Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking (Heartland Foodways) Paperback – May 22, 2017 by Linda Civitello(University of Illinois Press)

Just like in the kitchen, there is a lot of prep work. Civitello puts women in their place, experimenting, inventing, and investigating ingredients and processes, pre baking powder. They communicated by the cookbooks they wrote. They messed with longstanding family recipes that did not work in the colonies, where the flour was different, corn was more available than wheat, and a distinct preference for light and sweet soon developed. Women were in charge of baking, and they ran with it. They innovated. Then however, men invented baking powder in 1850, and fought over it. Women were there to purchase it, and the men created a whole new way of living by getting them to buy it continuously.

When the big four competitors (Rumford, Calumet, Royal and Clabber Girl) decided to take on the women who insisted on making their leavening from scratch, their first thought was to take over the cookbook. They could add color plates and fancier layouts in these corporate cookbooks. And plaster them with their brand. They also competed in trade cards that were popular to collect (and which eventually morphed into bubblegum trading cards). And almanacs. Soon, they took to badmouthing each other via their door to door salesmen, their print advertising and their packaging. They tried to get laws passed banning the competition’s product. They bought media so effectively the media were not permitted to print replies and rebuttals that might criticize their product. With one or two exceptions, they ran their employees ragged, paid women less than men, and fought regulation, food safety and labor standards. So very little has changed.

Civitello’s life is food history. She collects it, researches it and writes about it. It looks like a niche she could simply own, and most of the images are from her own collection. Her book is a delight. She interlaces the absurd history with jabs at the male-dominated world and the racists – both men and women, who dominated it. Women stole recipes from their slaves and ads portrayed women at ease thanks to the black “help”. (There is a particularly nasty description of the revered Marjorie Kennan Rawlings.) Civitello lays it all our out for readers to judge. This mountain via molehill has a variety of villains and a variety of impacts. It moves quickly and brings back all kinds of pop culture memories. It is a sweet treat on its own.