Recipe books, brochures and a company in New Jersey.

Davis is an American baking powder sold today by Clabber Girl Corporation of Terre Haute, Indiana, which B&G Foods has owned since 2019. Its history begins in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the R. B. Davis Company, and library records make that connection plain. The special collections at Rutgers University hold a recipe book, My Favorite Cocomalt Recipes, published in Hoboken by the R.B. Davis Company and dated to about 1935, and a brochure from about 1938 to 1940 advertising “Davis Master Pattern Baking Formulas — The Secret of Success in Baking,” under the title “It takes more than kisses to keep a man happy (after the first year).”

A recipe booklet from the company, catalogued as 1922 in a scan on the Internet Archive, shows how Davis presented itself to cooks in that period. Its title is Davis Baking Powder: Selected Recipes, and its imprint reads R. B. Davis Co., Hoboken. Its opening pages carry pictures captioned “A View of Laboratory” and “Factory at Hoboken, N. J.,” and it is dedicated “to Home Makers, the Home Bakers.” The booklet says it was compiled and edited by Winifred Stuart Gibbs, whom it describes as a consultant in home economics and a former lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the author of books including Economical Cookery.

The booklet sets out the promises the brand made. Davis was “Positively Pure,” it said, made “in a Modern daylight factory” under the direction of skilled chemists and “never touched by hand.” It was “Double Acting,” giving off part of its leavening as soon as milk or water was added to the dough and more in the heat of the oven. And it was sold with a guarantee that the booklet says was printed on the label of every can, authorising grocers to refund the purchase price if the powder did not prove equal to any other baking powder or to a cream of tartar and soda combination. Running lines through the book repeat the brand’s slogans: “Costs Less — None Better” and “the Guaranteed Kind.”

The book addresses households where, in its words, “each dollar spent for food must bring in one hundred cents in results,” and its advice is practical. Flour is to be sifted before measuring, every measurement is level, and when economy matters, it says, the eggs in a recipe may be cut by adding a quarter teaspoon of Davis Baking Powder for each egg left out.

Two stages of leavening and a name on every recipe.

Double-acting baking powder answered a problem that the American Chemical Society describes in its history of the product. Early chemical leavening relied on bicarbonate of soda and an acid — sour milk from the 1830s, then cream of tartar, a by-product of wine-making — and the reaction began as soon as the two met the wet dough. The ACS records that the Harvard chemist Eben Horsford replaced cream of tartar with calcium acid phosphate in the 1850s, and that corn starch was later added to keep the dry ingredients from reacting in the can. The Davis booklet describes a powder that worked in two stages, once in the bowl and again in the oven, and the brand’s current product page still uses the phrase double-acting.

The booklet also shows how thoroughly the brand name was written into the cooking. Recipe after recipe carries it in the heading: Davis Boston Brown Bread, Davis Corn Bread, Davis Parker House Rolls and Davis Scones sit beside Davis muffins, griddle cakes, waffles, fritters and doughnuts. Each recipe is proportioned, the book says, for use with Davis Baking Powder, and readers are told that the best results come from using it “exactly according to directions.” A table of measurements and a timetable for baking open the collection.

The company did not sell baking powder alone. The Rutgers recipe book shows the R.B. Davis Company issuing a book of recipes for its Cocomalt line in the mid-1930s, and the David Rumsey Map Collection holds a pictorial map titled Buck Rogers’ Space World, credited to R.B. Davis Co. and dated by the collection, as an estimate, to about 1940. Its lower border, the catalogue says, shows the comic-strip characters Wilma Deering and Buck Rogers. The Rutgers brochure of about 1938 to 1940 shows the Davis name still in use for baking formulas promoted from Hoboken in the same years.

Hoboken is the fixed point in that record. The 1922 booklet, the 1935 recipe book and the brochure of about 1938 to 1940 all give the company’s home as Hoboken, and the booklet’s own pictures show a laboratory and a factory there.

Design and documentation.

The baking shelf of a grocery store holds a particular kind of product: condensed and evaporated milk in small cans, chocolate chips and baking chocolate in bags and bars, corn starch in a box and baking powder in a tin. They are ingredients rather than finished foods, bought to be measured into something else, and a single can or tin may sit in a kitchen cupboard for months between uses.

That shapes how their packaging works. A name, a colour and a simple device have to be recognised on a crowded shelf, and then again in a cupboard, often by someone following a recipe that names the product. Directions, measurements and recipes printed on the pack are part of the design as well, read in the kitchen with flour on the counter and the oven already warming.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where it is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A New Jersey name in an Indiana family of brands.

By 2019 Davis belonged to Clabber Girl Corporation, the baking business built by Hulman & Company of Terre Haute. On 15 May 2019 B&G Foods, of Parsippany, New Jersey, announced that it had acquired Clabber Girl Corporation from Hulman & Company with effect from that day, and named the Rumford, Davis, Hearth Club and Royal brands of retail baking powder, baking soda and corn starch among the business’s products. With that sale the brand passed to a company based in New Jersey, the state where the R. B. Davis Company had been based.

Clabber Girl’s website now says Davis “is manufactured by Clabber Girl” and describes it as a “balanced, double-acting baking powder.” It lists four ingredients: corn starch, sodium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum sulfate and monocalcium phosphate. The sodium aluminum sulfate is the difference in the listed ingredients from its stablemate Rumford, whose product page lists corn starch, sodium bicarbonate and monocalcium phosphate alone. Clabber Girl says it continues to manufacture in Terre Haute, Indiana, which it calls its home since the company began, and its own timeline dates Hulman & Company’s start as a wholesale grocery there to the 1850s.

For a design guide, Davis shows how a baking powder could build an identity from words on a can — a guarantee, a promise of purity and a two-stage action — and from a name repeated on every recipe. Compare Clabber Girl, the Terre Haute baking powder now made by the same company, and Rumford, the Rhode Island baking powder in the same family. For this guide we use a Hoboken green, a guarantee gold and a paper cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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