[Many of America’s favorite recipes today were born from
commercial incentives--from the obvious Rice Krispies Treats and
Jell-O salads, to beloved condensed-soup casserole and stuffing
recipes passed down for generations.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

YOUR MOST BELOVED “FAMILY” RECIPE JUST MIGHT HAVE BEEN DREAMED UP
BY A CORPORATION IN ORDER TO SELL PRODUCTS.  
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Cathy Erway
December 14, 2021
Taste Cooking [[link removed]]

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_ Many of America’s favorite recipes today were born from
commercial incentives--from the obvious Rice Krispies Treats and
Jell-O salads, to beloved condensed-soup casserole and stuffing
recipes passed down for generations. _

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In 2018, a mini scandal erupted in the baking world when Stella Parks,
blogger and best-selling author, introduced an alternate origin story
for key lime pie. According to popular lore from the sunshine state,
the dessert was created in Key West in the household of William J.
Curry, a 19th-century millionaire. Some say it was the genius of a
talented live-in cook, while others say it was his daughter-in-law who
whipped up the dessert using local limes; either way, the silken,
tangy custard so impressed his distinguished guests that its legacy
has endured since. In BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, Parks
attested that the pie was actually invented 1,500 miles away in New
York City, in the corporate test kitchen for Borden Dairy—not a
folksy pastry to entertain dinner party guests but a cold-hearted
calculation to sell more cans of sweetened condensed milk to the
masses.

Whether or not her theory is correct is beside the point. It is clear
from reporting and telltale legacy that many of America’s favorite
recipes today were born from commercial incentives. From the obvious
Rice Krispies Treats and Jell-O salads, to beloved condensed-soup
casserole and stuffing recipes passed down for generations, moving
product has been a significant contributor to culinary innovation in
America. Behind the labels, recipe developers at food brands have
started food trends, crafted viral recipes, and steered America’s
eating habits perhaps even more than cookbook authors with their free
recipes, creating lasting traditions in home kitchens.

“Food companies’ test kitchens have developed many, many recipes
that people call their own in their family,” says Jane Freiman,
founder of Smart Kitchen Insights Group and the former director for
the consumer test kitchen at Campbell Soup Company, where she worked
for 27 years. “Many times, people are shocked and say, ‘That was a
Campbell’s recipe? That was my mom’s recipe. That French onion
dip? That ranch dip? That flag cake? That was by Kraft or Cool
Whip?’”

The Campbell’s test kitchen was created in 1941, according to
Freiman, around the same time as that of Betty Crocker, Lipton, and
many other brands tasked with selling shelf-stable pantry foods or
seasonings, often geared toward convenience. The goal for all of them
was to create recipes that people would use in their homes, and use
frequently, so that they’d keep coming back to the products. Back
then, these test kitchens were typically called the home economics
department, and they were part of the sales team at food corporations.
Over the course of the ’70s and ’80s, many of them rebranded as
“test kitchens” as home economics, as a field of study, morphed
into consumer sciences. And according to Freiman, around 15 years ago,
many of these test kitchens changed their names to “culinary
kitchen” to reflect a professional chef’s point of view rather
than a home cook’s.

Moving product has been a significant contributor to culinary
innovation in America.

Though the labels may have evolved, the goals of the test kitchens
have remained largely the same: showcase the product in a way that
makes the recipe inseparable from it. So in the case of a Chicken and
Rice Bake, one of Freiman’s hit ’90s recipes for Campbell’s,
it’s the cream of mushroom soup that makes the rice so rich and
creamy.

“So you have a series of checklists and questions: Does this recipe
meet the business goals? Is the product the hero? Could it be made
without that product?” says Freiman.

Freiman always wanted to work in a company’s test kitchen. Sitting
around the dinner table when she was growing up, she was fascinated by
the stories her father would tell about his day working at Corning
Glass Works, where he got to pop into the test kitchen and maybe bring
home some photos of a shoot or strawberries from the set. Determined
to break into this field, Freiman studied home economics and took an
internship at Good Housekeeping, but she found the magazine industry
too fast-paced for her liking. Having published a few recipes from
that experience, however, she was able to get her foot in the door at
the test kitchen at Durkee Famous Foods in Strongsville, Ohio, before
joining Campbell’s in Camden, New Jersey.

