I Heart Betty

1965 Betty, the St. Paul resident of my dreams

To say that I admire Betty Crocker, or that I'm fond of her, does not begin to plumb the depth of my feelings. Offering the thought that I would gladly burn incense sticks and joss paper while prostrating myself in front of her portrait at General Mills headquarters (assuming that security guards would let me, which is unlikely) might be getting a little closer to the heart of the matter.

As I write these words, I realize it seems as if I think Betty Crocker is a real person.

Of course she’s real; what do you think I am, stupid? I know that Betty lives and breathes and cooks warm and tasty desserts somewhere, and now that I think of it, I even know where that place must be – St. Paul. How could she live anywhere else? I picture her house, a darling cottage on suitably adorably named St. Paul street. None of those big-city Minneapolis number-and-alphabet streets for Betty.  No, she lives in a tree-shaded glen on Juno, say, or Juliet.

I imagine going to visit Betty. Of course I’d be late, because how can Juno follow right after Juliet in the order of streets? Can’t they lay out the streets in any rational order in this god-damned city? Okay, calm down, breathe deeply and stop cursing, I tell myself. Betty is waiting, right behind that perfectly painted door with the two charming pots of traditional geraniums on either side.

She lets me in, pretending not to notice my sweaty and typically Minneapolitan-frantic demeanor, because Betty is a Perfect Hostess. She leads me to the kitchen, which is appropriate but not over-the-top. No Aga for Betty, just a perfectly good Hotpoint, thank you very much. It might even be Harvest Gold, which, to Betty, is still a swell color, no matter what those hipsters in Uptown have to say about it.

Is Betty wearing her trademark red suit and pearls? Hmmm, I’m stumped there. It seems a bit formal for a casual afternoon entertaining a sweaty woman from Minneapolis, more what she might wear when applying for loan at the bank or posing for a box of brownies. I hit upon the solution: Over the one outfit she seems to own, Betty wears an apron, something vintage-looking that she whipped up herself in the downstairs sewing nook. (I’ll bet Betty’s house has a lot of nooks, just saying). As she pulls a pan from the oven, I notice that her oven mitts match her apron. Of course, duh, she’s Betty Crocker.

And then she places a dish of something warm and chocolaty in front of me, and offers me a glass of cold milk. Milk! I haven’t had milk in 25 years, but yes, Betty, I’d love some!

…. and, as I lift the glass to my lips, my reverie ends, and I’m back in Minneapolis, home of many orderly streets and very few Harvest Gold Hotpoints.

And I wonder, what is my deal? Why I am so taken with a woman who is (to some naysayers, I have to say it) an imaginary spokesperson? It’s not like I wish I could meet Uncle Ben, or poke the avoirdupois of the Doughboy. My heart belongs to Betty, and I think I know why – because my mother loved her, too. My mom was a housewife in the 1950s,when it truly was a miracle to toss an egg into a bowl, add a mix, and whip it all up in the Sunbeam. For my mother’s generation, packaged food was always better, and Betty Crocker was the symbol of the perfect housewife who knew how to please her family with reliable packaged goods.  

As I look back on what must have been my mother’s own eating history, I’ve realized something – our mother’s mothers were, most likely, terrible cooks. In my own poor mother’s case, her mother died when she was seven years old, so I can’t imagine that she had many home-cooked meals. And, oh yeah, the Depression, which hit when she was nine. So of course she loved Betty Crocker. The food tasted the same way every time, and no dim-witted big sister or dopey dad could mess it up.

I’ve been doing some writing for General Mills the past few months, and, recently, I pitched a story to the editor of BettyCrocker.com. When she accepted my idea and gave me an assignment, I was happy beyond all rationality. I was going to be writing for Betty herself. If I couldn’t get over to her house in St. Paul (And, let's face it, I could never find my way around there, anyway), I would be writing for her, which didn't even involve trying to figure out the GPS.

