The Peculiar Truth about Duncan Hines

• When Americans think of store-bought brownie and cake mixes, two names spring to mind: Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines.

• Betty Crocker is a fictitious character created for marketing purposes. Duncan Hines was a real man.

• Despite his name being synonymous with packaged baking products, Hines was not a baker. Nor was he a chef. He didn’t create any of the recipes or mixes found in the boxes that bear his name. He didn’t really know his way around a kitchen at all.

• He was a traveling salesman for a printing company.

• Hines was born in 1880 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His father was a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. Duncan’s mother died when he was four years old and his grandmother raised him. He graduated from college, married, and then moved to Chicago.

• Most of his working life in the first half of the 20th Century was spent employed as a a salesman for a Chicago printing firm. His career sent him traveling all across the United States to cities big and small for many years.

• Finding a good meal on the road was a dicey gamble a century ago. Chain restaurants didn’t exist, and even fine dining establishments could be hard to come by.

• Throughout his travels, Duncan Hines kept a private notebook of all the quality places where he liked to eat. He wrote down the best meals on the menus, asked to inspect restaurant kitchens for cleanliness, and even spied on garbage cans in back alleys. All of his observations went into his little notebook, which grew and grew.

• In time, his restaurant list numbered in the hundreds. Among his recommendations was a place in Kentucky with the best fried chicken; it was owned by Colonel Harland Sanders.

• Fellow travelers wanted his advice, so Hines began giving away copies of his notebook to friends as Christmas gifts.

• As more people clamored for the info, he sold his pamphlets for $1.50 each. He titled the booklet Adventures in Good Eating. In the 1930s, it became a self-published best seller.

• Accidentally, Duncan Hines became one of America’s first restaurant critics.

• Eateries across the US placed signs in their windows showing that their business was approved by Duncan Hines.

• He followed up with another bestselling book about the finest hotels and motels in the country.

• Eventually, Hines wrote a syndicated newspaper column that appeared thrice weekly across America - Adventures in Good Eating at Home. He published recipes from his favorite restaurants that people could cook in their own kitchens.

• He personally didn’t cook them, however. His wife did.

• By the 1950s, Hines attached his name to baked goods, starting with a store-bought brand of bread. In 1953, he struck a deal with a Nebraska company to put his name on their products. Duncan Hines cake mix was born.

• Hines didn’t have long to enjoy that business arrangement, however. He died in 1959 just shy of age 79.

• The Duncan Hines brand name was sold to various companies in the six decades that followed his death, and in 2018 it was sold back to the original Nebraska company, which is now called Conagra.

• The famous name of the traveling salesman and restaurant critic - who was never a baker - lives on.