Drum Cake for Independence Day from Betty Crocker’s Classic Cook Book for Boys and Girls (1957)

“If you use your cook book often I can promise you real fun and lots of good things to eat,” Betty Crocker told her young readers.  And she was as good as her word.  The last chapter, “Rules,” which ought to have been first because it introduced the basics of kitchen safety, measuring, equipment, and vocabulary, came after the recipes.  The book led off instead with “Extra Special,”  cakes, cookies, candies, and beverages “good things to make for parties—for holidays—for your friends—and just for fun.”   Betty may have been a corporate construct, but she was no fool. She shrewdly figured more children would be lured into the kitchen to  stir up a batch of brownies than a pan of mac and cheese.  Her  beginners and their sweet-teeth learned right off the bat how to  grease and flour pans, use a spatula to scrape the last of the batter out of the mixing bowl, and test a cake for doneness  with straightforward recipes for chocolate sheet cake, cocoa fudge cake, and yellow layer cake.  Recipes and directions for frosting a cake followed, strategically placed to build confidence before introducing the delectable subsection of party cakes.

.The soldier with the marching side drum in Archibald Willard’s “The Spirit of ‘76” (1876) could have been the inspiration for this drum cake, which would bring the family Fourth of July picnic to a cracking conclusion.   It didn’t have to be made  from scratch: Betty Crocker’ mixes would save energy for the all-important job of decoration.   To imitate the zig-zag rope tensioning around the drum’s chocolate devil’s food shell, a pattern of peppermint sticks and maraschino cherries had to be pressed into the thick glossy coat of pure white fluffy icing.

Could eight- to twelve-year-olds, General Mills’ target audience, actually make this cake? Yes,  because a group of home testers,  eight girls and four boys identified on page 6, cooked every dish.  Tester Bette Anne explained that “We had to say if things were easy or hard and did they taste good.”  Veto power was in their hands. “ If we didn’t like it,” said tester Chris, “Betty Crocker didn’t put it in this book.”   The children’s comments were run above the lower margins and they designate the dishes they would make again, offered helpful hints, identified skills they wanted to polish, and even conceded the vegetable recipes were tasty.  The home testers were real kids who lived in Cranbury, New Jersey, but they would have been at home on Klickitat Street.  They made the book for many of the baby boomers who have hung on to their treasured dogeared, sticky copies.The editorial team that compiled Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls in the decade after World War II saw the kitchen as a space where budget-conscious meals were made with what was on hand.  Dinnertime came once a day, not once a year like taxes. As family members, kids were expected to help out with meal preparation, but they were also invited to be creative in the kitchen.  If a child wanted to surprise the family with a heart cake for Mother’s  or Valentine’s Day, a special shaped pan wasn’t necessary, with an 8-inch round and 8-inch square pan around.  Mother didn’t have to hover because the young baker could be trusted to have enough good sense to get the pans in and out of the hot oven and cut up the cooled cakes with a long sharp knife without accident.   It’s easy to point fingers at the outdated gender roles in the illustrations, like the exclusion of girls from the campfire cooking chapter or the insensitive representation of Indigenous and people of color in this cook book. Fifty-odd years out, I could not help but be struck at how refreshing it was  to see no signs of extravagant consumption signaling wealth and privilege— a batterie de cuisine, countertops full of appliances, a gastronomic library of print and on-line resources, shelves of ingredients from around the world—that so much of today’s more sophisticated home cooking depends upon upon.   Cakes made with butter taste better than ones made with hydrogenated shortening or from a mix, but Betty Crocker’s drum cake from 1957 is still within the means of more people than the birthday cake dreamed up for  a children’s birthday party in The Best of Gourmet (2005).I read and reread my well-thumbed copy of Betty Crocker  until I had perfect recall of all the color plates of the iconic party cakes.  I never made one of them. If the results were likely to fall short of the pictures, I was too intimidated to try.  Even if I hadn’t been daunted by the food styling, I  knew my health-conscious mother would nix the drum cake, because it required hard candy and maraschino cherries, full of sugar and red dye number 2.  She probably would have pointed out that the cake wouldn’t taste as good as it looked and I would have been reluctant to admit she was probably right.  Better to never bring up the subject than to concede the field later.   Or offer a face-saving explanation is that the cake construction gene skipped a generation.  My daughter or nieces down under would tackle a drum cake  in a heart’s beat as child’s play.   All I have to do is ask.

The Spirit of 1776: An American Copy Book Older than This Country (Slightly)

34370frontwrapper

34370, front wrapper with an engraving illustrating a fable.

Since we are inaugurating a long weekend celebrating Independence Day today (huzzah for a holiday on Monday!), I thought it might be appropriate to share an equally important contemporaneous manuscript to the Declaration of Independence from the Cotsen collection.

The above image is the front wrapper of Samuel Holbrook’s copy book. Composed between June and September 1776 in  Hartford, Connecticut and Boston, Massachusetts, this copy book is a rare written artifact that has survived from the time of the founding of this country. A copy book (or copybook) is an educational practice book in which a pupil practices penmanship and the basics of reading (and often arithmetic) by copying as closely as possible passages from an engraved instruction manual. So of course, they often contained alphabets of Roman and italic letters, upper and lower case to copy.

page [8]

page [8]

Sam Holbrook’s copy book happens to have an entry that is a day earlier than a very auspicious date for this country:

34370page[1]

page [1]. Notice that Sam is using red ink for the headings and black for the precepts.

As you might have guessed, besides learning the rudiments of penmanship, copy books were often meant to be morally instructive  by providing life advice. These kinds of proverbial couplets pictured above, and other aphorisms, are typical  fodder for copy books and other forms of moral instruction throughout the  eighteenth century (think of the various kinds of “sayings” from the wildly popular Poor Richard’s Almanac).

page [11]

page [11]. Notice that Sam used red, blue, and black ink on this page.

 Either Samuel Holbrook hadn’t heard the recent news about independence or had (Gasp!) Tory sympathies. In the image below, Sam has copied out an extensive praise of British merchants and their far-reaching benefits:

page [13]

page [13]. Sam was probably using a British copy book, which might also explain all the pro-English sentiments.

 If you want to read more about how this Cotsen copy book has been featured in our public outreach program, Cotsen in the Classroom, check out this blog post by Dr. Dana on her blog: Pop Goes the Page.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!