When I was younger, younger as in my high school age, I wanted to make something special for my Mom’s birthday. I opened up the cabinet above the stove and saw that my mom had a really, really old Betty Crocker cook book. I thought it would be perfect, because Betty Crocker has a lot of recipes if I could remember correctly. In my mind, Betty Crocker was THE cookbook for everything. I flipped open “Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, New and Revised Edition,” (seventh printing). The pages were yellow and older, because the book was from 1982. This particular cookbook was reprinted from the original 1969 edition. Now I understand why most of the recipes were outdated for 2009.
The cookbook that I used to create my mom’s birthday cake. She still has this same cookbook above the stove.
Betty Crocker is one of those names that is synonymous with cooking. Everyone knows Betty Crocker. In my mind it meant that the recipes in there were obviously good enough for my grandma and my mom, so they should work for me too. I flipped past the pot roast section, skimmed through the appetizers which featured deviled eggs and colorful fruit salad, until I found what seemed to be an easy recipe for a simple vanilla cake. After following the instructions and frosting the whole thing, I surprised my mom with what looked to be a delicious confection. We cut the cake, took a bite, and instantly I knew that I had done something wrong. The cake had a horrible, horrible consistency. It was something that both my mom and I were not used to. I’ve grown up in a time of boxed cake mixes, not homemade cakes. It could be that I messed up Betty Crocker’s recipe, or it could be that the recipes in the Betty Crocker cookbook from 1969 are too outdated for my tastes.
Some recipes will always stay in the sixties.
Most of the recipes in the cookbook were outdated. I’ve never watched my mom make jello fruit salad or some of the dinners in the book. My mom is a modern(ish) woman who cooks tacos and French dip sandwiches. A revised cookbook doesn’t mean that every recipe is good for modern times. Some recipes do not carry over, and the cookbook that I used seemed to have the same recipes from 1969; all that changed was the design and layout of the book. The way food tastes or looks changes over the years do to manufacturing and processing. Betty Crocker will always be a name that is synonymous with baking and cooking, but the recipes that were popular from the Betty Crocker cookbooks of 1969 may not by popular or even common in 2014. “Betty Crocker’s Cookbook” is an example of how cooking can fail at moving forward to stay modern. My Mom’s homemade birthday cake was a learned lesson, and I can say that since then, I have not attempted to make a homemade cake again.
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