Perhaps the greatest culinary claim to fame to come from Campbell’s
test kitchen is the green bean casserole. Campbell’s recipe is
attributed to Dorcas Reilly, a supervisor of the home economics
department. According to Freiman, the dish was originally created in
1955 at the request of a writer for the Associated Press, and it
wasn’t intended to be a holiday dish. But over the years, it was
promoted during the holidays, and it became well associated with
Thanksgiving and Christmas. The product hero is, like many
mid-century-created casseroles turned household classics, condensed
cream of mushroom soup.

“Will I ever have my green bean casserole?” asks Freiman, of her
career in recipe developing. “I always wonder.”

While it may be somewhat uncomfortable to discover that a beloved
recipe was less indebted to Aunt Bonnie than to a brand, there’s
also a continuous exchange between home cooks’ ideas and those of
cooks who are paid to serve them ideas from brands. Recipe developers
are people, after all. And there’s a lot more to what makes them
tick besides, well, the bottom line.

“I think a lot of what we do is reflecting back to people what they
want to cook,” says Sarah Beth Tanner, the creative development chef
for Urban Accents spices, which was recently acquired by Stonewall
Kitchen, a specialty pantry goods brand. When she’s not creating
recipes for seasoning blends and mixes—there are more than 200 of
them to her credit in her five years with the company—she loves to
devour food magazines and TV. “I love that challenge of finding what
I know people are excited about right now and making a product that
does that,” says Tanner.

Before the pandemic and the acquisition, Tanner would ring a dinner
bell in their ten-person office in Chicago whenever a recipe was ready
to be tested and get feedback from the whole . And she loves
Thanksgiving and holiday recipes. Many recipes—like a winter squash
stuffed with quinoa and kale—were created to utilize the brand’s
best-selling turkey seasoning rub in different ways. It’s the type
of product that some people find inseparable from Thanksgiving itself.

“Sometimes people will say [in customer reviews] that they can’t
find it and they’re afraid their Thanksgiving will be ruined,”
says Tanner. “Folks have their traditions based around something we
created, and it’s really satisfying.”

For Tanner, that satisfaction comes from helping people cook at home
rather than getting takeout. And since many of the products they
feature are shelf-stable shortcut ingredients—Tanner says the term
“participative convenience” is used a lot at the company—the
main competition for a recipe featuring, say, pizza seasoning blend
might just be the local pizzeria.

Knowing her audience and their needs, Tanner approaches her recipes
hoping to give people an idea that feels accessible and familiar, but
with an extra dimension that just makes it a little more special. Each
recipe has been rigorously tested if it’s been published or included
on a product’s package, she says. Product and recipe reviews are
constantly read on the website to glean feedback. Language is very
carefully chosen so that each recipe is foolproof.

“I imagine someone who’s running low on time, and they’re going
to cook more because it’s nutritious and soul-soothing,” says
Tanner.

Thanksgiving turkey solutions seem to be a popular flex for food
companies. For chef Helen Roberts, the challenge was in selling a
product that wasn’t associated with classic American cooking to an
American audience every day of the year: soy sauce. As the test
kitchen manager at Kikkoman, where she worked for 37 years, Roberts
created more recipes than she can even estimate, sometimes five in a
day.

The most popular one was her turkey brine recipe, which calls for an
entire bottle of soy sauce. She said that this was not only popular
among cooks, according to feedback over the years, but it created the
largest sales for the brand.

“Other recipes, they would use, like, only one tablespoon, and
that’s not going to move product—and isn’t that the point?”

Roberts had recently joined Kikkoman’s product team in 1981 when she
discovered that she was a supertaster. Impressed with her ability to
distinguish sauces in tastings, she was offered a job in the test
kitchen, where she again wowed colleagues. At the time, she says, the
test kitchen’s recipes mostly consisted of taking a sauce from the
product line and “brushing it on chicken”—whereas Roberts would
introduce a spice cake she’d made using the or a meatloaf with the
plum sauce. She made French toast with the panko bread crumbs and
deep-fried Twinkies with the tempura mix. Her unexpected creations may
have even helped steer the brand’s strategy, rather than the other
way around.

“It’s a Japanese company, but they were more interested in saying,
‘Let’s feed America what they want to eat, not try to teach them
to cook Japanese,’” says Roberts. “I was using soy sauce as a
flavor enhancer, but not cooking Japanese.”

