Betty Crocker has been part of Americana for 100 years

You might say Betty Crocker is older than dirt…in its dessert form, that is.

“Dirt treat” recipes began showing up in the 1980s. 

By then, Betty Crocker had already become a “senior citizen.” Lordy, she dates all the way back to 1921, making her a centenarian…plus one.

 

(Psst. Betty Crocker’s key ingredient in her “Dirt Ice Cream Cake” recipe is her Super Moist Devil’s Food cake mix.) 

Carrie Hatler of St. Paul, Minn., creator of the Forgotten Minnesota blog, said Betty Crocker is known as “America’s First Lady of Food,” but she’s not a real person.

 

“Betty Crocker was born in a boardroom of The Washburn-Crosby Company in Minneapolis in 1921,” Hatler said. (The flour-milling company merged in 1928 with a number of other mills to form General Mills.) 

Betty Crocker was “invented” to solve a problem that was generated by an advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post in 1921. 

The ad for Gold Bond Flour, a product of Washburn-Crosby, featured a jumbled picture puzzle. Contestants were encouraged to solve the puzzle and send it in for the prize of a pincushion in the shape of a sack of Gold Medal Flour, said Tori Avey, a food writer in Beverly Hills, Calif.

 

Not only did Washburn-Crosby receive more than 30,000 pieced-together puzzles, it got almost as many letters with questions about the basics of baking, almost exclusively from women. 

Samuel Gale, who was the head of the company’s advertising department back then, “never felt comfortable signing his name to letters in reply to consumers, as he suspected that women would rather hear from other women who knew their way around a kitchen,” Avey wrote. 

According to Hatler’s online post, Gale and his team had the bright idea of “creating a female personality” to answer inquiries individually. They combined the last name of a recently retired company director, “William G. Crocker,” with the first name “Betty” – a name they thought sounded warm and friendly. 

Florence Lindeberg, a secretary at Washburn-Crosby, penned Betty Crocker’s “original signature,” and Lindeberg was tasked with signing each letter “Cordially Yours, Betty Crocker.” 

In 1924, Betty Crocker “acquired a voice” with the radio debut of the nation’s first cooking show on WCCO radio in Minneapolis. Washburn-Crosby’s home economist Blanche Ingersoll portrayed Betty on the air and “promoted good cooking as the secret to a happy home.” 

As the program was picked up in other markets, different women voiced Betty in each city, reading scripts written by Ingersoll. 

Marjorie Child Husted was next in line to take over the radio microphone in 1926. She managed the Betty Crocker Homemaking Service. Her 40 home economists created and “triple-tested” recipes to meet “the Betty Crocker standard.”

 Marjorie Child Husted

As her role expanded, Husted even traveled to Hollywood to interview movie stars such as Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow, Helen Hayes and Clark Gable…“who also enjoyed Betty’s recipes and home-cooked food.” 

In 1936, artist Neysa McMein created a portrait “to put a face to Betty Crocker.” McMein painted Betty with dark hair. She wore a red jacket over a white blouse with a frilled collar.

 

In 1941, General Mills hired Adelaide Hawley to act as Betty Crocker on television. Hawley was a popular vaudeville entertainer with a large following…but truth be told…she “had little experience of any kind with cooking.”

 Adelaide Hawley

General Mills never let that bit of information leak out to dissuade Betty’s ever-growing fan base.