Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking
Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking
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Abstract
This book is about the Hundred Years War of food business, how a mid-nineteenth century American invention, baking powder, replaced yeast as a leavening agent and created a culinary revolution as profound as the use of yeast thousands of years ago. Before government regulation, the force controlling the market was not a visible or invisible hand, but advertising sleight of hand. Four companies—Rumford, Royal, Calumet, and Clabber Girl—fought advertising, trade, legislative, scientific, and judicial wars with proprietary cookbooks, lawsuits, trade cards, and bribes. In the process, they altered or created cake, cupcakes, cookies, biscuits, pancakes, quick breads, waffles, doughnuts, and other foods, and forged a distinct American culinary identity. This new American chemical leavening shortcut also changed the breadstuffs of Native Americans and every immigrant group and was a force for assimilation. The wars continued in spite of scandals exposed by muckraking journalists and investigation by President Theodore Roosevelt, through WWI, the 1920s, the Depression, and WWII in every state, territory, and kitchen in the United States until standardization finally occurred at the end of the twentieth century. Now, global businesses such as McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken depend on baking powder for their baked goods, and baking powder is in home and commercial kitchens around the world.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
- 1 The Burden of Bread: Bread Before Baking Powder
- 2 The Liberation of Cake: Chemical Independence, 1796
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3
The Rise of Baking Powder Business: The Northeast, 1856–1876
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4
The Advertising War Begins: “Is the Bread That We Eat Poisoned?” 1876–1888
- 5 The Cream of Tartar Wars: Battle Royal, 1888–1899
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6
The Rise of Baking Powder Business: The Midwest, 1880s–1890s
- 7 The Pure Food War: Outlaws in Missouri, 1899–1906
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8
The Alum War and World War I: “What a Fumin’ about Egg Albumen,” 1907–1920
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9
The Federal Trade Commission Wars: The Final Federal Battle, 1920–1929
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10
The Price War: The Fight for the National Market, 1930–1950
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11
Baking Powder Today: Post–World War II to the Twenty-First Century
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End Matter
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