My OKRA Post About German Chocolate Cake
My column about the History of German Chocolate Cake is now live on OKRA, the magazine of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum.
Before there was the Internet, finding a new or favorite recipe could be problematic. For decades, home cooks turned to the food sections of their newspaper for inspiration or replacement of lost recipes. Most food editors ran a recipe exchange column where readers could seek and share recipes.
The popularity of the German Chocolate Cake can be traced back to a newspaper exchange column in the June 3, 1957 issue of the Dallas Morning Star. On that day, homemaker Georgia Clay’s recipe ran in the column “Recipe of the Day.”
The recipe would have been chosen by food editor Julie Benell. She had been a concert pianist who later gave performances on radio and television. She eventually left her music career and became the food editor at the Dallas Morning News where she spent 25 years. The reader called the dessert Texas German Sweet Chocolate Cake. In reality, it was German’s Chocolate Cake. General Foods, which owned Baker’s, sent the recipe with its product to newspaper food editors across the country. It soon became a national staple, with the possessive dropped from the name.
The story of recipe exchange columns and the relationship between home cooks and newspaper food editors can be found in The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community, which is out in April 2014 and available for preorder on Amazon now. In the book, I examine the important work newspaper food editors were doing in the 1950s and 1960s despite being marginalized in the newsroom and then overlooked by journalism historians. I looked at the work of more than 60 food editors and found that they were doing significant journalism and made important connections in their communities.
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