All In The Mix

NATHAN: And we have one more podcast you may be interested in. It’s called Battle Scars. Battle Scars is a podcast for veterans from many countries and all branches of the services to share their stories. Here are some examples of the kinds of things you’ll hear.

JOANNE: Host Tom Tran talks to those who saw action on the front lines and in the elite fighting units, but he also interviews those whose contributions are often overlooked but whose stories are no less riveting.

BRIAN: You’ll hear from vets like the badly burned soldier whose five-year-old daughter actually taught him how he shouldn’t be embarrassed by his injuries.

NATHAN: You’ll hear about a soldier who killed in battle and the morbid curiosity civilians have about her experience.

JOANNE: A combat medic explains how he feels god heard his battlefield prayers and intervened to save the lives of the wounded men he treated, and why the memories of one particular casualty still upset him.

BRIAN: And Tom shares his own experiences of fighting in Iraq and how he struggled to make the adjustment to civilian life.

NATHAN: Sometimes there are tears, sometimes there are laughs. And just occasionally, there’s some salty language.

JOANNE: To listen to the show, just search for Battle Scars in Apple Podcasts or whichever podcast app you use. NATHAN: As with any good meal, we’re going to finish things off with something a little sweet.

BRIAN: Food historian Laura Shapiro has a special place in her heart for one dessert in particular. Hey, Laura. This is Brian, thanks so much for joining us.

LAURA: Thank you for having me do this. I love thinking about cakes.

BRIAN: Now, I’ve actually tried to make some cakes over my life and they’ve failed miserably. I made the mistake of trying to make them more or less from scratch. So I know how hard they are.

LAURA: Well, what went wrong? Tell me what went wrong.

BRIAN: Well, [LAUGHTER] you name it. One came out incredibly flat. It just never rose. And my, let’s just say, backseat driver who was advising me nonstop insisted it was because I kept opening the oven to take a peek.

LAURA: Your backseat driver was absolutely right.

BRIAN: Oh yeah. No, no, she makes great cakes. Look, there’s no question. And the other came out weighing about 120 pounds. Surely I’m not the only person who failed miserably at cake making.

LAURA: Not at all. In fact, you are just one in a very long line of struggling home cooks.

BRIAN: Shapiro says cakes were notoriously difficult to make, even after measurements and ovens became standardized in the early 20th century. Back then, women often rode into flour companies to ask what had gone wrong with their cakes.

LAURA: Why is there this weird crack across the top? Why didn’t it rise? Why does it sink in the middle? All of these things that are just– you know, people who bake are supposed to know these things and they didn’t.

BRIAN: In fact, one company, General Mills, invented the iconic character of Betty Crocker to answer these kinds of questions.

LAURA: Ah.

BRIAN: But then, flour companies introduced a new product that could make those worries vanish in a heartbeat. It was the cake mix.

LAURA: The cake mixes really came about because flour companies were trying to figure out ways to sell more flour.

BRIAN: Though first invented in the 1930s, cake mixes didn’t really take off until the late 1950s.

LAURA: And the food companies were standing around trying to figure out why more cake mixes were not flying off the shelf. They knew from surveys and from the things that people said that it was a treacherous proposition to make a cake from scratch. A lot could go wrong. Things could– just what happened to you– things could fail to rise, the oven could be wrong. And with a cake, you know, you can’t cover it up with mayonnaise and pretend that it was supposed to be that way.

BRIAN: No, no. I suggested said that we hang that flat one on the wall, but that was rejected out of hand.

LAURA: So if you blow it with a cake, you have blown it. And the cake is a gift from the heart. You’re baking that cake for someone you love. But Pillsbury company summed it right up in their very famous advertising slogan at that time, nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven. And they really put that across in the advertising and companies glommed on to that idea. If it comes out of the oven, if you baked it with your own

Two hands and you pulled it out of the oven, you were giving a little bit of your heart. You were showing your love, especially for your sweetheart or your husband. He’s going to think you are great when you show him this beautiful cake that you made. And that was the idea of a lot of that early advertising.

