Betty Crocker continually debuted new flavors: yellow cake and white cake in 1952, Honey Spice and Angel Food in 1953, marble in 1954, and chocolate in 1955. Unlike other “convenience” foods, for many women cakes symbolized femininity and household happiness. Women felt pressured to perfect the homemade cake.

Betty Crocker: In both tests, the Better Crocker has the least amount of rise on the cake, which again might be due to the increased liquid in the batter. Duncan Hines: The Duncan Hines cake had the lightest and fluffiest texture and it was also the most moist cake mix.

Here are the best boxed cake mixes.

• Best Overall: General Mills White Cake Mix.
• Best Lemon: Krusteaz Meyer Lemon Pound Cake Mix.
• Best for Cupcakes: Pillsbury Funfetti White Cake Mix.
• Best Yellow Cake: Jiffy Golden Yellow Cake Mix.
• Best Red Velvet: Betty Crocker Super Moist Red Velvet Cake Mix.

While cake mixes have a certain nostalgic comfort-factor, they typically taste flat, sugary, and vaguely chemically while the texture leaves a lot to be desired. Cakes made from scratch just taste better: rich, buttery, and moist with lots of sweet flavor nuances that make it hard to stop eating more.

Vintage Cookbooks Even the most widely used cookbooks from the 1950s and 1960s can command high prices. Good condition copies of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book are highly prized (prices range from $10 to $450 on AbeBooks).

Here’s what to do with cookbooks you don’t want anymore.

1. Sell them. If you have, say, a first edition of a vintage, now-famous cookbook or one by a popular new author in pristine condition, you may be able to sell it.
2. Donate them.
3. Offer them up for free.
4. Recycle them.
5. Repurpose them.

That’s fine, but if it’s been years since you cracked an actual cookbook, you don’t really need them anymore. Keep them if you like the way they look and have the storage space, but if you don’t, embrace the way you cook now and let them go.

The Most Expensive Cookbooks Ever Sold on Abebooks

1. La Cuisiniere Bourgeoise.
2. The Practice of Cookery Pastry and Confectionary.
3. Modern Domestic Cookery and Useful Receipt Book.
4. Soyer’s Cookery.
5. French Country Cooking.
6. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.
7. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
8. Rebecca’s Cookbook.

The Most Expensive Cookbooks Ever Sold on Abebooks

• La Cuisiniere Bourgeoise. Menon.
• The Practice of Cookery Pastry and Confectionary. Mrs.
• Modern Domestic Cookery and Useful Receipt Book. Elizabeth Hammond.
• Soyer’s Cookery.
• French Country Cooking.
• The Alice B.
• The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
• Rebecca’s Cookbook.

As the US Copyright office states: “Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds, or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection. While it’s true that recipes are meant to be shared, people do so in cookbooks and on the internet to share them with their readers.

You can use any recipe you like, you just can’t publish it claiming it to be your original recipe. Unless you tell someone, or make a specific claim, no one can prove what recipe you may have used.

Restaurants must obtain legal protection of recipes and products in order to claim them as their own.

Sure, it is perfectly legal. There are plenty of foods that have been licensed to others, like Famous Amos cookies (Wally Amos makes other baked goods, now, but under different names, since he sold the Famous Amos brand outright, but he uses a slightly different cookie recipe than Kellog’s uses).

Welcome to copyright law. Here in the food writing world, many of us follow an informal standard that you need to make at least three changes before you can claim credit for a recipe.

Recipe Writing Basics

1. Know your audience.
2. Use descriptive recipe titles.
3. Add a recipe description.
4. List the preparation and cooking time.
5. Provide the number of servings and serving size.
6. List ingredients in chronological order.
7. Spell out measurements and amounts.
8. Separate ingredients for major steps in a recipe.

Total price tag for a cookbook with photos runs from $50,000 to $100,000.