Rolls, product placement, and a gift in every box!

This week’s post was inspired by a small 144-page hardcover cookbook titled All About Home Baking and published by the Consumer Service Department of the General Foods Corporation in June 1936. 

It’s a great little book that features a black and yellow plaid cover and includes loads of black and white pictures, as well as several full-colour plates. All About Home Baking begins with a word from, well, someone in the Consumer Service Department. The only person actually named in the book can be found on the very last page, 144, crediting the photographs to an H. I. Williams. Intrigued, I conducted an extensive search for the said person and eventually discovered that the H. I. stood for Harney Isham Williams, or Hi Williams for short. Turns out, Mr. Williams was one of the leading food and advertising photographers of his day. One of his photographs, titled Chocolate Chip Cookie, is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art’s collection in New York City:

All About Home Baking begins with an introduction titled “It’s a Wise Woman Who Knows Her Baking Rules” and ensues with “Have you ever wished you were blessed with a ‘born knack for baking’? Stop your wishing! There's no such thing to be had! Baking skills is made and not born.” Well thank goodness for that. I can imagine the sigh of relief from the thousands of homemakers across America, finally let off the hook for over kneading their dough or (dear heavens) using the wrong ingredient. (“See Ralph! You’re mother’s wrong! Not EVERYBODY is born with a knack for baking! Says right here!”) No, as the book points out “it takes no special gift, no magic touch, to work wonders with a mixing bowl… Here, in this book, there are tested ways to perfect baking. Whether you're a beginner or an old hand at the game, the things you learn here will make your baking better, easier, and more fun!” And isn’t that what every good homemaker wanted – more fun in the kitchen?

The introduction goes on to describe some basic rules: be orderly, use good tools, and choose good ingredients. In fact, a whole chapter is devoted to explaining the type of baking powder, flour, and other ingredients required to achieve success, and that it is imperative homemakers use the exact ingredients listed in the recipes. The book features “23 Easy Picture Lessons – The Keys to Baking Success” that consist of pictorial illustrations of the steps and tips to achieve some “basic” recipes. As I view the photos, I can just imagine Hi adjusting his camera, suggesting “Miss Turner” tilt the bowl ever so slightly to her left. No, her other left. Though upon further study, the hands do appear to be rather manly and so it may have been a “Mr. Turner” who beat the eggs for 10 minutes (can you imagine?), then beat in sugar gradually. The initial lessons are followed by “Other Recipes Made Like…” whatever was just made, so after mastering the Calumet One-egg Cake, you can try the Raisin Cup Cakes or the Boston Cream Pie which uses the same techniques. Very clever indeed.

Flipping through the pages seeking something to bake, a full-colour image caught my eye and 72 pages later, I came upon the recipe: Quick Cinnamon Rolls. What a great idea for a Sunday morning! 

I skimmed the ingredients to make sure I had everything on hand. Well, I had flour, but not Swans Down Cake Flour, nor did I have Calumet Baking Powder but though the book warned me that NOT using these ingredients could result in disappointment, I went ahead and pulled out my food stuffs. 

But as I reached for my brown sugar and headed to the other cupboard for cinnamon, I couldn’t help but wonder about the brands mentioned in the recipes. So I ventured over to the computer and let my fingers do the tapping. General Foods Corporation…

We go back to 1895 when Charles William Post created the Postum Cereal Company. Ironically, his first product was not cereal but a roasted, cereal-based beverage called Postum.  The drink was a combination of wheat-grain, bran, and molasses, and was marketed as a healthy alternative to caffeine - one that could be fed to children. Mr. Post was an astute businessman who believed in advertising and marketing. By 1905, he was spending $400,000 a year on advertising and his Postum Cereal Company had earned more than $10 million dollars. That’s a lot of cereal. Post died in 1914, but he instilled this belief in his daughter Marjorie Merriweather Post who took over the business upon his death. Six years later, Marjorie, a smart cookie herself, married Edward F. Hutton, a Wall Street broker. Some of you may remember the 70s television ads “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” In fact, he was the founder.

