Baking icon Betty Crocker turns 100
Minnesota “native” celebrated in new recipe compilation
Spoiler alert: Betty Crocker, arguably the most recognized Minnesotan of the past century, isn’t a real person. Still, Cathy Swanson Wheaton is making sure that the 100th birthday of General Mills’ fictitious spokesperson is not going unnoticed.
Wheaton is executive editor of the Golden Valley, Minnesota-based company’s cookbooks, overseeing recipe development, photography and manuscript writing.
For her latest project, Wheaton has compiled a collector’s edition of recipes into “Betty Crocker Best 100: Favorite Recipes From America’s Most Trusted Cook” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), ranging from tried-and-true standards like banana bread and Swedish meatballs to classics-in-themaking along the lines of spiced pumpkin cupcakes and glutenfree tuna-noodle casserole.
Q: How did you go about narrowing what had to be a mountain of archived recipes?
A: It was daunting. I lost a lot of sleep. How am I to know what are the 100 top recipes? I ended up looking at the data that we had. Bettycrocker.com has 12 million visits each month — it’s one of the largest food websites out there — and selecting the most popular recipes was a good way to choose. We have a robust consumer relations department. They receive a million questions each year, and I pored over their recipe requests. A lot came from the nearly 400 cookbooks that General Mills has published since Betty was born, and also recipes that we’ve given clever new twists.
Q: Such as?
A: Fruitcake. It got a bad rap as being a good doorstop. But there’s a recipe on bettycrocker.com for fruitcake bars that take 20 minutes to prepare, and people rave about them.
We never changed for change’s sake. There was always a purpose. We tried to keep the essence of the recipe — we did take some favorites and made them gluten-free — but in some cases, ingredients and methods have changed and improved. For example, it didn’t make sense to share the old recipe for stuffed peppers, because you boiled them for 30 minutes. That’s when people cooked vegetables to death. Now, we stick them in the microwave with 2 tablespoons of water, and they’re done in three minutes.
Q: How many recipes did you consider before whittling the list down to a hundred?
A: There were hundreds, easily. Every night, I’d be pulling back my memories, asking myself, “What did I have 30 years ago?” and “What did I have 20 years ago?”
Q: Memory can be tricky.
A: We’ve learned that while we may have our memories, our taste buds have moved on. If you taste the mac-and-cheese you remembered from your childhood, you’d probably think, “This doesn’t have much flavor.” We expect more flavor combinations these days, which is why we updated the mac-and-cheese recipe with dry mustard and Worcestershire sauce.
Q: First on my to-do list is going to be making those singleserving chicken pot pies. Why did you include them?
A: That recipe is very much comfort food; it says “fall” to me. We recognize that people have busy lives. We don’t want cooking to be daunting - we want people to be successful at it, and to be proud to serve what they’re making to their family and friends. With those pot pies, it’s so easy to place the crust over the top, it doesn’t have to form beautiful edges. People aren’t looking for perfection, they’re looking for things that taste good and are easy to make.
Q: You produce three or four cookbooks a year. Was this a fun project to take on?
A: Oh, my gosh, yes. It was so exciting when we realized, a few years ago, that the 100th birthday was coming up. We had to do a book. It helps consumers see that she’s still relevant. She’s not your grandmother’s Betty Crocker. She has that history, but she’s still going forward and still has great ideas. She trends with the times, she’s not ahead of the times. Poring through old books, finding original sources and seeing how recipes have touched our lives and continue to touch our lives, that was a lot of fun. My blood runs Betty red, and so I’m super-honored that I can keep up the traditions.
Q: We’re talking about a fictitious character as if she were a living, breathing person. Is that standard operating procedure in your workplace?
A: It’s definitely part of the culture of General Mills. As a writer, it’s a little odd to talk about her in the first person as much as I did in the book. But it is about her birthday, and she lives in the hearts of all of us who represent her.
Q: Can you shorthand Betty’s origin story?
A: Our parent company, the Washburn-crosby Co., had a contest. A lot of the responses included cooking questions, and the marketing people realized that they needed more foodrelated people to answer them. They decided to create a persona for all of the home economists working at the company. They chose “Betty” because it was popular, and warm, and friendly, and “Crocker” because it was the last name of a retiring executive.