Mary Davis' Blog: April 2025

Monday, April 21, 2025

Tuesday Tidbits: THANK YOU, ELMER DOOLIN!!!

Charles Elmer Doolin (1903-1959) worked in his father’s car repair garage/tire shop as well as the family’s Highland Park Confectionary in San Antonio, Texas. Not content to continue with only sugary treats, he was eager to add a salty snack to the line-up of sweets. He found that tortilla chips staled too quickly and wanted something salted with crunch-staying power.

Keeping his eyes open, he spotted Gustavo Olguin’s ad in the San Antonio Express. Homesick Olguin needed money to return to Mexico, so he offered his original fried corn chip recipe for sale along with a modified potato ricer and nineteen retail accounts, all for the bargain price of $100. With one taste, Doolin knew he had found what he was looking for. However, this was 1932 with the Great Depression in full swing. As with most people, that was more money than Doolin had. Even so, he believed in the tasty chips and his mother believed in him, so she pawned her wedding ring to raise the funds.

Elmer started manufacturing Fritos with the help of his mother, father, and brother in his mother’s kitchen. They created the Frito Corporation to keep this separate from the other businesses, and sales began out of their garage. They produced roughly ten pounds of chips a day, grossing $8-$10 a day, and after expenses, a net profit of $2 a day. By the next year, sales—and profits—had increased tenfold. Not bad during the Great Depression.

Quickly outgrowing the garage arrangement, they purchased the house next door to expand the operation. In 1933-34, they opened plants in Dallas and Tulsa.

The Texas Centennial Exposition displayed Fritos in 1936. By 1947, the company had expanded with plants in Los Angeles and Denver and had franchises across the country. H. W. Lay and Company had an exclusive franchise license to make and sell Fritos all across the Southeastern United States. The Frito Company expanded their line-up by creating other snacks, including Cheetos in 1948.

Doolin developed his own hybrid corn and contracted Texas farmers to exclusively grow his special variety. His corn was his secret ingredient.

By 1955, the Frito Corporation owned over fifty manufacturing plants and was one of the early Disneyland investors. They had a Casa de Frito Restaurant in Disneyland a month after the park opened.

Inside this Disneyland restaurant stood a large, animatronic Frito the Kid mascot vending machine. Put in a nickel, and Frito the Kid, surrounded by mountains, would come to life, moving his eyes and tongue from side to side. He would call to his partner inside the “Frito mine” mountain, and a bag of delicious, crunchy chips slid down the chute to the customer. This feature remained in Disneyland for ten years. Several other mascots followed from 1967 on, including the Frito Bandito, the Muncha Bunch Gang, and W.C. Fritos.

The Frito Company merged with H. W. Lay and Company to form Frito-Lay in 1961, and then Pepsi-Cola Company merged with them in 1965 to become PepsiCo.

A popular recipe using Fritos is Frito Pie, which has apparently been around since almost the beginning. However, this Northwestern gal had never heard of it until my critique partner mentioned it a year ago. Frito pie (a.k.a. a walking taco or Frito boat) consists of three basic ingredients, Fritos, chili, and cheese. Then one can add additional ingredients to taste, like onions, jalapeños, sour cream, tomatoes, or whatever else one fancies. Historically, it was served right from the Fritos bag. Open it up and spoon in the desired ingredients. Though I hadn’t heard this term before, I do love to scoop up my turkey chili with Fritos—a variation on the Frito Pie.

I found conflicting accounts of who created the Frito Pie recipe. Some credited it to Doolin’s wife, Katherine. Other sources say Doolin’s mother, Daisy, came up with it, or Mary Livingston, Doolin’s executive secretary, or Nell Morris who helped develop the official Frito-Lay’s cookbook. Whoever dreamed it up, Frito Pie and various other recipes were printed on the back of the bags, though none were as long lasting as Frito Pie.

Interestingly, Doolin, being highly health conscience by avoiding meat and salt, didn’t consume his own product. On the rare occasion he did fancy to munch a bunch, he took them right off the factory conveyor belt before they were salted.

The original Frito’s ingredients were corn, corn oil, and salt. Thankfully, the recipe hasn’t changed. I love Fritos! They are a perfect balance of oil and salt. Mmm, mmm good!!!

Here’s a fun vintage commercial with Frito the Kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmrYwW_36E

THE QUILTING CIRCLE SERIES Box Set

Historical Romance Series

By Mary Davis

THE WIDOW’S PLIGHT (Book1) – Will a secret clouding a single mother’s past cost Lily her loved ones?

THE DAUGHTER’S PREDICAMENT (Book2) *SELAH & WRMA Finalist* – As Isabelle’s romance prospects turn in her favor, a family scandal derails her dreams.

THE DAMSEL’S INTENT (Book3) *SELAH Winner* – Nicole heads down the mountain to fetch herself a husband. Can she learn to be enough of a lady to snag the handsome rancher?

