The Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking by Linda Civitello (review)

Although lack of leavening is central to one of Western culture's most famous stories—the Jewish flight from Egypt—the process has not yet received much attention from historians. In a new book by Linda Civitello, the difference between a cracker and a biscuit, between fried mush and pancakes earns a thorough study.

In The Baking Powder Wars, Civitello argues that consumer desire for lift in baked goods produced a fierce competition among companies at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book is useful for understanding the emergence of height as a positive attribute in baked goods in American culinary history. We may take for granted the two- and three-layer birthday cakes in American bakeries or the fluffy pancakes served at IHOP, but these are distinct structures that other culinary traditions do not pursue. Civitello convincingly argues that commercial leavenings are American products that produced a transformation in baking and established certain kinds of baked goods as uniquely American. By uncovering the twists and turns along the way to total acceptance of baking powder in American foodways, Civitello reminds us that foodstuffs often have histories that are much more complicated than we might guess. Nothing just arrives in the pantry without scientific intervention, market testing, advertising campaigns (often dueling), and consumer acceptance.

The Baking Powder Wars is best read as a case history in the business of food in America. Civitello uses a wide range of sources to construct her narrative and support her argument. She begins with a review of the state of breads in America before commercial leavening agents so that she can make a claim for the important difference that these substances made in American baking. Civitello chronicles references to chemical leavening agents in cookbooks to show acceptance on the demand side and traces advertising campaigns to show developments on the supply side. She refers to material from corporate archives and advertising to follow internal struggles both within and between minor and major producers.

The "war" to win customer loyalty involved attempts to establish new norms and as such is instructive to anyone interested in the construction of American foodways. Baking soda and baking powder companies had to convince home cooks that their own homemade versions of chemical leavening (made of pearl ash) were inferior to the mass-produced variety. Their success in this endeavor took some of the lab work out of home cooking and helped establish a sustained market for premixed household chemicals. Companies like Rumford, Clabber Girl, and Royal also tried to convince cooks that chemically leavened baked goods were superior to yeast-risen breads, an attempt that never fully succeeded. American cooks had room in their repertoire for both bread and cakes.

The fight for market share seeped into state and national politics at the turn of the century and even erupted into a bribery scandal corrupt enough to attract the attention of muckraker Lincoln Steffens. Because different companies used different combinations of chemicals in their product, Civitello recounts, some saw an opportunity to hobble competitors by hiring lobbyists at the state level to help pass legislation limiting use of particular ingredients on which their competitors relied. Companies spied on one another and used the Federal Trade Commission to both cast doubt on rivals' formulae and defend their own. Experts argued tirelessly on both sides of the debate over whether alum was safe or dangerous, even after the Pure Food Act of 1906 seemed to settle the debate.

Civitello follows the industry through its eras of establishment and consolidation into a few large companies and into the contemporary age of ubiquity, when "baking powder is now an invisible ingredient—an indispensable invisible ingredient" (p. 187).

The book is strongest when it is presenting facts about the industry and weakest when Civitello tries to extract larger meaning from transitions. For...