By Donald H. Harrison

CARLSBAD, Calif.— Home in the Bronx after World War II and studying chemistry at college, Gerry Greber decided to find the answer to the question that has perplexed lovers of Jewish cooking for generations. His mother didn't measure her ingredients, she pinched them, or sprinkled them, or scooped them, and, of course, whatever meal she was preparing always came out perfect. But how could this be translated into a workable recipe? 

So Greber brought scales and tubes to his mother's kitchen, and observed as she made another luscious dinner.  But, on this occasion, whenever she started to add an ingredient to the mix, he stopped her in midair and had her put the ingredients first into one of his devices.  He wrote in a little notebook the exact number of grams or the precise volume of each ingredient.  That evening, Mama's dinner was delicious, so Greber was satisfied that there in his very own notebook was the elusive secret of Jewish cooking—or, at least, of his mother's kashe varnishkes. Of course, there remained one final test.  Using the recipe he had so carefully constructed, he needed to reproduce his mother's cooking.

Greber, 78,  laughed as he remembered the story that had occurred more than a half century ago.  "And then?" asked I, leaning forward in anticipation over coffee at a restaurant in his retirement city of Carlsbad. "Horrible!" he responded.  "It tasted horrible." Our waitress, walking by, looked startled, but soon realized we were talking about something that had happened long ago. Greber's story illustrates the maxim that neither the secret of a Jewish mother's cooking, nor of her wisdom, can be set down in simple writing. (Please see Greber's companion story for further proof.)

He didn't know it then, but that incident was the beginning of Greber's career in the food industry.  He went on to complete a bachelor's degree in chemistry at CCNY and postgraduate work at Columbia University.  He worked in Washington D.C. at a government laboratory, then moved to Illinois where he had jobs with Pillsbury, Air-Wick and A.E. Staley over the next decade. At A.E. Staley.

In 1961, he went to General Foods which had a line of soap products including S.O.S. cleaning pads—a competitor to Brillo. Greber set to work making a new product, a combination detergent and fabric softener.  The  idea was that people washing their clothes should be able to simply put the product into the washing machine, at one time, instead of having to first put in the detergent, then return to the washing machine to add the fabric softener during the rinse cycle.

Greber developed a formula that worked right in the laboratory.  The next step was to produce it in a commercial quantity.  Barely had the lid been placed on the 25th drum of the product when General Foods sold the S.O.S. division of its business to Brillo, ending the competition.  The decision was made to abandon the combination fabric softener-detergent product, and Greber was told to simply keep it, or dispose of it, whichever he preferred.  He brought the drums home to his wife Marilyn and they didn't have to buy laundry detergents again for more than five years.

With no more soaps to make, Greber was assigned as a product development manager in General Foods'  Kool-Aid Division, named after one of General Foods' most successful brands. One of the first products that Greber helped to develop was Open Pit Barbecue Sauce.

"Barbecue sauce is a blend of tomato paste and certain seasonings," he said.  "And we just worked these blends day and night, finding different levels of tomato paste and seasonings." Once they produced a product in the laboratory that the research team thought tasted pretty good, they asked people in the factory to taste it.  If the factory workers (who developed pretty discerning tastes) thought the product was good, the next step was a "home test," in which consumers would be asked to rate the product against that of the market leader.

Greber and the others in the laboratory hoped at-home consumers would prefer their product by a wide margin, but a tie, or even a near tie, such as 52 percent to 48 percent in favor of the market leader, was sufficient to tell the laboratory it was on the right track. 

"Once you get that formula up, then you market it, and then the second part of the project begins," Greber said.  "How do we make it more profitable ?  Now we have a target to shoot for.  We try to make the same product at a lower cost, and that is the big name of the game.  By reducing the costs it becomes really profitable."

Reducing costs means substituting ingredients or changing the proportions of those ingredients in the hope that the product will taste the same or even better, so it can be called "new and improved." Another product under Greber's supervision at that time was Good Seasons Salad Dressing.  The difference between a good salad dressing and a bad one was how spices were blended. 

