Betty Crocker is one of the most influential bakers of the last hundred years. The thing is... she never existed. But that never stopped her from making some
excellent recipes like this one from 1950 for pineapple upside down cake. So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as I ask the question who was Betty Crocker or who were Betty Crocker? This time on Tasting History. There are few names more synonymous with home baking than Betty Crocker and that's because her recipes really stood the test of
time, like those from the 1950 'Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book.' She really had a knack for writing foolproof recipes regardless of your expertise in baking. One interesting thing about this cookbook is the way that she sets up her cake recipes. At the top of each page there's what she calls a key recipe which could be something like a yellow cake or a chiffon cake. Then she writes ways to modify each of those to make more specific cakes like a coconut cake or orange chiffon. So if you learn a dozen key recipes you've really learned a hundred different types of cake which is pretty cool. One of the pages has a key recipe for upside down cake with ways to alter it to make peach or apricot upside-down cake, a prune upside-down cake, or the pineapple upside-down cake which is what we're making today. So for that what you'll need is: 1/3 cup or 75 grams of butter, a half cup or 110 grams of brown sugar, 7 pineapple rings, some pecan halves and 7
maraschino cherries for garnish. Then she says to "Melt 1/3 cup butter in heavy 10" inch skillet or baking dish. Sprinkle 1/2 cup brown sugar evenly over butter. arranged drained cooked fruit in attractive pattern on the butter-sugar coating." So the biggest difference between her recipe
and most modern recipes that you'll find is the skillet. Instead of using a cake pan she uses
a skillet which would probably be something like a cast iron skillet, and that is going to let you get like a real nice caramelization on the fruit. So first melt the butter in the skillet then take
it off the heat and sprinkle in the brown sugar making sure that it's evenly spread. Then take the pineapple and arrange it on the bottom of the pan putting a cherry inside of each ring. Then fill in the empty space with pecan halves. Also just curious do you say Maraschino or Maraschino because Maraschino is is the proper Italian but I feel pretentious saying Maraschino cherries especially at a bar so I say Maraschino you know but I guess either one works I'm just
curious which one do you say? Anyway once you have placed your Maraschino or maraschino cherries she says to make the cake batter, and for that what you'll need is: 2 eggs, 2/3 cup or 135 grams of sugar, 6 tablespoons or 90 milliliters of juice from the canned pineapple, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, 1 cup or 125 grams of sifted flour or cake flour, specifically she calls for Gold Medal Flour or Softasilk flour, and the reason that she does is because
pretty much all of her recipes are a way to sell flour, and we'll talk more about that later. Now you can still get Gold Medal Flour or Softasilk. This one I got online because I couldn't find at the store and it came like taped? It's an absolute mess but you can still get it but
any cake flour or all-purpose flour is going to work but cake flour is going to work better. 1/3 teaspoon of baking powder and one quarter teaspoon of salt. So first take the sifted flour in a large bowl and whisk in the baking powder and the salt and then set that aside. Then beat the eggs for several minutes until as she says "They are thick and lemon colored. About 5 minutes." And when she says 5 minutes she means using an electric beater, because most of these recipes were written with electronic kitchen gadgets in mind. It was the 1950s and and kitchens had gone all modern, and so most of the recipes are implying that. Then gradually add in the sugar and beat until just incorporated then pour in the pineapple juice and the vanilla and beat those in. Finally add in the flour mixture about a 1/3 at a time and incorporate those by hand. Then pour that batter over the sugared pineapples in the pan moving it around the entire time so it's less likely to disturb the fruit. Then set it in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius. Now she says to bake it for 45 minutes which is way too long but she was using an oven like the one that I have
behind me from- well this one's from the late 40s, but from the early 50s and ovens were not great. The stove part, fantastic. The oven, not so much. Modern ovens are a lot more consistent and
they're just better. So I baked mine for 30 minutes, a little bit more. I would check it at 30 minutes it might go up to 35 minutes. And while it bakes let's look at how this very
real recipe was written by a very not real person. In October of 1921 an ad appeared on
the back cover of the 'Saturday Evening Post'. It was put out by the Washburn Crosby Company
to promote their Gold Medal flour, and the ad was made up of puzzle pieces that you could cut
out assemble and then mail back into the company for the prize of a pin cushion in the shape of
a bag of Gold Medal flour. Thirty thousand people returned the completed puzzle but many of them were not satisfied with their pin cushion. They were also hungry for knowledge just like me, and so they used the opportunity of writing into this flour company to also ask some questions about baking. Questions like how long do I bake my cake? How do I know when it's done? What kind of flour should I use for whatever. The kind of questions that you would just Google today, you had to write in and just hope you got an answer several weeks or months later, but at this time the Washburn-Crosby Company was not staffed to answer all of these questions. And all of the questions that were ever sent in or any kind of "fan mail" for a flour company they were answered by the all-male marketing department and they mostly didn't know anything about actually baking so
