Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (78 page)

Although most American housewives believed Betty Crocker was a real person, no one had yet seen her picture, because none existed until 1936. That year, to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of the Betty Crocker name, a portrait was commissioned from a prominent New York artist, Neysa McMein. In an act of artistic egalitarianism, Neysa McMein did not use a single company woman to sit for the portrait. Instead, all the women in the company’s Home Service Department assembled, and the artist, as the company stated, “blended their features into an official likeness.”

That first Betty Crocker visage reigned unaltered until 1955, when the company “updated” the portrait. Instead of aging the appropriate nineteen years, Betty actually appeared younger in her 1955 portrayal. And she continued to grow more youthful and contemporary, in her official 1965 portrait and in the most recent one, painted in 1980, in which she appears as a modern professional woman.

For a fictitious woman, Betty Crocker acquired enviable fame. During World War II, she served the country at the request of the United States Department of State with a patriotic radio show,
Your Nation’s Rations
. She went on to write several best-selling cookbooks, narrate films, record recipes on cassette tapes, and become a one-woman cottage industry, something of a prototypal Jane Fonda.

Duncan Hines: 1948, Kentucky

While there was never a Betty Crocker, and only an Aunt Jemima impersonator, there was a flesh-and-blood, real-life Duncan Hines—though he never baked a cake professionally in his life. Duncan Hines only
wrote
about food.

In 1936, Hines published
Adventures in Good Eating
, a pocket-sized guidebook to the best restaurants along America’s highways. With the burgeoning craze for automobile travel in the ’30s, Hines’s book became a runaway success. Sales figures suggested that every car in America had a copy of the guide in its glove compartment. Restaurants across the country coveted their hard-earned sign that boasted “Recommended by Duncan Hines.”

A native of Bowling Green, Kentucky, Duncan Hines traveled fifty thousand miles a year for the sole purpose of sampling highway fare and updating his guidebook. In the late 1940s, when New York businessman Roy Park surveyed housewives to identify a trusted food authority to endorse a new line of baked goods, he found there was no competition: The name Duncan Hines was not only trusted, it was better known across America than that of the incumbent Vice President, Alben Barkley—even in Barkley’s home state of Kentucky.

In 1948, Roy Park and Duncan Hines teamed up to form Hines-Park Foods, Inc. Park was president, and Duncan Hines signed a contract permitting his name to be used on the company’s line of boxed baked goods. So respected was the Hines name that within three weeks of their introduction, the cake mixes had swallowed up 48 percent of the national market.

One could argue, of course, that the man behind the Duncan Hines brand was every bit the corporate ruse of an Aunt Jemima or a Betty Crocker, a harmless deception. And a popular way to personalize a product. Certainly no one ever seriously believed there was an aristocrat named Lady Kenmore, or if one existed, that she ever endorsed appliances.

Pie: 5th Century
B.C
., Greece

Although baking bread and confections began in ancient Egypt, there is no evidence that civilization’s first bakers ever stumbled on the idea of stuffing a dough shell with meat, fish, or fruit. That culinary advance was made in ancient Greece, where the
artocreas
, a hash-meat pie with only a bottom crust, endured for centuries. Two features distinguished those early pies from today’s: They had no top crust, and fillings were never fruit or custard, but meat or fish.

The first pies made with two layers of crust were baked by the Romans. Cato the Elder, a second-century
B.C
. Roman statesman who wrote a treatise on farming,
De Agricultura
, loved delicacies and recorded a recipe for his era’s
most popular pie,
placenta
. Rye and wheat flour were used in the crust; the sweet, thick filling consisted of honey, spices, and cheese made from sheep’s milk; and the pie was coated with oil and baked atop aromatic bay leaves.

The first Western reference to a fruit pie—and a true dessert pie—appears surprisingly late in history: during the sixteenth-century reign of England’s Elizabeth I. Though home bakers may have used fruits such as apples and peaches, it is known that the queen requested pitted and preserved cherries as substitutions for the traditional fillings of meat or fish. Before the Elizabethan era, “pie” meant “meat pie,” a meal’s main course. The word’s antecedent,
pi
, referred to any confusing jumble or mixture of things: meats to the early Britons, and to the earlier Greeks, a perplexing and endless array of digits generated by dividing a circle’s circumference by its diameter.

