Here’s another history geek post for my friends into cooking:
This is the first Betty Crocker cookbook, circa 1950. It’s a first edition “signed” by Betty aka a General Mills secretary. Betty herself is a fictional character used to promote General Mills products. Beautiful hardcover book with mostly black-and-white photos, although a limited number of full-page color photos were sprinkled in.
This cookbook ushers in a new era after World War II. Middle-class homemakers had more time and resources to entertain. Also a notable time because more women were entering and staying in the workforce. Because women were needed so badly to work during the war, it was becoming more socially acceptable for a woman to leave the so-called purity of the home to work away from the hearth. For the first time, cookbooks included recipes that saved time and used modern conveniences (appliances such as electric blenders and mixers, store-bought packaged ingredients and prepared food) to help busy homemakers.
Updated 09-08-20:
I have often wondered why the cover of my first edition is blue, while every picture of a first edition I've seen elsewhere show the cover as red. I found out on another blogger's page that this blue first edition is a special limited edition. This info comes courtesy of https://sandychatter.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/then-along-came-the-betty-crocker-picture-cook-book/:
Before the first red-and-white cookbook was released to the public, however, employees of General Mills received a special limited edition of the Betty Crocker Picture Cook Book, with a presentation line on which an employee’s name was written, and below it was printed “With the Warm Good Wishes of General Mills …. And signed underneath that was the handwritten name “Betty Crocker.”
Some years ago, my supervisor at the office where I worked – who had become a good friend as well – offered this special limited edition of the Betty Crocker Picture Cook Book to me; the person it had been presented to had been her MOTHER although it was her FATHER, who had worked at General Mills. I happily accepted the book which came in a cardboard case of the same dark blue as the book itself. Unlike the first edition released to the public, the limited edition had a red, yellow design on a blue denim-like background—kind of a Pennsylvania Dutch motif. ...