they asked the all-female home service department who came up with the recipes but even with the lady's input the letters were still coming from men and the head of the marketing department kind of thought that women didn't want to get a bunch of answers from men who had never been in the kitchen so he decided to put a woman's name at the bottom of every letter Betty Crocker. Betty because it was a popular name at the time and it just sounds pleasant. Who doesn't have a favorite gal pal named Betty? And Crocker because it was in honor of a recently retired and beloved executive William Crocker at the company but if you were going to have people sign Betty Crocker
then the signature needed to be consistent and so they asked all of the women who worked at
the company to give them their best Betty Crocker signature. And the winner was a secretary named Florence Lindberg and it's still the signature that is used today. And I totally related to this because when I worked for Disney you had to learn how to how to sign your character's name,
like so that no matter where you go in the world Peter Pan's signature or Cinderella's signature
will always look the same. Mine was Prince Charming and I never actually had to sign it but I was prepared. Anyway with that signature Betty Crocker was born, on paper at least. And between Betty Crocker's responses to questions and the added publicity of the company's not so subtle eat more wheat advertising campaign the number of flour-related questions came flooding in
and within five years the company said that because of Betty Crocker "2,000,000 women have learned to make perfectly delicious small breads and pastries every time they bake." Then in April of 1926 with five years of content plus a bunch of recipes from Gold Medal cookbooks from the
early 20th century the people behind Miss Crocker invited customers to send in 70 cents, which then
became a dollar, and in return they would send you a little wooden box filled with Betty's best recipes. And maybe if I had thought to do that I would have compiled my recipes into a little wooden box instead of putting them in the Tasting History cookbook but here we are it's on shelves, it's on my counter. Speaking of the Tasting History cookbook I am going to be going back out on book tour in October. This time it's all east coast, the cities are still being determined but we're going to go north to south, hitting several cities so if you live back there I'd love to see you .I'm going
to put details on online as soon as I have them. In fact maybe by the time this video actually drops I'll have all those details or some of the details down in the description. So keep an eye out. Anyway, as Miss Crocker's popularity grew the Washburn-Crosby Company decided to take her onto the airwaves. They'd recently purchased a Minnesota radio station and then hired a journalist and home economist Blanche Ingersoll to write scripts and perform them, providing the very first voice of
Betty Crocker. And in October of 1924 households all over the Midwest heard Betty Crocker say "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 every morning - is yours and I am here to be of service to you." And she was, within 3 years twelve different radio stations nationwide were broadcasting Betty Crocker but as they didn't record radio at the time, the scripts were being read by 12 different voices of Betty Crocker. And in addition to recipes and cooking tips she also got into just general household management. How best to do grocery shopping, how best to get a stain out of a tablecloth or something, and even how best to keep your man docile. "If you load a man's stomach with soggy boiled cabbage, greasy fried potatoes, 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." Now all of these scripts for Betty Crocker
were still being written by one person, and in 1927 that one person was Marjorie Child Husted who for the next 20 years really was Betty Crocker. Not only did she provide the voice, both on paper and
literally for several years, but she also crafted Betty Crocker's personality and made her have a relationship with her audience. Homemakers all over the country felt like they had a friend now when they listened to Husted's writing to Betty Crocker on the radio, and by the 1940s Betty Crocker was recognized in 90% of households making her the second most recognizable woman in the
country right behind Eleanor Roosevelt. And Eleanor Roosevelt had the benefit of being a real person
where Betty was not. The relationship that Husted built between Betty Crocker and her audience was
something very new at the time and resembled that of Dear Abby years later in the 1950s and 60s. And similarly to Betty Crocker Abigail Van Buren didn't really exist, it was the pen name of Abby's creator Pauline Phillips. Now this relationship that was built became all the more important in the 1930s during the Great Depression when people just needed to have a calming voice to listen
to and a voice to hear that people were going through the same things as they were going through and so Betty would read letters on the air like "My husband is just barely making a living for my four children and myself. He has had his wages cut terribly. I must try and do something." This allowed Betty Crocker to then teach people how to meal plan and cook on a budget. This was also an era of great change for the American home cook because of all the gadgets that were starting to invade
the kitchen. So Betty Crocker, or rather Marjorie Husted, began writing the recipes to complement those new kitchens the new appliances and in some cases new ingredients that weren't around even 20 years before. She also made a push for standardized size cake pans because before that each company was just kind of making their own size cake pans, there was no 9x13. It just wasn't standard like it is today which makes baking hard. She also took old recipes that people had on their shelves and told them how to update them for modern cooking. "Since many of the ingredients and methods no longer
fit the times, 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]." And all of these changes actually saved people time and money during a time when people really needed to save money. If you're trying to figure out a recipe from 1910 before they had any kind of temperature on your oven or a lot of standardized measurements were just coming into use and in a cake pan that is not standard and
using ingredients that maybe don't even exist anymore you're going to have a lot of like trial and error and end up wasting a lot of ingredients. Betty Crocker helped to fix that and people
