The Rise of Baking Powder
This Kitchen Essential Has Deep Roots in Midwestern Manufacturing.
What do the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a famed Lexington, KY, horse farm, and an extended family member of Dayton’s Wright brothers all have in common?
Would you believe a connection to baking powder?
The history of baking powder marches straight through these Midwestern stops and includes my mother’s kitchen. Baking powder works when a dry or wet acid kickstarts the sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). In recent times, that dry acid has been cream of tartar. Out of hundreds of recipes my mother left behind, only two contain cream of tartar. I never appreciated its use when called for in her sugar cookies and maple pecan chiffon cake until now.
To understand the composition and role of baking powder in our everyday lives, one must first grasp the purpose of a leavening agent. After flour and water, a leavening agent of any sort is the third most important ingredient to baking. This agent creates bubbles in the dough of breads and pastries, adding volume and texture to baked goods. Modern-day baking powder is one such ingredient.
Baking powder is made from a combination of sodium bicarbonate, some type of dry acid such as cream of tartar, and any ingredient that acts as a buffer to protect the sodium bicarbonate and acid from reacting to each other prematurely. In most cases, the buffer is cornstarch.
When baking powder is combined with a wet mixture, the carbon dioxide gas created is circulated throughout, inflating and stretching the dough or batter with tiny bubbles that expand. During the rise and bake steps, these bubbles are set in place and produce a fluffy texture that is easier to chew and digest.
Before Baking Powder
In the earliest of days, bread was made from pulverized wheat made into pastes. Those pastes plus water were cooked over a fire, hardening into loaves. The earliest leavening agents used in making bread were yeasts that naturally occurred as fungus. These yeasts evolved alongside humans: Scientists have found that one-third of the 6,000 genes in yeasts are related to our genetic makeup.
Ancient Egyptians have been credited for their use of yeast, and therefore for its spread to other cultures. However, researchers do not know specifically how they might have stumbled onto its use, other than a theory that someone left dough made from flour and water near a natural source of fermentation, initiating the process. After all, the ritual of the starter is an old tradition of saving a piece of that day’s dough to use the next day.
In 2020, a group of scientists at the National Library of Medicine suggested, “hominids likely fermented fruits using yeasts as early as a million years ago,” hinting that any type of fermentation related to grains is much older than currently thought. According to their studies, other “genomic evidence suggests that the canonical beer and bread yeast, S. cerevisiae, originated in China before moving west 16–14 thousand years ago, via the route which would become the Silk Road.”
We also have evidence of leavening agents utilized by ancient Romans. The philosopher Pliny the Elder, who died following the eruption in Pompeii, wrote, “The Greeks have established a rule that for a modius (a Roman unit of measurement equal to a peck) of meal eight ounces of leaven is enough.”
Several other components were introduced as leavening agents before baking powder entered the culinary canon. Potash was one of the first introduced to the baking process in the U.S., presumably by Native Americans. Potash is a mixture of wood fire ashes and water, soaked together to create lye. The lye is boiled to remove the water; the salt-like substance left behind, a mixture of potassium carbonate and other chemicals, is known as pearlash. Potassium carbonate creates the necessary carbon dioxide reaction. Nowadays, potash is a main ingredient in fertilizers and detergents.
Several less tasteful references exist about ingredients used to leaven bread or extend its shelf-life prior to the advent of baking powder. During the siege of France in 1590, starving Parisians made bread using human bones from the Cemetery of Innocents. Author Tobia Smollet disdained the use of chalk, alum, and bone ash in the bread of London in the 1770s. And we’re all familiar with the tale of Jack and the Bean Stalk: “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the bones of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
Given these unappealing and unsafe leaveners, scientists set to work to find alternatives.
Baking Powder Beginnings
In 1843, the British chemist Alfred Bird was motivated by love: His wife was allergic to yeast. Wanting to relieve her suffering whenever she consumed bread, he created and commercially produced a chemical leavening agent of sodium bicarbonate and tartaric acid to be used in baking, which became known as baking powder and marketed under Bird’s Custard Powder.
