The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Timeless dishes for today’s tastes
Betty Crocker cookbook celebrates the 100th anniversary of a home kitchen icon.
The first Betty Crocker cookbooks appeared in the 1930s and ’40s, with the first picture cookbook published in 1950, each filled with recipes created by the cooks and home economists in the Betty Crocker test kitchens. Now Betty Crocker cookbooks number in the hundreds with more than 75 million sold to date.
This month, General Mills is publishing “Betty Crocker Best 100” (Houghton Mifflin, $25) to celebrate the 100 years of recipes and advice published under the brand of “Betty Crocker,” the fictional character who first appeared in 1921 and has served as a reassuring guide for home cooks around the world for a century.
Cathy Swanson Wheaton is the executive editor for all Betty Crocker cookbooks and was the first writer for bettycrocker.com. She’s worked for the company for 25 years, beginning with creating recipes to publish on the back of product packages, creating new product prototypes for the company, and as she says, working her way into her sweet spot, publications, where she enjoys sharing her love of cooking with others.
Wheaton grew up in Minneapolis, preparing meals for her family. “My parents always wanted to go out to dinner at mediocre restaurants, so I said I would be happy to make dinner from the refrigerator so we wouldn’t have to go out. Everyone liked what I made.”
Marry her youthful success in the kitchen, the lessons she learned from her Italian grandmother who prepared elaborate meals that gathered the family around the table to eat, laugh and talk, and her sister’s Girl Scout tour of the Betty Crocker kitchens in Minneapolis, and Wheaton had found her calling.
“I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I went to Purdue for their excellent program for food science, and came back to Minneapolis and took a job waiting tables until there was an opening in the test kitchens.
I’ve been working here ever since, with a break for raising my kids.”
Some of the early products she worked on or developed prototypes for were for Betty Crocker mix for angel food cake and Suddenly Salad Caesar salad.
When it came time to mark Betty’s 100th “birthday,” Wheaton was in charge of choosing the 100 recipes for the new cookbook. “It was daunting and I was losing sleep. How do I decide what the best recipes are?” She looked to data, finding the top rated recipes from bettycrocker.com, poring over the questions that come into the General Mills consumer relations department (which answers over a million recipe questions every year), and looking at the tried-and-true recipes that have made it into many of the Betty Crocker cookbooks.
“I wanted a book that would include recipes people can’t stop talking about, comfort food favorites, and recipes that would become favorites for our children’s generation.”
The result is a book with 100 recipes, leaning heavily toward baking, with each recipe including a brief introduction that might be a consumer quote, a fun story about its creation or the history behind a recipe.
In testing the recipes for the book, many factors went into play. For example, the No-knead Oatmeal-molasses Bread is a nod to the “casserole breads” popularized in the 1950s and ’60s. “Today people are interested in things they can put together quickly, and these casserole breads were probably the original no-knead breads, so popular today.”
But in the 70 years since those recipes first appeared, ingredients have changed and our awareness of food safety issues has as well. “Many of those breads were baked in coffee cans, and we now know that’s not a good idea. Yeast has changed and the way we incorporate it into a recipe has changed, which means a change in the order of the ingredients and even the temperature of the water you use. We tweaked the original recipes, if necessary, so they are
easy for anyone to make, taste great and that you’d be proud to serve.”
Ingredients are not the only thing that has changed. “Our memories of our favorite foods may stay the same, but our taste buds have changed. We expect more flavor than we used to, and we are accustomed to more sophisticated seasonings. We’ve come a long way in understanding the role of salt and sugar and how to get great flavor without so much of either.”
Creating healthier versions of favorites like zucchini bread with more fiber than the original recipes and developing gluten-free recipes that not only skip the wheat but actually incorporate more vegetables, all while using ingredients commonly found at the neighborhood grocery store, were all part of the consideration in getting to those final 100 recipes.
The result is 100 well-tested recipes, updated for today’s tastes and easy to incorporate into today’s meals.