Many customers were wary of the latter notion, the company learned
from feedback. With the turkey brine recipe, for instance, many were
skeptical about turning their all-American holiday fare into an
Asian-themed entrée—as evidenced at roughly 1:30 of this TV clip.
Hence, part of Roberts’s goal was to convince customers that their
stew or hamburger would simply taste better with the products and
downplay their Japanese provenance.

What makes sense for a brand’s CEO might not always sync with a home
cook, and that’s where the recipe developer can work to build a
bridge. But what are the consequences of allowing commercial
incentives so much influence over our cooking habits—especially when
the foods they feature are not particularly healthy or fresh? And
should it make any difference if the impetus for key lime pie was
perhaps not local limes but a long-lasting milk product that required
no refrigeration (but did require marketing to familiarize people with
it)? After all, a good recipe is a good recipe—and many good things
have been created in the service of capitalism. But the work of
company test kitchens may have had an enduring effect on America’s
cooking habits that we have been slow to unlearn. That is, these test
kitchens’ goals have largely succeeded.

“Right around this moment, I can’t even tell you how many people
are looking for some sort of healthy alternative to cream of mushroom
soup because they have no conception that they can make green bean
casserole without it,” says Alana Chernila, the author of The
Homemade Pantry and other cookbooks where she has developed recipes
for food products that people normally buy. You might call her an
evangelist for not cooking with shelf-stable convenience foods.

She says that she was inspired to start creating homemade hacks for
processed foods while raising her small children, trying to avoid the
unhealthy additives and chemicals often found in them.

“There’s a reason why Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup is so
delicious—it’s because there’s so much crap in it,” she says,
referring to the 37 percent of the recommended daily value for sodium,
the high proportion of commodity cooking oil, and more ingredients or
quantities that you likely wouldn’t reach for when cooking soup from
scratch. While some food additives may have been wrongly maligned over
the years in America—looking at you, MSG—there’s no denying that
we’d be better off making béchamel with fresh milk and butter and
adding mushrooms. If only we had the time.

What makes sense for a brand’s CEO might not always sync with a home
cook, and that’s where the recipe developer can work to build a
bridge.

Chernila is sympathetic to the home cook who can’t juggle it all,
and she points out that, for many households, free recipes on the back
of a box may be the only ones accessible to them. And like many
cookbook authors and food bloggers, she’s done her share of
sponsored recipes for brands. But it’s not all about the brand.

“Even when I’m tasked with creating a recipe for a certain peanut
butter, for instance, I’m still a human being with feelings, and I
might be drawing from all sorts of things, like my grandma’s peanut
butter cookies,” she says.

“You have to really enjoy the product. If you don’t, it’s hard
to do any kind of recipe development,” says Freiman. While she
admits that condensed soup and processed foods in general have less of
a healthy glow than they did in the 1940s, most brands are evolving at
least some of their products to meet today’s health and diet
attitudes. And nutritional fads come and go. During the fat-free craze
of the ’90s, Freiman developed the idea of cooking potatoes in
Swanson chicken broth for mashed potatoes instead of adding butter or
milk. (Anecdotally, this is a habit I’ve seen perpetuated in many
home kitchens, including my own family’s in the ’90s.)

The fear and shock that some people have when they find that their
favorite recipe was made by a brand may come from the notion that
they’re produced by faceless, nameless corporate entities—like a
lab filled with robots. But that’s not the case. In-house recipe
developers at brands may not have their name attached to recipes on
product labels or brand websites. And they may not rise to name
recognition through their best recipe efforts in the way that an
influencer or blogger might.

But the standards for recipe testing in corporate test kitchens are
probably much higher than those for cookbooks, and that’s thanks to
investment from the brand. Recipe developers have to run their ideas
through numerous procedures and approvals before a recipe is deemed
good enough to slap on labels—so having a financial interest in
recipe quality may serve home cooks better than they think.

“There’s a lot of trial and error,” says Roberts, of each recipe
she tested for Kikkoman. “But the nice thing about it is that even
the errors came out good enough that they were always eaten.”

_Shelve It explores the world of groceries, from the fluorescent-lit
aisles to the nooks and crannies of your cupboard. We dive into why
certain ingredients got pantry staple status, the connection between
cookbooks and buying habits, the online-ification of grocery shopping,
and what gets shelved along the way._

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