GOOD EATS (via Tom Morin):

MAN OF TASTE: William A Mitchell, 1911-2004 (Mark Steyn, November 2004, The Atlantic Monthly)

William A Mitchell never became a household name, but most households you can name have something of his in it – Cool Whip, quick-set Jell-O, egg whites for cake mix… He gave American astronauts the first space-age beverage (Tang) and impressionable adolescents one of the great urban legends (Pop Rocks). Bill Mitchell’s inventions are not to everyone’s taste. Once, for a BBC show about Thanksgiving, I served Martha Stewart a pumpkin pie with Cool Whip, and she wasn’t happy about it. As it happens, Martha and Bill Mitchell both have Nutley, New Jersey in common. In the year of Martha’s birth, 1941, Bill Mitchell started work as a chemist at General Foods and briefly lived in Nutley. As he was developing Cool Whip, Martha’s parents were developing the anti-Cool Whip.

Business-wise, the former beats the latter. Originally developed as time-saving substitutes for various elementary kitchen needs, the Kraft/General Foods repertory has multiplied and mutated, and the products which Mitchell and his colleagues developed live happily within a self-contained universe. To make Kraft’s Classic Angel Flake Coconut Cake you need a 7 oz bag of Baker’s Angel Flake Coconut, a package of yellow cake mix, a package of Jell-O White Chocolate Instant Pudding, and a tub of Cool Whip. It’s like modular furniture: sometimes you put Cool Whip in the Jell-O, sometimes you put Jell-O in the Cool Whip. But it’s an all-or-nothing world. It would be unsettling and intrusive to replace the Cool Whip with Martha’s recipe for crème anglaise.

And yet, if you’re at a county fair or a church bazaar and you buy the local fundraising cookbook, you notice how in a relatively short period (Cool Whip, the world’s first non-dairy whipped topping, dates back only to 1966) Bill Mitchell’s products have become the great staples of “down-home cooking” and traditional “family recipes”. In the Tunbridge Volunteer Fire Department Cookbook from Tunbridge, Vermont, for example, Mary Vermette’s excellent “Pudding Dessert” requires for the first layer 2 sticks of oleo, 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of chopped nuts (mix and bake); for the second layer, 1 cup of confectioner’s sugar, 8 oz of cream cheese, 1 cup of Cool Whip (combine and spread on the first layer); for the third layer, 2 small packages of instant pudding and 2 ½ cups of milk (mix and spread on the second layer); and for the fourth layer more Cool Whip sprinkled with chopped nuts. I made it and ate it in the interests of research, and had such a good time I clean forgot what it was I was meant to be researching.

If you've never been to the Tunbridge World's Fair, you owe yourself the trip. Kevlar is strongly recommended.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 9, 2004 4:34 PM