over 30,000 puzzle entries, but they also got a lot of questions about baking.
Washburn-Crosby had an office to respond to correspondence, but they didn’t usually get this much mail.
To answer it, they decided to create a persona, a friendly, helpful baking sage who could help home bakers with their kitchen conundrums.
They specifically wanted this character to be a woman, in a time when baking and cooking for largely seen as women’s work.
The last name was a tribute to the company’s former director, William G. Crocker; they chose the name Betty, because as General Mills says today, “she sounded friendly.”
Betty Crocker started answering all those letters asking for baking advice, complete with her signature (which was the work of a Washburn-Crosby employee, Florence Lindberg).
The more letters she sent out, the more came in, especially after the company launched a radio show called The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air.
A newspaper article in 1945 said Betty was the second most popular woman in the country, behind First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Of course, by that point, the radio version of Betty Crocker had been helping people make nutritious and tasty meals out of their limited rations during World War II.
Since then she’s been featured on TV, on products and on best-selling cookbooks.
Both actors and artists have portrayed Betty, and her look has changed a number of times to reflect the styles of the time.
She’s so well known that some people have been surprised, or even a little upset, that she’s a character and not a real person.
But her backers say, in a time when we have celebrity chefs and social media influencers trying to make the biggest, grandest, most outlandish creations of all, maybe a down to earth character who offers practical tips on making everyday recipes is actually the most real one of all?
Starting tomorrow in Jeffersonville, Indiana, it’s Abbey Road on the River.
Five days of music, mostly Beatles or Beatle-related music, by dozens and dozens of acts, all on stages near the banks of the Ohio River.
Do fans picture themselves, on boats, on the river?
Who Was Betty Crocker? (PBS)
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Photo courtesy Otto Nassar, via Flickr/Creative Commons