It’s 7:30pm on a Thursday night, and your daughter just informed you that she needs 37 cupcakes for tomorrow’s class party. No problem! Just pull out a box of cake mix, add some oil and eggs, and voila! Some passable cupcakes.
The ingredient that makes this kitchen magic possible is baking powder. In 1850, the relatively light and fluffy cake that we pour out of a box today would have been a laborious ordeal. Flour might have to be dried, grated or sifted depending on the season. Sugar needed to be ground, and even with these tasks you might still have a dense, flat desert.
Advertisement for Royal baking powder warning about the dangerous use of alum by competitors. Published in the Scott County Argus, February 7th, 1908
During this time the main leavening agent was yeast. Getting a proper rise out of those finicky little fungi could often be a multi-day process. Yeast “breathe” in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. Over time, and with constant heat, tiny yeast-breath bubbles of carbon dioxide build up in dough, causing it to “rise”. In order to have some fluff, the cake-baking process had to be scheduled with 12 to 24 hours of rising time.
Even acquiring yeast could be difficult. The 1891 household guide “Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping” listed eight different recipes for making your own yeast. Unfortunately, all but one of these listed “Good Yeast” saved from your last batch of starter as one of the necessary ingredients. There was only one set of instructions for “Yeast without yeast”, and the process was lengthy. First, “On Monday morning” you were instructed to boil hops into water and drain the liquid into a ceramic crock. Once it has cooled to lukewarm, add “The best brown sugar” and flour to the mix. Two days later, add boiled and mashed potatoes and mix thoroughly. The next day, strain out the mix into stoneware jugs and set loosely with corks. Two days later the corks could be tightened. Then for the next two weeks, the mixture should be set near a stove (keeping it warm, but not too warm), and it needed to be stirred frequently. At the end of this process you would finally have yeast.
It is very possible that the process of making yeast would have been relatively new to early European—American Scott County cooks. Until the 1860s, many housewives simply took leftover yeast from breweries. With its high German population, leftover brewers yeast might have been the norm for many Scott County residents. Unfortunately, in the late 1800s, most brewers switched from using primarily top-fermenting yeast to bottom-fermenting yeast. This new “lager” yeast ferments more slowly and at cooler temperatures, making it fairly useless in a home kitchen. Around this time, you also see a proliferation of cookbooks and household guides published explaining to frustrated housewives the process of creating yeast. Given the relative difficulty of obtaining good yeast, it is no surprise that people began looking for a substitute.
The story goes that in the 1840s, an English chemist had a wife who was allergic to yeast and asked him to invent a substitute. He combined a few household items and presto! Baking powder. In reality, the mission to find an alternative leavening agent had been going on for centuries. In the late 1700s, early cookbooks mentioned using pearlash, or potash to create a rise. Made from lye, wood ashes, or baker's ammonia, pearlash consisted mainly of potassium carbonate. This produces carbon dioxide quickly and reliably, but was difficult to make, caustic, and often smelly, making it a less than ideal ingredient. By the early 1800s, cooks were using cream of tarter and baking soda, but tarter (a byproduct of winemaking) was too expensive for the average American household.
In 1856 a chemist named Eben Norton Horsford officially patented the first baking powder. Rather then using ash, lye, or cream of tarter, Horsford’s invention was made from boiled down animal bones. This process extracted monocalcium phosphate, creating an acid that would react with baking soda to create CO2. He mixed the two in a container with a little cornstarch and baking powder was born. He started selling his product under the name “Rumford Baking Powder”.
Baking powder soon became a pantry staple, and the competitors began to pop up. Royal Baking Powder used the classic cream of tartar in their powder, touting it as a higher quality, though slightly more expensive, product. Calmut and Clabber Girl used alum in place of monocalcium phosphate, making their powder slightly cheaper. This competition soon heated. The baking powder wars had begun.
Advertisement for Royal baking powder warning about the dangerous use of alum by competitors. Published in the Scott County Argus, February 7th, 1908
What makes the struggle between these companies so unique is the context in which their battle played out. The United States was changing rapidly at the turn of the century. The era of the “Wild West” was ending, and the nation was becoming urban. With this came changes in how people ate. More and more Americans were turning to pre-prepared foods, and increasingly, consumers did not know where the ingredients for their meals were sourced. Food safety laws had not caught up to these changes, and adulterated, spoiled, and downright poisonous ingredients became a real fear.
Baking powder was one of the first popular “chemical” foods. There wasn’t a baking powder grain that it was ground from, or a baking powder plant. Instead, this ingredient was produced in a lab. During an era of food uncertainty, this new chemical product became instantly suspect.
You can see this play out on the pages of Scott County newspapers. During the first 10 years of 1900, competing baking powder advertisements grace almost every issue. Royal and Rumford baking powders pointed to the health concerns of the alum in cheaper brands. Calmut and Clabber insisted that their products were just as healthful, and cheaper than the competition. For such a low-profile food, baking powder dominated the advertising market.
Eventually, cost won out. Royal and Rumford were acquired by Clabber Girl, leaving it and Calumet as the reigning American companies on the market. You don't have to look far to see baking powder's continued hegemony today: cooks around the world use it in everything from cupcakes to crepes, muffins to madeleines, danishes to doughnuts. The sheer lack of baking powder ads gracing our screens speaks to its ubiquitous nature- nobody has to be convinced to buy baking powder.