A Tale of Two Bettys

And one of my favorite topics: cookies

Do you have, or did your mom or grandma or someone else dear to you have, the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, with spiral binding and a red cover?

According to the Betty Crocker website, the Cooky Book first came out in 1963. I love the old-fashioned spelling of “cooky” as it seems extra warm and homey.

My grandma, whose name was also Betty, found some of our favorite cookie recipes in that book, like chocolate crinkles. These cookies are rolled into balls and then rolled in powdered sugar so that when they flatten as they bake, they end up looking like a snow-covered field (or at least in my imaginative mind they do; more realistically, they look chocolaty and delicious).

Other recipes we all made together came from a variety of smudged and stained recipe cards, some with names attached (“from the kitchen of — “), some cut out of magazines or from food packaging, and others from I don’t remember where, like the one that calls for you to lay down layers of dough with a cookie press to make buttery spritz pockets, each one with a single rectangle from a Hershey bar hidden inside.

(I found a version of the spritz cookies here, but let me add that they look more fun if you put colored sugar sprinkles on top, which was my job as a kid, as well as breaking the Hershey bars into segments.)

One year while visiting my grandparents for Christmas, my Aunt Sandy got out all the family-favorite cookie recipes and wrote them (twice) by hand into small, hardbound notebooks for my mom and my Aunt Carol. My mom refers to this now rather than the Cooky Book, though she also has a collection of well-worn recipe cards like my grandma used (or sometimes the original ones from grandma’s collection).

I’ve written about both my grandmas before. I think of them often. Today I’m thinking of them as I’m wanting to bake cookies. Both my grandmas used to make tons of cookies, and we’d have freezers full of cookies after Christmas, but my mom and I just made a few this year.

So this afternoon I went to my cookbook shelf and picked up the Betty Crocker Cookie Book that my grandma (Betty) gave me for my birthday in 1999.

The spelling and recipes have changed in this newer “collection of America’s best-loved cookies,” but the book is sweet to me all the same. It has several variations on chocolate chip cookies, and on most days, what more do you need?

By the way, did you know that Betty Crocker wasn’t a real person but rather an invented character from the company that produced Gold Medal Flour? They first chose “Betty” as an all-American, friendly kind of name when they wanted to create the persona of a helpful, down-to-earth expert to be the voice of the company when responding to customer questions.

Betty Crocker was imagined into life just a couple of years before my grandma was born in 1923 in Mandan, North Dakota. Her name was Elizabeth, but I never heard anyone who knew her call her that.

My grandma never went back to Mandan after her family moved west together. One time her friend Maxine drove through grandma’s hometown on a road trip and sent her a postcard with a picture of the earth lodges made by Native Americans who had built villages there long before her time.

I’m sure you can guess that I have the postcard in a shoebox with other postcards I’ll always love.