BRIAN: So to bake a cake was to confirm that you were the ideal housewife.

LAURA: Yes, absolutely. Because it was such a heavily symbolic thing, because it was so important to turn out a beautiful cake, the idea of doing it with a short cut, getting it from a box, this was a huge guilt producer. Also, the early cake mixes weren’t that good, so you were getting a product that was full of guilt and not that great a cake.

BRIAN: Not ideal. So what did marketers do to address that issue?

LAURA: Well, there are some competing theories about this. I think the thing that turned cake mixes around was frosting.

BRIAN: Well, come on. I mean, what do we really eat cake for anyway?

LAURA: Well, yes. So the frosting was obviously the thing that people wanted. Besides, if it’s a cake mix cake, frankly it does taste kind of disgusting. And the frosting could be the only good thing about it, though after awhile, they figured out how to make frosting mixes, and those were terrible. I mean, tasted terrible. So I’m not a fan of cake mix cakes or frosting mixes. But as soon as they started advertising, not only the frosting and the way that you could turn these cake mix cakes into something that looks like it came out of Versailles with elaborate shapes and characters and pe–

BRIAN: So this was the personal touch.

LAURA: That is exactly what the advertising and what the women’s magazines were pitching. Make the cake, that’s the least important part of this. And then make it your own, this is creative. That is, you are the little Picasso of your cake.

BRIAN: Now, were these mixes part of a broader trend? Did they lead the trend towards processed foods? I know that when I talk about the 1950s with my students, I talk about TV dinners, for instance. You’ve got your meat, you’ve got your potato, you’ve got your vegetable, you’ve got your dessert.

LAURA: Well, they’re different from TV dinners in an important way. They were part of that whole wave of post-war packaged foods, absolutely, and they were a prime example of that. TV dinners never became dinner. People stayed away from them at first. They were not a hit right out of the market at all. And then gradually, people started to use them. You’d give them to the kids when you were going out or the babysitter would put them in the oven.

BRIAN: Yeah, that’s exactly when we got them. Exactly. And it was great, we rooted for our parents to go, much better than home cooking.

LAURA: Right. But nobody in a gazillion years, you would not have put a TV dinner in front of company. Cake mixes, unlike many other packaged products, actually became cake. They became, in the American mind and imagination, the thing that they originally imitated.

BRIAN: Well, if I were in your family, I would challenge you to a taste test. Has anybody done that? Have you ever done a blind comparison of a homemade cake and store-bought mixed cake?

LAURA: I did do a taste test once. I did it to a group of women who were gathered to hear me speak on the wonderful topic of Betty Crocker in Michigan. And I baked a simple cake from scratch and a simple cake mix cake. And I brought them both to the talk. I cut them up and I had people taste them. And I asked them which they preferred and could they identify the cake mix. To a woman, they identified not only the cake mix cake, they knew exactly the brand it was and within that brand. And they preferred it hands down over the scratch cake.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: Wait, wait, wait, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. I did not see that coming. Why did they prefer it hands down over the scratch cake?

LAURA: Because our palates have changed in response to this. I think that is the real role of packaged foods in this country. They have changed our palates. We are now much more responsive to sweetness, to chemical-ness. And in terms of cakes, to that artificially light texture. Those cake mix cakes are going to stay light for like a year. My cake– I made them both at the same time and brought them in the next morning– and my cake was already starting to dry out a tiny bit. Not Betty Crocker, her cakes were light forever. So they could taste that and they liked it better. But I think our palates are now– we spring to attention at sweetness and chemical.

BRIAN: Laura Shapiro is a food historian. Her latest book is What She Ate– Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories.

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And if anyone’s looking for relatively easy cake to make from scratch, Shapiro recommends Maida Heatter’s lemon cake. We’ll post a link to the recipe on the BackStory website.

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