In 1925, the Postum Cereal Company began buying companies right and left (the Jell-O Company, the Minute Tapioca Company, Walter Baker (chocolates), Richard Hellmann Inc. (mayo), the Cheek-Neel Coffee Company), including… wait for it – Igleheart Brothers Inc., the makers of Swans Down cake flour AND the Calumet Baking Powder Company. Oh, and I forgot to mention the Diamond Crystal salt brand. (The recipe doesn’t specify this specific brand, but you'll note the can in the colour plate – the first product placement?) Four years later, Postum Cereal Company would become the General Foods Corporation. This led me to wonder if the average homemaker knew back then that the products promoted in this book were actually brands owned by the General Foods Corporation. Probably not any more than today’s homemaker knows that the body soap she uses (Dove), the soup she serves (Lipton), the mayonnaise she spreads on her BLT (Hellmann’s), or the ice-cream she feeds her children (Ben & Jerry’s) are all brands owned by Unilever – the same people who bring you the household cleaning product Vim, “because you’re home is for living, not just for cleaning!”

Back to our recipe. While researching online, I happened to come across an image that closely resembled the colour plate on page 11 in my book, the one of the cinnamon rolls. It looked very similar, but not quite the same. The exact same items were there but laid out differently, and the paper shelf liner was a different colour and cut. It was my daughter Rachel who noticed the difference in the rolls. The colour plate in my 1936 edition shows 16 rolls (scroll back up), even though the recipe specifies it makes 12. The other colour plate I discovered online is from the first edition published in 1933, the second printing, and shows 9 rolls. The recipe calls for an 8 x 8 square pan. My guess is that the good folks in the Consumer Service Department failed to notice this discrepancy in the book’s first edition, and upon discovering their error, realized that the recipe did not produce 12 rolls but rather nine. I like to imagine Hi being called in to re-shoot the nine rolls, tongue clicking while a cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Sorry, that would be more fitting for a private eye, not a food photographer. AND I’m sure the people at General Foods would not have approved. I digress yet again.  

Quick Cinnamon Rolls it was. Well, quick they were, because I used my KitchenAid mixer with the paddle attachment to cut the shortening into the flour mixture and melted the butter in my microwave. But I did get distracted just long enough to over beat the dough, thus resulting in a denser roll. My bad. I also didn’t add currants or raisins because my daughter doesn’t like them.  All in all, not bad for a first attempt, and tasty none the less. 

Next time, I’ll be sure to keep an eye on the mixing and double the amount of butter and brown sugar in the pan to obtain a larger amount of caramel topping. Cause you can never have too much caramel topping. And maybe I’ll add some nuts. Walnuts or pecans… 

As a side note (aside from my usual digressions), my edition of All About Home Baking arrived with an added perk - a Toytown card tucked in between pages 70 and 71. These cards were inserted in boxes of Nabisco Shredded Wheat to encourage future purchases. The card in question, No. 16 Roadside Stand, was part of a series of 36 that displayed a building or part of a village that could be cut out and coloured. My research tells me the card dates from 1946. 

"Ask Mother to get more Nabisco Shredded Wheat so you can get all 36,

including a layout of the complete town."  

Have a great week!

A gem of a story, with liner notes

The inspiration for this post came in the form of a vintage photo of paper cup cake liners. After discovering that the cup cake was a distant cousin of the pound cake (see last post), the image of those faded little pleated paper cups got me wondering and so I let my fingers do the tapping. 

What we call cup liners are also referred to as paper cases, patty pans, and baking cups, depending on where you call home. So the story goes that “in the beginning”, cupcakes were baked in individual pottery cups, ramekins, moulds, or gem pans or irons. A gem pan? I had to look that up. According to the web, a gem is a type of bread, much like a muffin. But it's the pan itself that appears to be behind the name, since it looks like the facets of a gem. The pan is made up of compartments that can hold about a quarter cup of dough and is traditionally made of cast iron. Here's an example:

You’ll note that the "cups" have cut outs between them, which allowed for even heat distribution, but were still connected so that the heat could be transmitted through the iron. I suspect it was just a matter of time before one clever cook substituted bread batter for cake batter and discovered the cup cake. In fact, the earliest reference to a “cup cake” is apparently found in Amelia Simmons book, American Cookery (1796) where she mentions a “cake to be baked in small cups.” According to the Food Timeline Web site, the earliest mention of a cup cake recipe was found in Eliza Leslie’s cookbook Seventy-five Receipts, for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, published in Boston in 1828. Once again, note the author credit, “By a lady of Philadelphia”.  

