Getting the mix just right for the Canadian home baker

What was the appeal of fictional food characters such as Betty Crocker to consumers in the decades between 1920 and 1980? This essay isolates the central claims of these characters (who baked food but were never seen eating it, a role that signified their status as objects of consumption rather than as consumers) and some of the paradoxes of those claims. It also begins to unpack the conflicting demands of twentieth-century domestic consumer culture that both caused and resulted from them.