Baking powder is one of four nondescript white ingredients found in most American kitchens—along with sugar, flour, and salt—that are central not only to most baked goods, but also to food history. In Baking Powder Wars, Linda Civitello explores the path of this humble ingredient from homemade mixture to multimillion-dollar industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. She argues that “baking powder entrepreneurs are the robber barons that history missed” (p. 1). Like their kindred industrialists, baking powder executives fought fierce competitive battles in the media, in their boardrooms, in state and federal legislatures, in the White House, and even in the United States Supreme Court. Civitello demonstrates through rich detail and extensive research that their battles intersect with the histories of American business, government, and law and influenced social and gender relations. Along the way, industrialized food became accepted and welcomed into American daily life.
The front lines of this war were the kitchens of American homemakers. From colonial times, women faced frustrating and labor-intensive challenges in adapting European recipes to new ingredients and cooking environments. Civitello contends that bread-making was linked to more than family sustenance; it carried intense moral pressures, with religious, medical, and academic overtones. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, baking powder was the chemical leavening agent that allowed women to distance these concerns, along with the hours waiting for yeast to rise or the physical demands of beating air into dough. Tough brown loaves were replaced with light, fluffy white breads, pancakes, biscuits, cookies, muffins, and cakes. Both the American diet and the American homemaker experienced a radical transformation.
Rumford was the first brand to capitalize on this new technology, through an 1856 patent of its company's founder, Eben Horsford. Three other brands soon joined Rumford as industry leaders: Royal, Calumet, and Clabber Girl. They faced fierce competition among themselves and by hundreds of others. Within a little more than three decades, 387 companies were selling baking powder. By 1900 this number had grown to 534 companies, as demand for the product grew to more than 100 million pounds a year. With vast fortunes at stake, the four leading brands fought titanic battles for women's hearts, minds, and family budgets.
Civitello is at her best when tying together the many dimensions of this corporate competition. While the baking powder wars are compelling as a tale of intense business rivalry—complete with disreputable marketing practices, political bribery, and industrial espionage—they also provide a lens through which we can view complex historical developments. Baking powder battles were fought on many fronts, and each perspective deepens our understanding of the evolution of nineteenth-century business and the broader cultural landscape. As trade wars, the four leading brands fought for space on grocers’ shelves, which transformed during this period from local establishments to self-service chain stores. Civitello's book expands upon work by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Susan Strasser on women's roles in the home and explores how women were subtly but relentlessly educated to abandon their position as producers in the home to embrace a new role as consumers in the marketplace. We glean new insights as well about the influence of baking powder on the development of the New American Woman, as the Clabber Girl brand capitalized on the changing status of women at the turn of the twentieth century by presenting an image of a young female on its label. (Ironically, it is a label that has changed little since its debut.)
Marketing know-how developed in tandem with early packaged food items. Civitello's research places the marketing efforts by baking powder companies into the larger context of trade cards, women's magazines, and corporate promotional activities, adding to earlier research by historians Pamela Laird, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Richard Tedlow. Each of the four leading brands leveraged advances in printing technology and magazine distribution to reach broader audiences. In both ads and editorial copy, each company highlighted why its specific formula was the most appealing in terms of health and cooking results. Sales promotions were both clever and cutthroat, as illustrated by Clabber Girl's campaign to give grocers a free case of its product for every case they sold. Not only did this shut down new orders to competitors, it also created an instant national sales force for the regional brand without the company hiring any new employees. Retailers were ecstatic about their profits and became a corps of loyal brand ambassadors.
Baking powder rivalries also played a part in social and political affairs. Lincoln Steffens and other muckrakers created a national sensation with a series of articles about Royal's bribery of the Missouri state senate and the latter's willingness to rewrite laws to favor the brand. As brands expanded nationally, they faced regional social conflicts, such as the Ku Klux Klan's campaign against Clabber Girl's German Catholic owners. On a larger social scale, Civitello argues that food became secularized during this period and that the new powder embodied “the advantages of industrialization: minimal skill and time required to consistently produce a uniform product” (p. 40).
The baking powder wars ended abruptly in 1928 with the advent of two food conglomerates, General Foods and Standard Brands. In this new structure, individual brands were subsumed by the larger corporate identity. Products were cross-promoted as part of a brand family, ensuring greater visibility and profits across the entire line. Today, two major baking powder brands remain in the United States: Clabber Girl (with approximately two-thirds of the market share) and Calumet. An item that sells for less than four dollars for an eight-ounce can has become, in Civitello's words, “an indispensible invisible ingredient” of American cuisine (p. 187).
Civitello delved into corporate archives, cookbooks, government sources, and special collections to present her lively narrative. While it is mildly distracting that her tone shifts from academic to anecdotal by the end of the book, Baking Powder Wars makes a solid contribution to business history and a valuable addition to a food historian's collection.
