A puzzle contest, a pile of questions and an invented correspondent.

Betty Crocker was never a real person. English Wikipedia says the character was created by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis in 1921 to give a personal reply to customers’ questions, and it describes Betty Crocker today as both a brand and a fictional character used in advertising for food and recipes.

The trigger was a flour promotion. PBS Food, in a piece by Tori Avey published on 15 February 2013, says that in 1921 Washburn-Crosby placed an advertisement for Gold Medal Flour in the Saturday Evening Post featuring a jigsaw puzzle of a small-town main street; readers who completed and mailed it in were promised a pincushion shaped like a sack of flour. Many of the returned puzzles came with letters asking baking questions. Avey writes that the advertising department’s manager, Samuel Gale, had been answering mail with help from the women of the company’s Gold Medal home service staff, and felt uncomfortable signing that advice himself.

The department’s answer was to create a female chief of correspondence. According to PBS Food, the surname came from William G. Crocker, a recently retired Washburn-Crosby director, and “Betty” was chosen for its wholesome, cheerful sound; Wikipedia, citing General Mills material, describes Crocker as a company director and the first name as a cheery, all-American choice. Avey adds that Gale asked the company’s female employees to submit versions of the signature, and that the winning hand was penned by a secretary, Florence Lindeberg; that signature closed every letter.

In 1928, Wikipedia says, Washburn Crosby merged with other milling companies to form General Mills, which has owned the character ever since. Its headquarters suburb, Golden Valley in Minnesota, has a street named Betty Crocker Drive.

A voice, then a face.

The persona gained a voice before it had a face. PBS Food says that in 1924 Washburn-Crosby began a radio programme, the Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air, first on the Minneapolis station WCCO and later nationally, and that the original voice belonged to a home economist, Marjorie Child Husted, who also wrote and hosted it. Wikipedia says the programme went out on the NBC network from 1926 and that the show stayed on network radio until 1953, with several women portraying Betty Crocker anonymously on air and at cooking schools. Wikipedia says Husted played the role on radio for twenty years. On television the part went to the actress Adelaide Hawley, later Adelaide Hawley Cumming, who played Betty Crocker until 1964; Wikipedia dates her television run from 1949, while PBS Food says she was hired in 1951.

The face came in 1936. Wikipedia says the portrait painted by Neysa McMein was commissioned for the character’s 15th anniversary, although earlier images had already appeared in General Mills publications. PBS Food calls McMein’s painting the official portrait of 1936 and describes it as a composite blending the facial features of the women in the company’s home service department; it remained in use for more than 20 years. Avey writes that the image has been updated seven times since 1955, including a 1965 version with a slight resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy.

The latest painted generation was made for an anniversary. PBS Food says that for Betty Crocker’s 75th anniversary in 1996, the painter John Stuart Ingle produced a portrait by digitally morphing photographs of 75 women whom General Mills felt embodied the character; Wikipedia, citing General Mills, describes the 1996 likeness as partly inspired by a computerised composite of women of diverse backgrounds and ages.

Design and documentation.

American baking brands have long been sold as much through their packaging as through what sits inside it. Flour came home in printed sacks that carried a mill’s name, an emblem and sometimes a slogan, so the bag itself did the work of a sign. Leavening, cornstarch and spices travelled in tins, cans and small paper boxes, each with a label meant to be read from across a grocery shelf.

Many of these brands chose to give the product a face. Painted portraits, cartoon figures and invented home cooks stood in for the company and spoke to the person doing the baking. Recipe booklets and recipes printed on the side of a box gave a single ingredient a list of uses, and they let a brand speak at length in a way a small label could not.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From flatware coupons to a logo on every box.

The name reached packaging gradually. Wikipedia says Betty Crocker coupons were introduced in 1929, inserted in flour bags and redeemable against Oneida flatware. By 1932 the scheme offered a complete flatware set in a pattern called “Friendship”, later renamed “Medality”, and from 1937 the coupons were printed on the outside of packages. The character made its packaging debut in 1937 on Softasilk cake flour, and the name appeared as a product brand on soup mixes in 1941. The catalogue operation that grew out of the coupons closed in 2006.

The device that unified it all came in 1954. Wikipedia says General Mills introduced the red spoon logo with Betty Crocker’s signature that year and placed it on Gold Medal flour, Bisquick and cake-mix packages. The spoon joined the signature that, PBS Food says, had closed customer letters since the 1920s.

Books carried the persona further. Wikipedia says General Mills issued softbound recipe books from 1930, including a 1933 collection of Bisquick recipes, and that the hardcover Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook appeared in 1950; later editions followed, including a tenth in 2005 and a ring-binder eleventh in 2011. During the war the company published the Betty Crocker Cook Book of All-Purpose Baking to help with wartime cooking, and in 2005 it added a bilingual Spanish and English collection of common recipes.

For a design guide, Betty Crocker shows how an invented signature, a painted portrait and a red spoon can stand in for a person across a century of packaging. Compare it with Gold Medal Flour, the Washburn-Crosby flour whose promotion produced her, and Pillsbury, the rival Minneapolis miller with a mascot of its own. For this guide we use spoon red and deep crimson on batter cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Betty Crocker’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.