Cake Mixes, Oil Cakes, and European Cakes

The contradictions inherent in the corporate recipe industry began to emerge in the late 1930s, foretelling the doom of the golden age of the food industry cake recipe. The standard method of mixing butter cakes, in place almost from the start, entailed beating (or “creaming”) softened butter and sugar until fluffy and aerated, adding eggs (or just egg yolks) one at a time, adding flour mixed with chemical leavening and salt alternately with the milk and extract, and finally, in some recipes, folding in separately beaten egg whites. In the late 1930s, a simpler mixing procedure, actually pioneered by Fannie Farmer in the 1890s, was introduced by food corporations as the “muffin method.” In basic outline, this entailed creaming the butter, all of the dry ingredients, and about half of the milk and eggs into a stiff, puffy batter, and then beating in the remainder of the milk and egg. From the mid-1940s into the early 1960s, General Mills and Pillsbury both energetically promoted this streamlined mixing method—for an urgent reason. The big mills had begun to market cake mixes in the late 1940s (which, not entirely coincidentally, work on the same muffin-mix principal), and as more women bought mixes, fewer baked cakes from scratch, causing the sales of cake flour to slump. Alas, contrary to corporate hopes, the muffin method failed to halt this slide. Many consumers, still working with wooden spoons and rotary egg beaters rather than with electric mixers, failed to beat muffin mix batters sufficiently to produce acceptable cakes. Meanwhile, due in large measure to the mills’ own relentless advertising, consumers became ever more reliant on mixes. In the early 1960s, Pillsbury finally threw in the towel on its scratch cake-baking operations. It retired Ann Pillsbury, discontinued its SnoSheen brand of cake flour, and changed the rules of its famous Bake-Off to allow the use of its cake mixes, frosting mixes, and other premade products, like bake-and-serve rolls. Soon enough, the Bake-Off would mandate the use of Pillsbury premade products.