Real Name? When we research and don’t find a person outside of their professional years, there is a chance they took on a pseudonym, as we believe Clara Alden Spence did. There are records for Clara Alden Spence after 1927 and before 1932. That’s it, 1927-1932. Miss Spence, as she was called, was a Test Kitchen Director, a “Pop up” Cooking School teacher, author, and radio announcer. And from these records we were thrilled to cobble together a professional biographical outline. “If you have information leading to the… please let us know.“
Clara Alden Spence was from Kansas and was a graduate in Home Economics from Kansas University. I will vouch for Kansas University being highly committed to baking, as I visited their campus in Manhattan, Kansas which had a baking museum. There’s also a Pillsbury Drive in town! As an aside there was a fabulous antique stove shop in the shopping district.
Anyway, Clara.
She was once called a “Kansan,” so probably born and raised in Kansas.
circa 1924-1925 Graduated from Kansas University
circa 1925-1927 Taught Domestic Science, hints that it was at Kansas University, her alma mater.
circa 1927 – 1932 Clara operated a new model kitchen physically connected to the laboratory of Larrabee’s Flour Mill, Kansas City, Missouri. She answered homemakers’ questions by mail, developed “Easy-to-Bake” recipes and created methods to save steps in the kitchen.
Spence represented Larrabee’s Flour Mills including Airy fairy flour at “pop-up” cooking schools in Missouri, Iowa, and even Texas. The first event was a Food Show, but many times the cooking school was the main event at local auditoriums, vacated Woolworth buildings, etc. sponsored by local newspapers. The schools typically lasted 3 days and the audience could have hundreds to over 1200 attendees. Besides the cooking school, there were contests where after the last day of class, women brought in items they baked at home to win products — sometimes as spectacular as an electric Frigidaire or a Roper gas stove, or as small as a Puritan Ham, slab of bacon, or an electric iron. Yet these were the days that people were still installing electricity in their houses for the first time and anything electric was new and refreshing. All local stores were invited to contribute to the prizes. Note: this was a time when there would be no doubt about if someone used a cake mix as they hadn’t been invented yet! The first packaged cake mix [reddit] was patented in 1933.
It appears that Clara Alden Spence continually represented Larrabee’s Flour, as well as K. C. Baking Powder, but at the pop up cooking schools she also represented Town Crier Flour, Folger’s Coffee, Richelieu grocery products, I.G.A. Groceries, Pound O’ Gold Butter, Brown Shoe Fit, Yellow Rose Dairy Products, Maytag washing machines, and more! No doubt all were customers of the newspapers who sponsored the events.
Free cooking booklets were advertised in connection with the cooking schools including KC Baking Powder’s updated edition of the The Cook’s Book and Staley’s Selected Recipes and Menus by Grace Viall Gray, 1930.
In 1932 Clara Alden Spence had a Home Economics syndicated radio show. She also wrote this 33 New Recipes Made with Airy Fairy Kwik-Bis-Kit recipe booklet! Please let us know if you ever see her name on another booklet, or know any more about her life!