General Foods would purchase spices from various "flavor houses," that specialized in accumulating them, then would test them in various blends, trying to come up with dressings that could survive the taste gauntlet of laboratory technicians, factory workers and household consumers. Based on the cost of each ingredient, company accountants would determine whether this or that mixture would permit the product to be competitively priced.  The laboratory team could be creative, just so long as they brought the product in under the current price.

Sometimes the tests were successful.  Sometimes they ended up like young Greber's attempt to duplicate Mama's cooking.  But the testing went on, day after day, year after year.

Meanwhile, the marketing division of General Foods conducted focus groups with consumers.  Consumers who typically were housewives were asked what kind of products would they like  One group of women told the marketers how much they hated to make fried chicken.  Dip the chicken in the egg, dunk it in the flour, fry it in the oil, clean up the whole mess!  Wasn't there anyway to simplify the process?  

So the marketers put the question to Greber and his food chemists, and for a year, they experimented, and tested, and tested and experimented, and then they brought out their product: Shake 'n Bake.  The eggs, the flour, the seasonings, the cooking oil taste from hydrogenated fats, all were pre-mixed. All anyone needed to do was drop the chicken into the bag, and then put the coated chicken into the oven, and it would taste similar to fried chicken—but without the mess.

Once the product was developed, the testing continued.  Less of this spice, more of that one.  New flavors were added to appeal to different tastes. 

Besides Shake 'n Bake product lines of chicken, there were also Shake 'n Bake product lines of fish and pork  Although he supervised development of  the latter product, Greber said he never tasted it—nor did he  have to.  Like all the other food products, the Shake n' Bake pork went through the process of taste tests (by other people) in the laboratory, factory and at home.  Everything was done by the numbers.

About the same time, General Foods was also working on the idea of cooking the dinner right in the bag. Another company developed the bag, but Greber's laboratory was working on the ingredients in which to cook the meat.  One day during a test of this product, a door blew off an oven in the laboratory's test oven!

Greber's team conducted various tests to determine what went wrong, learning that as the result of a process known as super-heating, the bag had exploded. The way to prevent a recurrence of such an explosion, they learned, was to make sure that there was sufficient flour in the bag before it was placed into the oven.  General Foods thanked Greber for his analysis, then decided to abandon the product line, fearing a consumer could be hurt at home using the product.  Today, said Greber, other companies do market cooking bags, but if you read the instructions, you'll see it is important to put flour inside the bag to prevent "bursting."

In a 25-year career with General Foods, before his retirement in 1986, Greber worked on numerous products familiar to anyone who has a pantry, or has shopped in a grocery store.  He even worked in General Food's pet foods division, which manufactured for dogs wrapped meat mixtures that retained their  moistness, as well as various kinds of dry dog foods. 

You probably can intuit how they tested the products for the dogs.  Carefully measured amounts of food would be placed in two bowls.  In one would go the product of the market leader; in the other the product under development.  The dogs would eat what they wanted, sometimes preferring one brand over the other, sometimes seeming to like the brands equally.  Whatever was left over in their bowls was again measured.  Whichever bowl had less food was judged the winner.  If the product under development proved competitive, that is in the 52-48 percent range, it went on to Phase Two testing.

I asked Greber what dogs really like in their food.

"Fat!" he responded. No matter how many times the food laboratory produced low-fat dog food, or healthy dog foods, the dogs would overwhelmingly prefer those with fat.  Dog food without fat is like, well, chopped liver without shmaltz.  It can be eaten, but who wants to?

Whatever dog food product General Foods manufactured had two important requirements in addition to price.  First, said Greber, they had to meet the nutritional requirements of a dog's daily diet.  And, second, said Greber, lowering his voice, they had to be fit for human consumption.  The sad fact of the matter was, he said, that in some poorer neighborhoods around the country, people were intentionally purchasing dog food for themselves, so desperate was their poverty. 

Two other important aspects of Greber's food career were the testing of new technology for the food product business and serving as liaison to the mashgiach for those products which would bear the kosher symbol.

Greber helped introduce extruders to the General Foods manufacturing line.  These devices, obtained from Germany, could shape the food while cooking it. 

Kosher products were made in vats that would be cleaned with boiling water over two days before the food was added, he said.  How did that job get added to his portfolio?   "I was the only Jew around at the time!"