It’s fun to read the small advertisements in the back of old magazines. They often are quirky – and sometimes I scratch my head when I read them. This 1920 advertisement by Mrs. Grace Osborn about the Osborn Cake Making System is one of those ads.
Does the square angel food cake in the picture look nice enough to make someone want to learn Mrs. Osborn’s cake making system? (Personally, round angel food cakes work just fine for me.)
And, exactly what is Mrs. Osborn selling? . . . a book for directions? . . . recipes? . . . cake pans and baking supplies? It apparently was a two-step process for her to sell anything. First, she would have to send people who responded to the ad free information about the particulars, and she would have to pay postage to send the materials (in addition to the cost of the ad ). Then some of them might actually buy the product she was selling. I’m no marketing expert, but somehow this doesn’t feel like a good model for financial success.
A Hundred Years Ago 
I wonder how much she paid for the ad! So interesting to try to understand an old advertisement for something that doesn’t make sense in today’s world.
I also wondered how much she paid for the ad. Back in that era, I think that Good Housekeeping had a circulation of more than a million subscribers, so even a small ad was probably fairly pricey.
This made me laugh. As a child, I was the family baker. I made plenty of angel food cakes, but never a square one.
I also have never had a square angel food cake. Maybe there’s a new baking experience for us to try. 🙂
A square Angel Cake is an interesting concept. 🙂
It’s different. 🙂
I scratched my head on that one.
So did I.
This makes me want to look Mrs. Grace Osborn up in genealogy records and see if she was living a prosperous life and if her occupation was “cake maker”.
What a great idea. It would be really interesting to know a little more about her.
Yes, please do it! She has a little bit of an aura of a carny hustler, to me. Or fortune teller. (The old past-up/mechanical artist in me wants to straighten out all those lines and odd typeset spacing 🙂 )
I think you may be right – this ad has a bit of a carny hustler sense. It reminds me of all the gadgets people are always trying to sell at the fair. I also find the problems with the paste-up fascinating – and in some ways understandable. I can remember how might trouble I had with paste-up during my very short stint on the high school newspaper.
Never saw a square angel food pan, and it is odd indeed. I had to look her up, and apparently she published at least one cookbook, “Cakes of Quality: How to make them,” and they go for between $30-$60 on eBay and Etsy! It appears to have had more than one printing. What I find most interesting, both in the ad and the title of the book, is that she talks about “making” cakes not “baking” them!
Wow- I’m amazed that there were several printings of her book. $30 – $60 seems like a lot for an old cookbook. I wonder if it’s a good cookbook. Maybe she really did have a unique cake making system. It does seem odd that she doesn’t refer to baking.
Maybe that was her secret! She didn’t bake the cakes but cooked them some other way. You’ve certainly showed us there are a lot of forgotten cooking arts!
I looked Mrs. Osborn up and it seems her daughter and her son-in-law started the company using her name. Here is a link to the article about it. http://www.acakebakesinbrooklyn.com/2010/03/patron-saint-of-cakes-with-buick-six-to.html
Thanks for researching this. It’s really interesting to read about the company. It’s fascinating how the next generation used her name for the company. It must have been at least a moderately successful company since it sounds like there were multiple editions of this cookbook published over several decades.
Pyramid scheme?
Maybe
I’m curious as to her special methods… Very intriguing!
If I ever find directions for her “cake making system,” it would be fun to give it a try.
Maybe Mrs Osborn wanted everyone to have a square deal when making an angel food cake.
LOL – works for me.
I like your modern assessment of Mrs. Osborn’s marketing plan– or lack of one, I guess.
It would be interesting to know more about how people thought about marketing plans a hundred years ago.
I have never seen a square angel food cake! I am curious about her “methods” too!
Square angel food cakes are definitely unique. 🙂
I am so curious to her about her methods!
Like you, I’d like to know more about her methods. The advertisement makes it sound like they were really special.
Well, I might be a traditionalist, but the round angel food cakes distinguish them for me…
Maybe she sent the material for free, but you had to pay for the book. Kind of like Free Shipping?
Maybe . . . it would be interesting to learn more about how this marketing endeavor worked.
So, you buy her directions of how to make a cake??? Puzzling, but interesting to me because I grew up less than an hour from Bay City, Michigan.
Your comment led me to google “Bay City.” I now know that it is located where the “thumb” joins the rest of the state.
Yes! I grew up north of there, on Lake Huron, in Tawas City. Bay City and nearby Saginaw were “the city” to us and where we went for things like “school shopping.”
All depends if she got any takers.. 😉
I’ve also wondered whether many people responded to the ad.
I don’t wonder about the success of this ad, even though I kind of like the idea of a square angel food cake with a round hole in the middle!
A square angel food cake definitely has a unique look. It would be a great conversation starter.
I was always intrigued by the ads on the back of our comic books. I tried to convince my mom that we could make money selling “Grit.” Of course I had no idea that it was a farm magazine and that we lived in a city.
Those ads in the back of comic books were so intriquing. I always found the ones for locksmith schools particularly fascinating.
I missed those. I bet my brother would have been intrigued. He was always trying to break into my diary.
It sure doesn’t sound like a good business model!xxx
😀definitely an interesting ad,I went to the one link about her … my theres a lot of don’ts . Really like the one about not adding to her recipe. I would so fail at that point.🤓