I wished the thing I always wish when something nice happens to me. I wanted to call my Mom and tell her all about it. I could almost hear her, wanting to celebrate with me, but also eager to cut the call short so she could call all her girlfriends: Writing for Betty! Her own little girl, the one who used to insist on adding brewer's yeast and bran flakes to every sodden, leaden thing she baked! Finally, she had seen the light and would be worshiping, one egg and half-cup of water at the ready, at the altar of Betty.  

If there's a way to eat package-mix brownies in heaven, I hope my Mom is having a little celebratory treat for me. And here's to Betty -- long may she reign.

Consciousness Raising (or is that Rising?) An Old Hippie Looks Back

If pressed, I suppose my excuse could be, “Hey, it was the 70s, and everyone was doing it,” but that doesn’t really explain how I became such an ardent, and terrible, bread baker. I can pinpoint exactly when my fervent and misplaced devotion began. I was attending a college that had decided to put the capital“L” in liberal arts. Right before my matriculation in 1976, they had banished same-sex dorms, general degree requirements, letter grades and other vestige of “the man” that those losers back east at Harvard were still insisting upon.

So it seemed totally cool when the teacher in my “History of Education” class decided to show us a movie about someone baking a loaf of Challah bread. “I view it with all my classes,” she had explained, “because it seems so relevant.” We freshman nodded, already inured to the italics that seemed to hover about that era like a veil of polyester. The Population Explosion. The Nuclear Freeze. The Equal Rights Amendment. And now, the italicized relevancy of the Challah Movie in an education class. It just all added up, sister.

The movie, which I guess I don’t really need to tell you was in black-and-white, had a wonderful sort of photographic haziness. The baker, and again I realize this is a detail that is probably already understood, had long hair that had been braided to droop over one shoulder. She wore a peasant blouse. I swear I could see, through that peasant blouse, that her armpits were unshaved. She mixed the flour. She hummed. She kneaded. She stared out the window thoughtfully, depicting the passage of time in a highly European way. After she pulled the bread from the oven, there was a closeup of her first taste of her hand-made, totally authentic expression of grain products. She looked absolutely blissed out, as if the population had been controlled, a nuclear freeze agreed to, and the Equal Rights Amendment passed, all on the same day.

My stomach rumbled, and I was sure I could feel every slice of Wonder Bread I had eaten in the past 17 years churning in there. Their days were numbered. I had seen the secret to being a truly authentic young adult, and it involved baking my own bread.

Hey, guess what, the college bookstore had a copy of Laurel’s Kitchen, the whole grain bible. Next was an ingredient-shopping trip to the local co-op, where mealy bugs scrabbled in the flour and the clerk had suspiciously yellowing eyeballs. I tried to recreate the movie scene, but, lacking a gauzy-focused kitchen and a long braid of hair, it just didn’t feel the same. I did enjoy the kneading, the waiting, the baking … and then, the moment when the bread came from the oven and I first tasted the results of my own honest labor – ick! What was this stuff? It wasn't like the movie.  It was Brown. Sodden. Gooey. I rechecked Laurel’s Kitchen, determined to try again. And again. And again. For most of the 70’s, I refused to give up, searching farther afield for ingredients, consulting more cookbooks. Apartment Life – a cool precursor to the Pottery Barn lifestyle -- carried a multi-photo exposé on bread baking, and I followed every syllable, but with no luck. My bread was flat. My bread was damp. My bread lacked not only philosophical significance, but flavor.

And then, 45 credits in creative writing and a few miscellaneous pottery classes later, I graduated from college. I began to concentrate on earning bread, not making it. I began to store glossy catalogs in that earnest-looking beige mixing bowl with the winsome blue stripe. And, along the way, a wonderful thing happened. Gourmet grocery stores opened. Bakeries began appearing. Women cut off their braids, shaved their armpits and began to see “artisanal” as the new homemade. Somewhere along the way, it became okay to eat something just because it tasted good, no matter what its political credentials. And now, years later, I don’t even know what happened to that old copy of Laurel’s Kitchen. I realize that I was a terrible bread baker all along, and I don’t eat that much bread now, anyway. The 70s were great, and sure, I loved all that black-and-white relevancy, but now I realize that it’s just as important to know what you can’t do well as to know where your talents lie.