Occasionally, I will revisit digitized facsimiles of the Betty Crocker recipe cards we used to have when I was a tween / adolescent.
The collection is chimaerical, in that nearly every cake recipe will start with "one box of our Devil's Food / Yellow / White cake mix...", repeat for any food product BC was making in the early 1970's. However, some scratch recipes were provided, and indeed, the "Favorite Muffins" recipe from the "Come For Coffee" section was the first quick bread I learned how to bake. Also the recipe on which I learned how many things can go wrong with muffins. To this day, I cannot bake anything without a recipe directly in front of me to make sure I'm not adding too much oil or stirring the wrong amount of time.
To be sure, there are some food horrors left over from the kind of "Nope" articles that make the rounds on social media. The savory gelatin and cans of cream-of-mushroom/chicken/celery soup were strong.
Sometimes I wonder who they thought they were marketing to, since the recipes calling for canned soup / mushrooms / fruit mingle willy-nilly with the expectation that our homemaker might also want to make a chocolate souffle, Danish aebleskiver (complete with the aebleskiver pan), or know what Fontina cheese is (I just found out what Fontina was last year). There are entertaining hints on the back of the party recipes--the "Children's Parties" cards are a fun read, suggesting themes like a hobo party (with dinner cooked in coffee cans), a Backwards Party, or an ice cream social.
The entire collection has been digitized on the Scribd website by the incredibly thorough and thoughtful "Kenneth", to whom I am indebted for this reminder of some happy childhood memories. I actually have cooked / attempted a few recipes from the collection over the years with varying degrees of success (I lost my enthusiasm for fried cornmeal mush after an unkind spatter burn where I couldn't remove the clinging mush fast enough), but always with a kind of pleasure. I felt like I was connecting to something lots of other people were trying at roughly the same time.
Happy cooking and happy eating 8)
