Dear Friend,
It’s 1953, and you’ve just been born. Little do you know
that by the time you’re old enough to help Mom in the kitchen it will be 1963,
and she will have already begun to supplement the cooking with ready-made and
pre-packaged food. By the time you’re old enough to cook by yourself, everything
she serves you will have been heated in a microwave oven from frozen.
Therefore, the skills she learned from her mother will not be passed down to
you. By the time you cook for your own growing family it will be 1983, and you
will never have made a pie crust from scratch, let alone breads, cookies, cakes
and frosting. My good friend Betty Crocker, who is a for-profit corporation,
not a person, will facilitate this slide into ignorance by making it easy to
buy all these things from a supermarket shelf. By the time your daughter is old
enough to cook for herself, it will be 2003, and she won’t even shop for food,
let along ingredients — everything she eats is handed to her through the window
of her car. Her grandma will long be dead of heart disease brought about by the
clogged arteries she got by eating so many foods made from Spry.
Have a nice day!
Aunt Jenny
Home Baking Made Easy
For Beginners and Experts, The Lever Brothers Company, 1953
