Crisco®, the all-vegetable shortening, introduced an entirely new way of cooking. This timeline Crisco® highlights Crisco"innovations" in advertising, packaging, and cooking, and in helping homemakers around the globe learn to cook better-tasting meals for their families.
The Story of Crisco is recognized as a classic in the subtle art of persuasion. Its language and contextual variety are “representative of the pre-WWI social milieu and reflect the urbanization, domestication, commercialization, education (or lack thereof) and simple sophistication of the times.”3 Crisco is presented as healthier, more digestible, cleaner, more economical, more enlightened and more modern than lard. Women who use Crisco are portrayed as good wives and mothers, their houses are free of strong cooking odors and their children grow up with good characters (because, according to the tortured logic of P&G’s advertising department, Crisco is easier to digest).
P&G also had the brilliant idea of presenting Crisco to the Jewish housewife as a kosher food, one that behaved like butter but could be used with meats. Because it made kosher cooking easier, Jews adopted Crisco and margarine—imitation lard and imitation butter—more quickly than other groups, with unforeseen consequences. The Rise and Fall of Crisco
Crisco, you may recall, was made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, a process that turned cottonseed oil (and later, soybean oil) from a liquid into a solid, like lard, that was perfect for baking and frying. Unfortunately, these wonderful qualities depended on "trans fats" that have since been implicated in heart disease. As a result, partially hydrogenated oils have fallen out of favor in the food industry. Even Crisco changed its recipe, cutting the amount of transfats in one serving to less than .5 grams. That allows Crisco's label to state that it contains zero transfats. The Forgotten, Fascinating Saga Of Crisco
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