At first, it was a charming movie that seemed tailor-made for me. A devoted, vintage clothing–wearing amateur foodie with a loyal and patient husband cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Just a normal person with a normal kitchen who hated her job and had hoped for more by this point in her life. She even wore pearls in the kitchen—one of my own personal dreams. Of course, in my dreams those pearls are fake. On the surface, I felt like I’d found someone a lot like me. But as you can imagine, Julie Powell lost me when she killed the lobster.
From the moment they showed her walking through the farmers’ market choosing the doomed crustaceans, right up to when she finally overcame her “fear” and threw them alive into a pot of boiling water, I kept waiting for her to have a change of heart. I thought she would succumb to her conscience—she even admitted that she knew it was wrong—but she never did. It was at that moment I realized that Julie and I were not so alike after all. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the celebrated Lobster Killer and how there needed to be a humane alternative.
Contrary to some stereotypes, vegans are just as passionate about cooking and eating as any meat-eating foodie. After years of working at the largest animal-advocacy organizations on the planet and meeting thousands of vegans from all over the world, I can say with complete confidence that no one loves food the way vegans do. We think about it constantly. We read labels with Christmas-morning eagerness, searching for those deal-breaker words: whey, egg whites, skim milk protein, and casein. We sit around talking about food like the gals on Sex and the City talk about orgasms. We send emails to our friends and family telling them about new products and restaurants with a passion that can only be compared to Beatlemania.
So when my husband, Dan, and I decided to start our own cookbook cook-through on our blog, we had an equally impassioned goal in mind: we wanted to show that you can make anything vegan and that no animal ever needs to be force-fed, confined to a crate or a cage, or boiled alive, or to endure any of the other nightmares animals face to satisfy our culinary desires.
But any good campaigner knows you can’t just tell people that. The proof is in the vegan pudding. You need to show people that any recipe can be veganized, and you need to prove the result can be even more delicious than the original. This meant we needed to show people how to use vegan products like mock meats and cheeses to their full potential. I used to ignore products like soy cheese and fake meats because when I first went vegan, technology hadn’t quite caught up with demand, and those early versions weren’t really right yet. Like many vegans, I also spent years avoiding ingredients like nutritional yeast and agave nectar because I didn’t know how to use them correctly. But these days, there are outstanding vegan products and ingredients available in every grocery store, and all folks need is a little inspiration and guidance on how to reimagine compassionate and often healthier versions of their all-time favorite dishes.
Once we had a clear idea of what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it, Dan and I drove to every bookstore in southern Virginia. We begrudgingly agreed that Julia’s historic book wasn’t the right fit. Julia really did revolutionize how Americans looked at cooking and mainstreamed French cuisine—but sadly Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with all its beef-flavored Jell-O molds and frightening organ-based dishes, wasn’t going to inspire the kinds of recipes we needed to create to achieve our goal.
We flipped through more cookbooks than I can remember, but there was one that stood out: a bright red binder decorated like Bavarian gingerbread. It was the original 1950s edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book. This book was for someone just like me, in (nonleather) saddle shoes and black-rimmed glasses, aspiring to one day wear (faux) pearls in the kitchen. But I had to put it back. The goal was to show that anything could be vegan—and this edition lacked any real international dishes and included recipes like Broiled Grapefruit and Herring-Appleteasers, which aren’t exactly in fashion with the modern family. We decided to compromise, going with the 2010 edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook, which had more than just pork chops, meat loafs, and Jell-O molds. This would be the perfect outline for family-friendly vegan recipes and for showcasing the tips and tricks we’d picked up over the years for “veganizing” recipes.
See, it had to be Betty. The Betty Crocker brand has a well-deserved reputation for teaching amateur American chefs how to get the most out of products and ingredients that they might not have otherwise used. Betty Crocker would be the perfect inspiration for showing people you really can turn anything vegan once you know the tricks.
Since the day we walked out of the bookstore with our own copy of Big Red, I have fallen in love with Betty Crocker. This project has not only encouraged me to make some outrageous casseroles and use all of the crazy kitchen gadgets I hoard, but also gives me an opportunity to share with others how easy a vegan lifestyle can be.
And that, kids, is how the Betty Crocker Project was born!
For more than two years, Dan and I shared our lives, discoveries, tips, tricks, and secrets with the loyal readers of our blog at MeetTheShannons.net—as well as all of those hidden lurkers, Twitter followers, and Facebook fans. This book takes the Betty Crocker Project one step further. It’s more than just a collection of recipes we created out of admiration for Betty Crocker and several hundred other recipes that will help any vegan or not-yet-vegan cook like a gourmet chef. There are instructions for equipping your vegan kitchen with all the products and gadgets you need to cook these and other vegan recipes; tips and tricks for making the transition to a vegan lifestyle and making it stick; reflections on what we’ve learned about Betty Crocker and her place in a modern, vegan-friendly world; and much more. Basically, it’s your all-in-one guide to becoming a cook like Betty Crocker that pays homage to her and the all-American superwoman she was created to represent, while celebrating vegan cuisine.
We’ve always said that we can make anything vegan. Now we can say we’ve proved it! Thank you, Lobster Killer, for inspiring a project that I suspect you would absolutely hate.
Any women’s studies major can tell you that for generations, the history of women has been recorded in quilts and on recipe cards and kept alive through oral traditions. So it’s kind of refreshing to actually have a documented origin story for one of the most famous female faces in culinary history… even if she’s not a real person.
Betty Crocker was “born” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1921 to the all-male staff of Gold Medal. She would later come to be known as “the First Lady of Food,” but in the beginning she was just a branding campaign. Ultimately she would become one of the most successful branding campaigns of all time. The character was named “Crocker” after William G. Crocker, a retired director at Washburn Crosby, the parent company of Gold Medal, which would become General Mills. “Betty” was just the obvious choice.
Bettys have always been pleasant, cheery, all-American gals. They’re that perfect combination of friendly and sexy, flashing garters and patooties like Grable, Boop, and Page. They’re the cutie-pies of neighborhood potlucks, with pterodactyl casseroles and fresh-baked cookies, like Rubble and Cooper (you know, Veronica’s archrival). They’re mysterious like Davis. They’re hilarious like White. And now they’re vegan.
“Betty Crocker” is an avatar for a uniquely American style of womanhood, and this book is for all those ladies courageously trying to live up to that expectation: those superhuman women who can cook tofu scramble for breakfast, get the kids off to school, bake vegan cupcakes for the office potluck, get the customer report submitted on time, chair the PTA meeting, pick the kids up from practice, and serve a nutritious three-course vegan dinner around an impeccably set table—all while wearing pearls and a smile. We’re the ones who see birthdays as an opportunity to bake towers of eggless cupcakes with better-than-buttercream frosting to show how much we care. We’re the ones who know deep down that there’s always a way to make a compassionate and delicious version of any dish. Betty Crocker represents everyone who ever looked at her kitchen and said, “You will not defeat me!” And now you can be like Betty Crocker too.