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Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two Cook Book. Printed by Western Printing and Lithographing Company, 1958
Family Heirloom, Kansas City

 

“This book is designed for you brides, business girls, career wives, and mothers of married children.”                                                                              Betty Crocker

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Though Betty Crocker was one of the most influential voices in the confectionary arts during the 1950s – Betty Crocker actually never existed.

Crocker was a fictional character created by General Mills, a multinational manufacturer of branded consumer foods, meant to provide an embodied image and personalized feel to their advertised household staples. Betty Crocker liked to hand out cookie cutter ideals about home cooking and making in recipe collections like the Dinner for Two Cook Book published in 1958. In it, she explicitly addressed “brides, business girls, career wives, and mothers of married children” and some of Crocker’s ideals and vocabulary feel distinctly out of tune today. Clearly the 1950s were distinctively different times than twenty-first century America. Even then, however, many women did not fit into Crocker’s standard molds.  My hardworking grandmother Rose Marie Healy, for example, did not even though she obviously liked the cookbook and passed it down through two generations.

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No doubt, the Dinner for two Cookbook is an epitome of 1950s cultural and culinary values. Its neat typescript and rich colorful illustrations create innovative and deeply enjoyable reading experiences for cooking hopefuls. As American universities began to put more emphasis into Home Economics, or what we now call Family and Consumer Sciences, scaffolds like Betty Crocker’s publications were meant to help young women transition from university into their future lives.  As we follow the life of Rose Marie Healy and her relationship with the cookbook, an intriguing and counterintuitive world emerges of a multifaceted mother and career bookkeeper, whose commitment to work and family powerfully resisted Crocker’s narrow domestic ideals.

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Brendan Clary

To see what Brendan Clary discovered about Dinner for Two

Click on the link below:

 

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