Thirteen years later, an American chemist and Harvard professor, Eben Horsford, played a significant role in the development of the modern ingredient. Horsford created a compound using monocalcium phosphate, made from powdered mutton and beef bones (producing calcium acid phosphate), and combined it with baking soda. Horsford had improved upon Bird’s baking powder by eliminating the need for cream of tartar, which was imported from France and required separate storage. He commercialized his product and sold it under the name Rumford Baking Powder, named for his endowment sponsor at Harvard, Count Rumford. In the late 1880s, the mining of calcium phosphate bypassed the need for bones of any sort.
Other competitors, such as Dr. Oetker’s Baking Powder, created by Dr. August Oetker in 1891 in Germany, became staples in Europe.
Today, most commercial baking powders are “double-acting,” meaning they contain two types of acid—one that reacts with the sodium bicarbonate at room temperature as it’s mixed with wet ingredients, and another that reacts when heated during the baking process, adding to a more consistent rise.
One controversy surrounding the production of baking powder still exists. Some baking powders contain sodium aluminum sulfate or sodium aluminum phosphate as the acid component. However, due to a metallic aftertaste and potential health concerns, many brands now offer aluminum-free baking powders. These aluminum-free versions typically use alternative acid salts like cream of tartar or monocalcium phosphate.
Baking Powder Rises in the Midwest
By the early 1900s, U.S. baking powder producers, many of them in the Midwest, were battling for market dominance. Companies took advantage of a lack of governmental advertising regulations. Royal Baking Powder, based in Fort Wayne, IN, was founded by Joseph Christoffel Hoagland and his brother Cornelius. The company used its marketing power to accuse competitors of poisoning their customers by using alum in their baking powders. In one such ad, Royal wrongly declared alum as the reason “why women are nervous (a.k.a. female hysteria).” Other companies offered rewards to bakers who could prove their competition’s baking powder was altered.
The Calumet Co. of Chicago, one of the first manufacturers to create an alum-phosphate composition, boasted of better results due to its “double-leavening agent.” Calumet was founded by William Monroe Wright, an older cousin of the Wright brothers from Dayton. Ironically, William once worked for the Royal Co. Royal fought back with ads headlined, “Is it Malaria or Is it Alum?”
Calumet would survive the baking powder wars due to lower pricing. Wright turned his white powder into an empire, selling the company to General Foods for $32 million in 1929. General Foods merged with Kraft in 1990, and Kraft continues to sell the product today. Wright went on to establish Calumet Farms, one of the most successful Thoroughbred breeding and training farms in Lexington.
However, Royal and Calumet were not the only companies pandering their Midwestern goods to bakers. In 1850, in Terre Haute, IN, Herman and Francis Hulman opened a dry goods store. As part of their enterprise, they developed a baking powder and named it Milk Brand, then Clabber Brand. (Clabber refers to a type of sour milk.) Soon enough, sales climbed and the name was changed to Clabber Girl.
Still family-owned, it is the largest branded retail baking powder manufacturer today; ironically, one of their brands is Rumford. In the 1940s, Herman’s grandson Tony, already at the helm of Clabber Girl, purchased an idle racetrack that became known as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and home to the Indianapolis 500, to promote Clabber Girl baking powder.
Cincinnati also participated in the great baking powder race.
In 1905, Louis Parlin started the Snow King Baking Powder Co. Fifteen years later, he asked his widowed daughter, Louise Parlin Lillard, to return home to help him manage the company. A woman who left school in 8th grade would go on to lead the company for 18 years before selling to General Mills.
Snow King was located along what is known today as Spring Grove Avenue. From that site in 1929, the company released Famous Southern Baking Recipes for Better Baking, a compilation of recipes collected when the company ran an advertisement in Southern agriculture magazines.
Across the world, baking powder differs from country to country. In Germany, most baking powders are single-acting, meaning they only react in contact with moisture. The secret to Italian pastries is their pane degli angeli, which is a combination of baking powder, vanilla flavoring, and other stabilizing ingredients. Hence, the Midwest can claim itself as the starter, and baking powder the agent, that fueled the rise of the region’s baking prowess.
Snow King’s Better Baking Recipe Book from 1929 and 1930
Annette is a writer, teacher, and author of two memoirs, I’ll Be in the Car and I’ll Have Some of Yours. She is a second-generation Italian-American with roots in Calabria and Abruzzo. As a resident of Over-the-Rhine, she’s lucky enough to walk to Findlay Market twice in a day whenever she forgets an ingredient. Visit annettejwick.com to learn more.
