I recently asked several chefs and friends who cook about the cookbooks they loved as children. Mollie Katzen’s “Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes”—a sort of junior “Moosewood Cookbook”—was popular among the Brooklyn thirtysomething set. A slightly younger group recalled the “Alpha-Bakery Gold Medal Children’s Cookbook” or the original “American Girls Cookbook” which, although a tie-in, seems quaintly uncommercial by today’s standards (there were only three dolls!). Alice Waters, who wrote the children’s story and recipe book “Fanny at Chez Panisse,” recommended Carolyn Federman’s “New Favorites for New Cooks,” published this year. Meanwhile, the cook and writer Phyllis Grant, who cooks frequently with her two children, told me that they like YouTube cooking tutorials and J. Kenji López-Alt’s “The Food Lab”—one of several recent books that focusses on the science of cooking. Ruth Reichl said that she refrained from buying kids’ cookbooks for her own son; she felt that he would only learn by watching someone else cook, as she had done.
Perhaps inevitably, it was my own favorite, “Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls,” first published in 1957, that I decided to buy for a friend’s seven-year-old daughter, who’d recently become a fan of “The Great British Bake Off.” Or perhaps the book was really for me after all. My own tattered copy, inherited from my mother, who had also used it as a child, lives somewhere in my parents’ basement, but General Mills published a near-exact replica of the original in 2003. I ordered it online, and with the first glimpse of the “Jolly Breakfast Ring”—a gleaming, cherry-crowned coffee cake, its colors Eggleston-vivid—was transported to my own childhood—and to the time, a generation before, when the forces of commerce, ideology, and aspiration combined to create something strange and memorable.
Betty Crocker, the character on General Mills’s packaging and advertisements, was in her heyday during the postwar years. The fictional homemaker had promoted flours and recipes for a while in various guises—young and pretty during the Depression; more sophisticated in the forties—but when, in a post-rationing bonanza, the company rolled out a new line of branded cake mixes and a wide range of sugar cereals, it was Betty Crocker’s motherly face that adorned the wildly popular 1950 cookbook for adults, “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book.” The children’s version, with its lurid range of photographs, similarly evoked a world of patio entertaining, cookouts, parties—cooking as leisure rather than labor. Although children’s cookbooks had existed since the late nineteenth century, the phenomenon suddenly had a different flavor. “It was so much about suburbanization—the home as entertainment center when you couldn’t get downtown,” Megan Elias, a culinary historian, told me. And, like all cookbooks, this one was also “a way to educate kids into a class culture.”
In the book’s introduction, Betty Crocker—by now vaguely resembling June Cleaver—addresses her audience: “Dear Boys and Girls, Cooking is an adventure,” she says. True, there’s a comprehensive list of safety guidelines, an illustrated glossary of instructions on how to measure, and a section on “kitchen manners” (choosing a time to suit one’s mother; the importance of aprons), but, whereas a child’s farm manual of the same era might have stressed thrift and the necessity of pulling one’s weight at home, the recipes in the “Cook Book for Boys and Girls” are unabashedly fun. They are divided into categories such as “Extra Special” and “Campfire Cooking,” and include such ideas as enlivening name-brand breakfast cereal with canned-pear-and-raisin faces. It’s stuff kids want to eat, from pigs-in-a-blanket to cupcakes filled with scoops of ice cream. “Three Men in a Boat” is a baked potato stuffed with creamed chipped beef, with American-cheese sails. “Raggedy Ann Salad” is composed of an orange-half torso adorned with raisin buttons, a lettuce-leaf skirt, celery limbs, and a hard-boiled-egg head crowned with grated-cheese hair. The smiling mouth is a tiny arc of pimiento. One can see the seeds of child-food tyranny—of kids’ menus and exhausting nutritional compromise—being planted with each brightly colored array.
The novelist Michael Cunningham, who also loved the Betty Crocker book as a child in Cincinatti, called the book’s effect “Proustian,” and, indeed, its images have an unearthly quality that makes them linger in the mind. A fruit float—pieces of banana and citrus suspended in ginger ale, topped, jarringly, with a large scoop of lime sherbet—is less appetizing than it is mesmerizing. Each egg in a frame sits, sunlit on golden-brown toast, within its clean-edged orb. To those of us who learned to cook from the book, the images taught us forever what could be and what could not. The comedian Amy Sedaris, who replicated the book’s saturated palette in her 2006 entertaining manual “I Like You” and on her retro-fab truTV show, “At Home With Amy Sedaris,” also re-created a number of the book’s recipes, including an alarmingly phallic “Candle Salad,” featuring a banana inside a pineapple ring topped with maraschino-cherry flame. “It was really hard to line up those peppermint sticks as a kid,” she recalled of the “Drum Cake,” which was designed to resemble a marching snare. In short, these were recipes that defined aspiration.
As a commercial product, it was insidiously effective. An entire generation of boomer children was simultaneously introduced to General Mills products such as Gold Medal Flour, Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge Frosting Mix, and Bisquick—often explicitly recommended by the book’s authors. Much like today’s social-media savants, the minds at General Mills had the wit to put human faces to all this perfection. On the first pages of the book, we meet “the twelve boys and girls who tested all these recipes” via a Brady Bunch-style grid, featuring pen-and-ink sketches of each tester alongside an introductory pull quote. “Baking is as much fun as my chemistry set,” Eric remarks in a footnote to “Cocoa Fudge Cake.” The book makes a clear effort to destigmatize the hobby for boys, who are most often depicted wearing the prescribed aprons, but in no other way could one call this book progressive. The diversity of the panel doesn’t extend beyond a left-hand part in one tester’s hair, and, in the original version, the most adventurous recipes are “Swedish Meatballs,” “Italian Spaghetti,” and something called “Chili Concoction.”
And yet it was from this book that I learned to dip and sweep, to clean as I went, and what it meant to chop and dice and fold. Every page is indelibly imprinted on my memory. The ages at which most kids’ cookbooks recommend you read them, eight to twelve, closely match the years in which reading is most magical; and, as with any armchair cookbook, the experience of reading recipes is especially layered, as you conjure not just the meal and the circumstances in which you might serve it—a bevy of friends coming to your birthday party, say—but how the components will come together and the challenges of the process. Add to this the fact that, when cooking as a child, you are allowed the illusion of freedom and a taste of danger (lighting an oven, using a knife), even while you are protected by reassuring limits.
When I mentioned the Betty Crocker book to David Kamp, the author of “The United States of Arugula,” whose own children were once obsessed with a 2007 cookbook that tied in with the animated film “Ratatouille,” it didn’t seem to inspire the rhapsodic response I was hoping for. “It was already a corny anachronism by the time I came along,” he said. This, perhaps, is the point for those of us who loved it; the book is less the image of one’s own childhood than the one some of us wished for at the age of eight. Bonnie Slotnick, who runs a vintage-cookbook shop in Manhattan’s East Village, told me that she has seen adults weeping upon flicking through its pages. She added that children rarely sit in the kids’ corner for long enough to get through a recipe. “But there’s often an adult, sitting in one of the miniature chairs—you know, reliving something.”
