[3] Owing to the dominant color of the book's covers over the years, the Betty Crocker Cookbook is familiarly referred to as "Big Red", a term that General Mills has trademarked.

[6] The 2,161[6] recipes for the book were developed by a team of 50 chefs at the General Mills test kitchens, supervised by the home economist Janette Kelley.

It featured an extensive glossary that explained cooking terminology and in addition to recipes it offered instructions for using then-new appliances such as refrigerators and electric ranges.

[6] In Germany, where food rationing continued for many years after the end of the war, the publication of the cookbook created a popular vision of the United States as a land of inexhaustible resources.

[13] The 12th edition (subtitled "Everything You Need to Know to Cook From Scratch") was published in October 2016 and features more contemporary cuisine; there are recipes for beef pho, ropa vieja, and shakshouka.

[6][12] The culinary historian Laura Shapiro does not dispute this, but suggests that the relative ease of making a partially pre-packaged cake recipe from the cookbook empowered women to experiment and to view cooking as a creative outlet, which in turn helped housewives of the 1950s begin to see homemaking as a respectable profession unto itself.