THE DÉBUTANTE’S SECRET (Book4) – Complications arise when a fancy French lady steps off the train and into Deputy Montana’s arms.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNZPRRS2/ref=sr_1_7?crid=3NJNTQ5SD1WGB&keywords=the+quilting+circle+by+mary+davis&qid=1700957455&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C155&sr=1-7

MARY DAVIS, bestselling, award-winning novelist, has over thirty titles in both historical and contemporary themes. Her latest release is THE LADY’S MISSION. Her other novels include THE DÉBUTANTE'S SECRET (Quilting Circle Book 4) THE DAMSEL’S INTENT (The Quilting Circle Book 3) is a SELAH Award Winner. Some of her other recent titles include; THE WIDOW'S PLIGHT, THE DAUGHTER'S PREDICAMENT, “Zola’s Cross-Country Adventure” in The MISSAdventure Brides Collection, Prodigal Daughters Amish series, "Holly and Ivy" in A Bouquet of Brides Collection, and "Bygones" in Thimbles and Threads. She is a member of ACFW and active in critique groups.

Mary lives in the Rocky Mountains with her Carolina dog, Shelby. She has three adult children and three incredibly adorable grandchildren. Find her online at: Books2Read Newsletter Blog FB FB Readers Group Amazon GoodReads BookBub

SOURCES

https://www.npr.org/2007/10/18/15377830/the-birth-of-the-frito

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritos

https://texashillcountry.com/fritos-corn-chips-history/

https://www.snackhistory.com/fritos/

https://atomicredhead.com/2019/08/28/the-forgotten-frito-kid-of-frontierland/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frito_pie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmrYwW_36E

Monday, April 7, 2025

Tuesday Tidbits: I’LL TAKE MY MARGARINE PINK!

The War on Margarine

As I was researching my topic for my February post, CRISCO, I looked into the fascinating history of margarine. It is older than I realized.

When making a shopping list, my mom would write down oleo. “Huh? What’s that, Mom?” “Margarine.” Why didn’t she just write margarine? I suppose it was shorter, and it was her list, and she knew what it meant. But I digress.

Back in the 1860’s—yes, margarine dates back that far—France had a butter shortage. Emperor Napoleon III offered a prize for the creation of a substitute for butter. He wanted something cheaper for his soldiers and the poor.

French scientist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès took up the challenge and experimented with animal fats. This came on the heels of his success with making bread ingredients yield 14% more. In 1869, he received a patent in France for his oleomargarine making process, which combined beef tallow and skimmed milk. Patents from several other countries followed that same year and years after. His creation was called oleomargarine: “oleo” from the Latin “oleum” (olive oil) and the Greek “margarite” (pearl-indicating luster). So that’s where my mom got oleo from.

I’m not going to get into the science of how it was made, the variations of ingredients from beef to vegetable oil, hydrogenation, and such. Just know there was a lot of science-y stuff in the making and reformulating of it. More interesting is the trouble margarine caused.

Oleomargarine, which was shortened to margarine, became popular in Europe. It didn’t take long for it to spread to the United States where dairy farmers felt their livelihood threatened. Various attempts to crush the spread of margarine ranged from heavy taxes to outright bans to strange colors and absolute lies.

Margarine producers popped up all across the country. Everyone wanted in on this new profitable market. With the invasion of margarine, the dairy industry declared war on the new competition. The battle was fought in the local courts, federal legislation, and on the streets, where margarine was deemed an unhealthy fraud, trying to pass itself off as butter.

Wild accusations claimed that it threatened family farms, the American way of life, and the moral order. Political cartoonists even went so far as to depict margarine factories putting everything from paint and arsenic to soap, rubber boots, and stray cats into the mix. Drummed up scientific reports hinted that margarine might cause cancer and insanity. Some compared it to the witches’ brew in Macbeth.

This led to the 1886 Margarine Act that imposed strict tariffs and fees on margarine producers. The first of many anti-margarine laws, but they didn’t all stick. However, the damage to the burgeoning margarine market had been done. Some states, including Michigan, Maine, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and, of course, Wisconsin, put outright bans on margarine.

New Hampshire and other states had mandates, for a while, that margarine must be tinted pink. These were called the “pink laws”. Violators selling non-pink margarine could be fined $100 or sixty days in jail. The whole idea of pink margarine was to make it unsalable, and they were right. However, the Supreme Court struck down that law in 1898, stating that margarine wasn’t naturally pink. Other “tasty” shades of margarine were red and brown.

No state fought harder against margarine than Minnesota, creating law after law to make it nearly impossible to sell it in their state—a dairy state. However, most of their laws got shot down in court as unconstitutional.

The dairy industry managed to get a law passed where margarine—which is naturally white-ish—could not be colored yellow in an attempt to fool consumers. To get around this, margarine producers packaged it in plastic bags with a tab that could be broken to release yellow dye. Then the bag would have to be kneaded for about twenty minutes to mix in the food coloring to make the margarine yellow.

Both World Wars helped increase margarine sales when butter was too expensive and scarce. The health benefits of margarine over butter went up and down. One minute it was superior to butter, and the next it was detrimental to one’s health.

Until the 1950s and 60s, some states still had laws on the books pertaining to the color of margarine. Minnesota didn’t relinquish their laws on yellow margarine until 1963 but still taxed margarine, along with North Dakota, until 1975.

I never realized there was so much angst over margarine.

Have you ever heard of pink margarine or remember mixing yellow dye into a pouch of margarine?