Origins
In 1936, Lever Brothers, part of the large corporation Unilever, introduced Spry Vegetable Shortening as a competitor to the long-successful shortening Crisco, produced by Procter & Gamble. Aunt Jenny was intended to give a pleasant face to what might otherwise be seen as a boring or at least uninspiring product, therefore presenting a challenge to writers of advertisement copy. Sometimes even Jenny’s enthusiastic writers seemed to be reaching for things to say—on the final page of the Aunt Jenny’s Favorite Recipes cookbook appears a blurb boasting that doughnuts made with Spry are “so light and digestible a child can eat ‘em.” For the most part, however, Aunt Jenny was successful, and within mere months Spry had consumed nearly half of Crisco’s considerable market share.
In appearance, Aunt Jenny was a slightly plump, grandmotherly woman with bright white hair, thin spectacles, and an ever-present baking apron. Her demeanor was sweet, kind, helpful and almost bizarrely enthusiastic, especially regarding her home cooking and Spry Vegetable Shortening in particular. She spoke in a plain and homely manner, often dropping the ending g of words like cooking.
Read more about this topic: Aunt Jenny
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
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“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)