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We all know the name very well, and one thing is clear - WHOEVER this 'Betty Crocker" is, she is an amazing cook! But, is Betty even real? Or, was she just a figment of our collective imagination? Today on Weird History Food we are delving deep into who exactly was Betty Crocker, and how exactly this hybrid sensation became what we know today!
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Today, we're blowing the pot lid off this mystery and answering the question
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was Betty Crocker a real person? In 1921, General Mills ran a contest in the Saturday Evening Post
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whereby customers could win a pin cushion shaped like a bag of flour by completing a puzzle
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The contest was so popular, the company was deluged by letters from customers
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who suddenly wanted all kinds of baking advice. General Mills deployed an expert to respond to all those letters
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an expert named Betty Crocker. She answered thousands of letters a week
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and wrote a line of best-selling cookbooks. In 1924, Betty became the star of radio's very first cooking show
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the Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air. And starting in 1929, she began dropping Betty Crocker coupons for flatware
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into bags of flour. In 1937, those coupons would start appearing right on the boxes
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of hundreds of General Mills products. And the first official Betty Crocker food product
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was a packaged noodle soup mix released in 1941. Then, in 1947, they would have released the first iteration
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of the product Betty is most associated with today, cake mix. And in the 1950s, she would become a staple on network television. In 1972, she would
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even start to share her ideas on a wide variety of topics, including dinner parties and decorating
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in her own lifestyle magazine called Sphere, the Betty Crocker magazine. But who was Betty Crocker
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and what do we really know about her? Betty Crocker wasn't a real person at all. She's a
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fictional character who created in the wake of that pin cushion contest Yes Betty Crocker was dreamed up by the marketing department of General Mills working in partnership with advertising executive Bruce Barton But even though Betty is fictional the character wasn completely conjured out of thin air
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In fact, she was allegedly inspired by a real-life sous chef from Barton's alma mater
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The name Betty was selected because it sounded friendly and cheerful, and the name Crocker was selected in honor of William G. Crocker
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a company director who had recently retired. According to a 1945 article in Fortune magazine
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Betty received somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 letters a day and was the second most recognizable woman on earth, behind only Eleanor Roosevelt
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She was so beloved that the very same article actually outed her as a fictive person and no one cared
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The public loved Betty so much, it didn't matter if she was real or not
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Then who wrote all of those letters and books? And who was that person on the TV show
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Well, to paraphrase Chaka Khan, Betty Crocker was actually several women. The letters that Betty answered, for example, were actually written by a team of home economists who were informally known as the Croquettes
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One such Croquette was Jeanette Kelly, who would later become director of the home services department at General Mills
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In that position, she would supervise the team of 50 chefs who created the recipes for Betty Crocker's picture cookbook
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Scripts for Betty's 1924 radio show were written by journalist and home economist Blanche Ingersoll, who was also the first to provide the voice for Betty on that very show
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But what about the Betty who kept showing up on television? you ask? Well, that was mostly an ex-Vaudeville actress named Adelaide Hawley Cumming. It just
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goes to show that her old slogan was right. No matter where you are in the world, all good things
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start with Betty Crocker. Just make sure you get an extra can of frosting. There never seems to be enough