Once the dessert fruit pie appeared, its references and fillings proliferated. Interestingly (perhaps following the queen’s lead), the preferred fillings initially were not cut fruits but berries, a 1610s British favorite being the dark-blue hurtleberry, which resembles a blueberry but has ten nutlike seeds; in America by 1670, it was called the huckleberry, the basis for huckleberry pie and the quintessentially American name of an adventure-some boy surnamed Finn.

Cookie: 3rd Century
B.C
., Rome

Today’s cookies are crisp or chewy, round or oval, plain or studded with nuts, raisins, and/or chocolate chips. In the ancient past, such options did not exist; a cookie was a thin unleavened wafer, hard, square, bland, and “twice baked.” Its origin and evolution are evident in its names throughout history.

The cookie began in Rome around the third century
B.C
. as a wafer-like biscuit—
bis coctum
in Latin, literally “twice baked,” signifying its reduced moisture compared to that of bread or cake. To soften the wafer, Romans often dipped it in wine.

But it was precisely the wafer’s firmness and crispness that earned it the echoic Middle English name
craken
, “to resound,” for on breaking, it “crackled.” The
craken
became the “cracker,” which in concept is considerably closer to the modern food the Roman cookie most closely resembled. Though neither the
bis coctum
nor the
craken
would satisfy a sweet craving, both were immensely popular foods in the ancient world because their low moisture content served effectively as a preservative, extending their home shelf life. As pies for centuries were meat pies, cookies were plain biscuits; sweetness did not become a cookie hallmark until after the Middle Ages.

The modern connotation of “cookie” is believed to have derived from a small, sweet Dutch wedding cake known as
koekje
, a diminutive of
koek
, Dutch for a full-sized “cake.” Made in numerous variations and never “twice
baked,” the sweeter, softer, moister
koekje
, etymologists claim, at least gave us the words “cooky” and “cookie,” and probably the dessert itself.

In America, “cooky” and “cookie” became vernacularisms in the early 1700s. But the written history of the sweet remained scant compared to that of other foods, primarily because cookies did not become truly popular—and certainly not brand-name sweet temptations—until about a hundred years ago. As we’ll see, several of those early commercial successes are still selling today.

Animal Cookies: 1890s, England

For Christmas 1902, thousands of American children received a new and edible toy: animal-shaped cookies in a small rectangular box imprinted to resemble a circus cage. The box’s string handle made it easy to carry and suitable as a play purse, but the white string had been added by National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) to encourage parents to hang the boxes of Animal Crackers as decorative Christmas tree gifts.

The design of the animal cookies had originated in England in the 1890s, but the American manufacturer displayed advertising genius with the package design. Labeled “Barnum’s Animals” in the decade when P. T. Barnum was popularizing the “Greatest Show on Earth,” the box immediately captured the imaginations of children and adults. And whereas British animal crackers came in only a handful of shapes, the American menagerie boasted a circus of seventeen different creatures (though the cookies came in eighteen distinct shapes): bison, camel, cougar, elephant, giraffe, gorilla, hippopotamus, hyena, kangaroo, lion, monkey, rhinoceros, seal, sheep, tiger, zebra, and sitting bear. The eighteenth shape was a walking bear.

Although a box of Animal Crackers contained twenty-two cookies, no child that Christmas of 1902 or thereafter was guaranteed a full representation of the zoo. This was because the machine-filled boxes could randomly contain, say, a caravan of camels and a laugh of hyenas but not so much as a lone kangaroo.

The randomness added an element of expectancy to a gift box of Animal Crackers, a plus the company had not foreseen. And soon parents were writing to Nabisco and revealing another unanticipated phenomenon (either trivial or of deep psychological import): Children across America nibbled away at the animals in a definite order of dismemberment: back legs, fore-legs, head, and lastly the body.

Fig Newton
. Whereas the shapes of Animal Crackers made them a novelty and a success, there was another cookie of the same era that caught the imaginations of Americans for its originality of concept.

In 1892, a Philadelphia inventor named James Mitchell devised a machine that extruded dough in a firm wraparound sandwich that could hold a filling—but a filling of what? Mitchell approached the Kennedy Biscuit
Works in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, and after testing his machine, they decided in 1895 to manufacture a stuffed cookie containing the company’s first and most successful jam: figs. The snack’s name generated debate. Management agreed it should include the word “fig” and, for local marketing purposes, the familiar name of a nearby town. “Fig Bostons” and “Fig Shrewsburys” did not sound as appealing as the suggestion made by an employee who lived in Newton, Massachusetts. Thus was named the newest sweet in American cookie jars at the turn of the century.