Did you know that the first edition of Sense and Sensibility in 1811 also was authored “By a lady”? Though it’s my understanding that Jane Austen chose to remain anonymous. Fascinating.

But I digress. So we can see how muffin/cupcake pans evolved over time. But when did the paper liner come into being, and why? Prior to liners, bakers had to use oil or fat and flour to ensure their cakes did not stick to pans.  As I conducted my online research, I found a multitude of sites that repeated the exact same information: “paper liners did not come into use until after WWI when the James River Corporation began manufacturing the liners on machines that had been making artillery shells just a few years before.” Yet upon further research, I was unable to validate this claim. It sounds very romantic, ammunition to cupcake liners, but I’m not convinced. 

According to the Food Timeline Web site, the paper cup was introduced to serve food with – not bake in. One excerpt I came across recommended homemakers not waste their money purchasing muffin pans but rather, use paper cups instead which could be set directly “on the oven grill.” May be convenient, but any wise homemaker back then would have opted for the $0.59 pan (on sale), rather than keep paying $0.15 for a box of 85 liners. Unless the goal was making an impression at the next PTA meeting.

In my attempt to date cups, I did find a US federal trademark registration for Betty Brite paper baking cups filed in 1955 by the American Lace Paper Company of Milwaukee.

These baking cups were manufactured by the Frank M. Sayford Company in Connecticut. Unfortunately, I was unable to date them. These were "scorch resistant". How convenient!

These lovelies are Barbie brand “treated” paper cups that I found listed at the Black Oak Vintage Shop on Etsy. I tried finding information on the Barbie brand but got nowhere. That's not true. Lots of plastic but no paper.  

I did come across a fascinating article called “The Golden Age of Patty Pans” written by Peter Sheen which describes the patty pans (paper cups) in the La Trobe Collection housed at the State Library of Victoria in Australia. The article refers to the golden age of the paper cups as being from 1930 to 1950, so this dates the cupcake liner back to 1930, at least down under.

Ultimately, paper baking cups were introduced to save cleaning time and provide a sanitary way of handling individual cakes. They also help keep cup cakes moist.

So after all this research, I decided to make the cupcake recipe found in Miss Leslie’s 1828 cookbook:

Cup Cake

5 eggs.Two large teacupfulls of molasses.The same of brown sugar, rolled fine.The same of fresh butter.One cup of rich milk.Five cups of flour, sifted.Half a cup of powdered allspice and cloves.Half a cup of ginger.

Cut up the butter in the milk, and warm them slightly. Warm also the molasses, and stir it into the milk and butter: then stir in, gradually, the sugar, and set it away to get cool.Beat the eggs very light, and stir them into the mixture alternately with the flour. Add the ginger and other spice, and stir the whole very hard. Butter small tins, nearly fill them with the mixture, and bake the cakes in a moderate oven.

Half a teacupful of molasses. Yes, I measured everything with the teacup.

After stirring very hard, I baked them at 350º F but had to keep an eye on them because the recipe failed to provide a baking time. Did you notice that the recipe called for cloves? Well, I just happened to have on hand a bottle of cloves passed down from my mother who passed it down from her mother, my grandmother Alice Gervais Bouffard. And as you can see, the bottle is not empty so I just HAD to use a couple of sprinkles to “vintage” up my recipe.

Also passed down from “Memeille Bouffard” is the Bake-Rite waffle texture muffin pan. So in the end, I didn’t use paper cups because I'm almost certain neither did Miss Leslie. And this is what the final product looked like:

I may have overcooked them a tad. They smelled real nice, though - molasses and spices - but they were, let's just say, rather dense. What I can't figure out is why they all had an indent on the bottom, like some wine bottles do. I wonder if my vintage cloves had anything to do with it... or maybe the pan.

Oh well, so ends our misadventure in vintage baking this week. You win some, you lose some.

If anyone needs hockey pucks, I've got a few scented ones you can have.

Bonne semaine !