Photography by Francis Scheidegger, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri
What would the lady in the Magic Kitchen put in her Hoosier cabinet? Jars of black salt and black mallow flowers. A box of wishbones. A shaker of something that looked like green glitter, but wasn’t. Jane Porter’s Magic Kitchen was actually stocked with plain old vegetable oil, salt, and flour, but it glimmered with showbiz witchery. Built inside KMOX-AM’s Mart Building, it had a stove and a sink, but also hanging microphones over its counters and seats for a studio audience. Every day for 15 minutes, Loreen Jacobsen—who became “Jane Porter” in 1933—went on-air, not as a chef, but as a “food counselor” who’d cut her chops running a military cafeteria in Wisconsin.
By ’39, the show was so popular, KMOX issued a cookbook and sent Porter on a tour. In many of the small and unelectrified towns she visited, women still used well water and cast-iron stoves, hauling in cords of wood and emptying the ash pan before they cracked an egg. Farm wives spent hours alone in the kitchen, too, often with a radio as their only company. Jane wasn’t just a voice; she seemed like a pal. Broadcasters exploited this, filling their daytime hours with soaps and domestic how-to shows, many of them almost ads in disguise. General Mills animated its cake-box avatar in the 1920s with Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air, hiring actresses to dictate recipes like “Emergency Steak,” where ground beef and General Mills’ Shredded Wheat got molded into a facsimile of a T-bone.
In St. Louis, there was Mary Lee Taylor, director of the PET Milk Test Kitchen. Taylor also aired out of KMOX, and broadcast on 200 other stations besides; unlike Porter, she didn’t earnestly pen-pal with rural housewives. She wrote Cookbook for Young Moderns, with every recipe calling for PET milk, and created a soap opera which also heavily featured the presence of PET milk. Taylor was Erma Perham Proetz—vice-president of St. Louis’ Gardner Advertising Company, and the first woman inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame. She was more gifted as a copywriter than as a cook. And that’s why you can still find 25 of her cookbooks on eBay…compared to Porter’s zero.