Oreo
. Following the success of Animal Crackers, Nabisco attempted several other cookie creations. Two of them were to be eaten once and forgotten; one would become the world’s all-time favorite seller.

On April 2, 1912, an executive memo to plant managers announced the company’s intentions: “We are preparing to offer to the trade three entirely new varieties of the highest class biscuit.” The memo predicted superior sales for two of the cookies. One, the “Mother Goose Biscuit,” would be an imaginative variation on the company’s successful Animal Crackers, “A biscuit bearing impressions of the Mother Goose legends.” How could Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella cookies fail? (No one questioned if there was something macabre in cannibalizing beloved little girls, or stopped to consider which appendages children would eat first.)

The second cookie with great expectations was, according to the memo, “a delicious, hard, sweet biscuit of beautiful design” exotically named “Veronese.” The third new entry would consist of “two beautifully embossed, chocolate flavored wafers with a rich cream filling,” to be named the “Oreo Biscuit.” Relatively few people ever got to taste a “Mother Goose” or a “Veronese,” but from Nabisco’s soaring sales figures, it appeared that every American was eating Oreos. Today the cookie outsells all others worldwide, more than five billion being consumed each year in the United States alone.

From its original name of “Oreo Biscuit,” the cookie became the “Oreo Creme Sandwich,” and in 1974, the “Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie.” What no archivist at Nabisco knows with certainty is the origin of the term Oreo. Two educated guesses have been offered: that the first chairman of the National Biscuit Company, Adolphus Green, coined the word from
oros
, Greek for “mountain,” since the cookie as originally conceived was to have a peaked, mountain-like top; or that the name was suggested by the French for “gold,”
or
, since on the original package, the cookie’s name was scrolled in gold letters.

Graham Cracker: 1830s, New England

The graham cracker originated as a health food, and in Britain it is still known as a “digestive biscuit.” It is also probably the only cookie or cracker to have sprung from a faddish health craze and religious movement, Grahamism, which swept New England in the 1820s and 1830s.

The Reverend Sylvester Graham was a Connecticut eccentric, congenitally prone to poor health. He married his nurse and became a self-styled physician and temperance leader, preaching impassioned lectures on white bread’s evils, nutritional and spiritual. Derided by Ralph Waldo Emerson as the “poet of bran,” the Reverend Graham did advocate many healthful things, if fanatically: little consumption of oil; no red meat, alcohol, or refined flour; frequent bathing and exercise; and brushing the teeth daily. He believed that the way to bodily health and spiritual salvation lay in diet, and his disciples, “Grahamites,” in accordance with his philosophy of “Grahamology,” followed a strict vegetarian diet, drank only water, and slept with windows open even in winter.

His teachings against commercial breads, cereals, and flour—in favor of coarse bran—incurred the wrath of New England bakers. They frequently harassed Graham on speaking tours and picketed outside his hotels. In 1837, he published a treatise urging Americans to eat only home-baked breads, pastries, and crackers, and his name became associated with a variety of unprocessed products: graham flour, graham cereal, and the graham cracker. Eventually, bakers adopted a more conciliatory attitude, and capitalizing on Graham’s popularity, they, too, offered a line of whole-wheat goods, including the graham cracker.

Due to Grahamism, a new breakfast trend developed in America. One of the Reverend Graham’s New York followers, Dr. James Caleb Jackson, advocated
cold breakfast cereal
, a bold reversal of the traditional hot morning gruel, but one that quickly caught on. The food would not become a true American tradition, however, until the 1890s, when another health-conscious physician, Dr. John Kellogg, who breakfasted daily on seven graham crackers, created his own “Battle Creek health foods,” the first being Granola, followed in 1907 by Corn Flakes. The prototype of packaged cold cereals was Dr. James Caleb Jackson’s own effort, Granula, a “granular” bran whose name was a compression of “Graham” and “bran.” As for “Dr.” Sylvester Graham, despite a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, and high-fiber diet, he remained a sickly man and died at age fifty-seven.