When the weather turns sub-zero, my thoughts turn to carbohydrates. All kinds of carbohydrates. Some of which are meant to be eaten with delicious stews and soups.
Carbohydrates like corn bread.
Homemade. Using Dottie Dorsel’s Corn Meal, a regional favorite. A product packaged in a rectangular shape made of thick paper. Traditional. Easy to find on the shelf.
• • •
So I went to ye olde K. Roger to a buy some of Dottie Dorsel’s Corn Meal and instead what I found was Dorsel’s Corn Meal. Packaged in a slick corporate plastic bag with a zip top and large writing that excluded Dottie’s name.
This, I said to myself, is an outrage.
I mean, Betty is still with Crocker. Duncan is still with Hines. Aunt is still with Jemima. [Okay, the last one’s not the same, but go with me here. I’m on a rant.]
SO WHAT HAPPENED TO DOTTIE DORSEL?
The heroine of our story.
• • •
{ Image courtesy of dannwoellertthefoodetymologist }
• • •
Naturally I started researching this mystery because it’s fricking cold outside and I ain’t going anywhere on foot or car [if I can help it] I had the time and I was curious to see how the current owners of Dottie Dorsel’s Corn Meal would explain themselves.
I discovered that:
- Dottie Dorsel, aka Dorathea Dorsel, was a real person from northern Kentucky whose father owned The Dorsel Milling Company in the late 1800s.
- I learned from a recipe in a 1999 cookbook that the company was at that time called the Dottie Dorsel Company.
- I know that today Prairie Mills owns, what it refers to as, Dorsels Brands.
- I cannot find any corporate PR releases or newspaper articles that talk about the change in packaging– or why Dottie’s delightfully alliterative name was left off the new package.
- I can find some recipes online [here and here] from the early 2000s that mention using Dottie Dorsel Pinhead Oat Meal (another regional favorite), but Corn Meal recipes, specifically mentioning Dottie, do not seem to exist.
• • •
Clearly, there’s a conspiracy going on here. A cover-up. You can’t go around messing with people’s names on food packaging, can you? I realize that Fig Newton dropped the Fig from its name, but Fig wasn’t a real live person who I related to on so many levels.
Fig was a fruit. Duh.
All I can guess is that Dottie must have overheard something so sinister or stumbled upon a secret so dark that there was a need to rub her out. Which lead to some mysterious someone axing her first name from the packaging of her own regionally famous corn meal.
BUT WHY MUST IT END THIS WAY?
That’s what I can’t figure out.
[Hello FTC! I forgot to add this disclaimer when I wrote this post, so I’ll add it now… a few weeks later. I’d love to tell you that this company was savvy enough to respond to my concerns, but no such luck. Meaning that there was no compensation for what I said here.]
THE SPECTACLED BEAN 