The Real Betty Crocker was a Team of "Crockettes"

You may think of Betty Crocker as the face of a cake mix. She's the picture on the cover of my 1972 cookbook. But Betty Crocker is much older than the cake mix, older even than her parent company, General Mills. She was born in 1921 when the Washburn Crosby company needed a name to sign when giving advice to women who asked questions about Gold Medal Flour.

It wasn't long before Betty Crocker, fictional as she was, became a celebrity. Cooks trusted her advice. Washburn Crosby enlisted an army of women with home economics degrees to teach housewives to cook, whether in person, on radio, or with recipe pamphlets. This group of women eventually founded the Betty Crocker Test Kitchen. While they worked hard to develop and perfect recipes, they were also a tourist attraction, as fans flocked to Minneapolis to watch them work. But while the "Crockettes" were the heart and soul of General Mills by then, company executives still expected them to make their birthday cakes, and got a hard lesson when they went over the Crockette's heads with a product that flopped in the 1970s. Read about the women who manned the Betty Crocker Test Kitchen at Atlas Obscura.