Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food The Secret Life Of America's First Lady Of Food (Hardcover)
| Author: Susan Marks |
| Format: | Hardcover |
Product Details:
| "Betty Crocker, happy homemaking, and cake mixes are almost synonymous with 1950s American kitchen kitsch, but Betty originally belonged to an entirely different generation..." (from the first line) From The Publisher About The Author |
Betty Crocker, of course, never actually existed, but she may be one of the most influential women in the history of American eating. Created in 1921 by the PR department of General Mills (then a small Minneapolis flour company), Betty Crocker became the banner under which a staff of experts tested their recipes, but over the years her fame spread much further than the test kitchen. The fictional Betty was a radio personality in the Twenties, an icon of good sense during the penny-pinching Depression years, and a hawker of newfangled convenience foods in the Fifties. In the Seventies, after the feminist group NOW filed a class action suit protesting the lily-white homemaker image of Betty Crocker, General Mills accordingly made her over into a more modern-looking professional woman. Here, Susan Marks writes Betty's biography, bringing her up to date in the Martha Stewart-dominated 21st century as a genial symbol of domesticity.
Praise
"Marks excels in putting her subject in context....Like a Betty Crocker recipe: goes down easy." 01/15/2005 Publishers Weekly
"Light on analysis but abundant with anecdotes, this is a solid basic history for casual culinary, marketing and American historians." 02/14/2005
Book Format:
