The years after World War II saw a number of advances in the world of foods, but particularly in the world of convenience foods.  Dehydrated potatoes, nutritional breakfast cereals (with added vitamins), nondairy creamer for coffee, TV Dinners, and many other foods were either introduced or improved during this time period.

Cake mixes, too, were popular, and it’s what I’m looking at today.  For many people cake mixes seemed to be so new and so useful that, as one food industry executive put it, they “were miracles…using them was like having the essence of the modern world in your kitchen.”*

But why did cake mixes become popular at that particular time?  They had been originally introduced decades before—why did they wait until after World War II to really catch on?

According to a number of writers, the reason comes down to psychology.  The original mixes came with everything required for a cake, in dehydrated form; therefore, for those mixes the cook only needed to add water, stir the batter, and bake the cake.  These early cakes were soundly rejected by consumers, though, because they were too easy to make.  Cake making was baking, and baking should be work.  Cake mixes only became popular when the ingredients, and the instructions, were changed slightly: instead of only adding water, cooks had to add oil, water, and an egg.  Suddenly, in this psychological explanation, cake making seemed like real work, and therefore acceptable to cooks.  Cake mixes then sold like, well, hot cakes.

This is a silver bullet sort of explanation, a very simple theory that makes the women of the time (who were the ones making the cakes) seem fairly stupid.  There’s not that much difference between adding oil, water, and an egg and just adding water.  It’s a tempting theory to believe in, but it doesn’t go very far in explaining what really happened.

A better way to explain  why cake mixes took off in popularity is too look at what was happening in society at that time.  From 1941 to 1945 we were involved in World War II, when millions of men were drafted and millions of women went to work in factories and other jobs across the country.  In spite of the full-time work women were still expected to cook meals for their families, and many of those women were understandably looking for a way to make foods quickly by using mixes and other shortcuts.

Home cooking was made more difficult because of rationing.  Many kinds of raw ingredients were rationed, like meat, flour, and sugar, so if a consumer wanted to buy a bag of sugar she first had to make sure she had a ration stamp for it.  If someone wanted a cake it was often easier to buy a finished cake, since the sugar ration given to bakeries was higher than that given to individuals, and bakeries sometimes received extra allotments of sugar.  Furthermore, sugar rationing continued until about two years after the war was over, long after other rationing had stopped.

This was the time period—during and just after World War II—when cake mixes exploded in popularity.  Between 1942 (the first full year of WWII) and 1946 (the first full year after the war) sales more than tripled.  And why did they become so popular?  Because during the war women were busy and it was difficult to get sugar, so women often turned to mixes rather than making a cake from scratch (the mixes were also rationed but with a different set of ration stamps). After rationing was done many women were comfortable in using the mixes, so they kept with them.

But what about the psychological explanation of how adding an egg, oil, and water to a mix felt like baking, more so than just adding water?  I think it’s a very simplistic explanation that doesn’t really look at what was happening during that time.  However, that explanation does come close to getting one thing right: adding an egg was probably an important step forward in cake mixes, but not for any psychological reason.  Rather, it’s more likely that adding an egg allowed mix producers to drop dehydrated egg from their ingredient list.  They had never gotten the dehydrated egg to taste right, and the tradeoff for making the instructions slightly more complicated was a better-tasting cake that sold exceeding well.

*Robert D. Buzzell & Robert E. M. Nourse, Product Innovation in Food Processing, 1954-1964 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1967), 39.  Most of the data for this article comes from that page and the pages following.