When my grandma died last year at the age of 104 we went through all her old hand written recipes to make digital copies for anyone in the family who wanted a copy. Her banana bread was always one onf my favs. It was one of those "oh grandma's secret recipe" things for me. Imagine my surprise to find in her recipe box the secret recipe was directly from a Betty Crocker newspaper ad from the 1920s.
I have found lots of that. That’s when the vendor that sold baking shit made up recipes to use their products.
And often they were so fucking simple.
Indeed. After going down a rabbit hole on this issue when I learned that several of grandma's secret recipes were like this, I learned the interesting story of Betty Crocker. Well the company was named after a "woman who had a baking advice collumn." Except Betty Crocker was an entirely corporate creation by the Gold Medal brand flour company. The "advice" collumn would publish letters that presented to be from readers asking for advice on things to make for hosting or their familes. "Betty" would then respond with recipes always saying that the reader should be sure to use superior quality Gold Medal brand flour.
It must've worked. My mom and I had a laugh when we found that out because she buys Gold Medal flour to this day, because that's her mom bought.
Yes. Worked. Also many recipes before the 40-50’s were not written down, so it started that movement.
Grandma often had cook on med oven. Wtf is that? Well when you have a wood cook stove, it’s not hot it’s not warm, it’s medium..