really appreciated that but even Betty Crocker, the beloved Betty Crocker was not above controversy. There was a period where she had bachelors on her radio show and would ask them what they were looking for in their future wife. And while many people actually really loved this segment others did not though not necessarily for the reasons that you'd think. "I can't say that I care much for your talks about what different men want in their [future[ wives. Most of us who listen are married and our husbands have got all their going to get, unless it's some different food
for which you are giving us recipes in that time. Besides, we all know they won't get what they're
looking for. They'll fall in love with some pretty nitwit and won't even stop to ask whether or not she can cook!" I feel like there's a lot of subtext to that letter that didn't actually make it in, but other than the occasional disgruntled housewife most people did enjoy this segment and it actually brought in a lot of male viewers or listeners because it was on the radio. And some of those male listeners began sending in marriage proposals by letter to Betty Crocker and one of these proposals
actually did end up in a marriage obviously not to Betty Crocker but to one of the women who was writing back the letter. They actually ended up getting together and got married and this led to a rumor in the press that Betty Crocker had gotten hitched and so Betty Crocker the character had to come out and say no that's just a rumor. "The girl who was married was a former member
of our staff but Betty Crocker is right here as usual. Instead of practicing making biscuits for a husband, I'm afraid I will have to be content to keep doing my cooking in the Gold Medal kitchen so that we can work out all these recipes for you." And she did continue to work out recipes like in
this 1942 'Betty Crocker's Cookbook of All-Purpose Baking' which even shows her portrait for a person
who didn't exist. The portrait which was created in 1936 was actually an amalgam of several of
the women who wrote on the character's behalf. Also as this was published in 1942 it makes a
lot of concessions to deal with rationing which was happening at the beginning of World War II
and throughout the war, and throughout that time she had new recipes coming out that dealt with the ever-tightening restrictions of rations on ingredients like butter, sugar, and meat. Now as the war years ended Marjorie Husted who was by that time basically Betty Crocker was the most valuable employee at what by then was called General Mills. She was making more sales than anyone else in
the company but even though I say most valuable she was not the most valued as when she left in 1950 she was making one-fourth of the salary of the salesmen who were making a lot fewer sales. >:| In a speech that she made a year after she left the company she said "Management is dominated by men and there is no indication of interest on the part of employers for change." Nor did it change at least not in the 1950s, a decade when this character that Marjorie Husted had helped craft, Betty Crocker was at the height of her power. First in 1950 there was 'Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book' which has sold over 75 million copies and was so omnipresent in the kitchens of America that it became known simply as 'Big Red'. The 1950s also saw Betty Crocker move from the radio to television with The Betty Crocker Show, the titular character being played by the actress Adelaide Hawley Cumming. From 1949 to 1964 Cumming played the character on a number of shows appearing frequently on the popular
Burns and Allen Show. Betty Crocker showed me how to make it with a wonderful marble cake mix. And cake mix probably was the biggest thing to come from Betty Crocker. Rather than taking all afternoon to bake a cake, her line of cake mixes allowed you to just add an egg, and some water or milk, and voila you had yourself a cake. In fact, many of the Betty Crocker recipes after the
early 50s for pineapple upside down cake don't even have you make the cake, they just tell you to
go get a box of cake mix. Between the cookbook, the TV shows, and the cake mix, Betty Crocker became not only a friend of American Housewives all over but also one of the most influential bakers of the
20th century. Heck she even invented chiffon cake which they touted as being "the cake discovery of the century" and the first new cake in 100 years. Of course it was actually invented by a man named
Harry Baker because you know Betty Crocker is not real, but that doesn't mean that her legacy is not real. Yes she gets the credit, but really it was the work of hundreds of cooks over decades
in the the Betty Crocker Kitchens who did the work of perfecting numerous recipes, many of which
are still with us today and very little changed. Like this recipe for pineapple upside down cake
which should be ready to take out of the oven. So once your cake is baked through, let it cool on
a wire rack for 10 minutes, and then carefully flip it over and let the cake drop out, upside down onto a cake plate and here we are Betty Crocker's pineapple upside down cake. It smells absolutely delectable. The crumb is is just so lovely. It's so- just looks moist. Hate that word
but works with cake. Sounds moist too. Here we go. Hmm. Betty you've done it again, you old gal. Wow. Can't believe I'm eating like that. It's fantastic. 70 year old recipe and it shouldn't change at all. You should make this in the cast iron skillet. It
really does- it darkens it up so it's not as pretty but it creates this kind of like dark carameliness,
so there's- it's not a crunch but there's a it changes the texture and it's
absolutely wonderful. And it makes it a much more complex flavor than
a lot of pineapple upside down cakes that I've had. The only problem is that I am going to eat this entire cake over the next few days, the entire cake. None of it will go to waste. It's absolutely fantastic. This recipe really does stand the test of time and I look forward to adding it to the compendium of recipes that I'm including on the Tasting History website which I'm building
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