Rice Krispies treats are an American icon, yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re inherently good
As a child of 1980s and 1990s America, I am a member of the Rice Krispies Treats generation. Growing up, the gooey, no-bake, cereal and marshmallow bars were everywhere — dominating potlucks and birthday parties, and a fixture on bake sale tables and in school lunch boxes alike. Along with the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of the Toll House package, Rice Krispies Treats were among the first desserts that I, like so many other children, independently prepared in our home kitchens. So it came as a shock when I realized, after recently making a batch to share with my own kids (using the official, trademarked recipe on Kellogg’s website), that Rice Krispies Treats are actually pretty middling: one note in flavor, quick to go stale, and ultimately less than the sum of their parts.
I am fully aware that this hot take will make me no friends. More than 80 years after Kellogg’s first printed a recipe for Rice Krispies Treats on the back of the cereal box, they remain stubbornly popular. But I think it is worth questioning if the crisped rice bars we loved as children legitimately stand the test of time, or whether our affection for them is clouded by nostalgia.
The first iteration of crisped rice cereal mixed with a sticky binder of melted butter and marshmallows was the brainchild of home economist Mildred Day. Employed by Kellogg’s in the late 1930s, Day and her colleague Malitta Jensen were tasked with developing recipes that used the company’s products in new ways. “She reportedly confined herself to her Kellogg’s kitchen for two whole intense weeks before emerging with her groundbreaking Rice Krispies Treats,” wrote William Sitwell, author of A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Never mind that the recipe (which was originally called Marshmallow Squares) transformed a wholesome, nourishing breakfast cereal into dessert. Day’s Marshmallow Squares recipe was a hit. “Kellogg’s liked them so much that in 1941 they put the recipe on every packet,” Sitwell wrote.
Kellogg’s efforts were typical for the era. According to culinary historian Sarah Lohman, Jell-O, which published a companion recipe booklet in the early 1900s, was the first American food product to actively use recipes as a marketing tool. “At the time, the idea of convenience foods and the notion of ‘just adding water’ did not make sense to homemakers and domestic servants,” she says. The recipe booklet, which included both recipes and beautiful illustrations of elaborate Jell-O molds, helped home cooks understand the product’s possibilities. “It was the book that ultimately helped Jell-O become profitable,” Lohman says. Other companies soon followed suit, creating product-centered recipes in an attempt to entice new consumers, a practice that continues today.
Rice Krispies were already a popular morning cereal by the time Rice Krispies Treats hit the scene. But their invention expanded the cereal’s significance in American households beyond the breakfast table. And for good reason: The crisp and chewy treats were easy to whip up and offered a comforting, uncomplicated sweetness that shaped several generations of childhood memories. Americans’ love of Rice Krispies Treats crescendoed over the decades until 1995, when Kellogg’s debuted a single-serving-sized packaged version of Rice Krispies Treats that ushered the confection into the official canon of American snack foods.
So why didn’t the Rice Krispies Treats I made for my kids hold up to my memories? Part of it certainly has to do with the evolution of our country’s palate, which is far more sophisticated than the meat-and-potatoes status quo of decades past. But it is also worth noting that the Original Rice Krispies Treats™ recipe on Kellogg’s website actually differs from the true original. Day’s Marshmallow Squares called for ⅓ cup of butter (a bit more than 5 tablespoons), 8 ounces of marshmallows, ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract, and 5 cups of Rice Krispies cereal. The current Kellogg’s recipe, meanwhile, recommends a ratio of 3 tablespoons of butter to 6 cups of Rice Krispies cereal. (The vanilla extract disappeared altogether.)
It is hard to verify a direct causation, but it seems safe to assert that as the decades went by and Americans’ fear of saturated fat increased, the amount of butter in the original recipe shrank accordingly. And without enough fat to properly lubricate the cereal, the treats become overly saccharine, with a brick-like mouthfeel Lohman aptly described as “scratchy.” The contrast is particularly stark compared to the packaged version, which has a lab-engineered softness that is nearly impossible to recreate at home. So perhaps there’s nothing inherently wrong with Rice Krispies Treats after all. Maybe our moral panic over weight gain and heart disease simply ruined a good thing.
That said, as long as there have been Rice Krispies Treats, there have been home cooks attempting to tweak them. A watershed moment occurred in 2007 when the New York Times published a recipe for Caramelized Brown Butter Rice Krispies Treats contributed by chef Colin Alevras. As the recipe’s title implies, Alevras heated the butter until it was toasty and fragrant before stirring in the marshmallows, which added luscious complexity to the flavor profile. At their core, Rice Krispies Treats are meant to be a simple, stovetop confection — nothing fancy, nothing laborious. But the genius of using browned butter, wrote Times columnist Julia Moskin, was that it “elevates these plebeian snacks into something more toothsome, and it adds just an extra couple of minutes to the process.”
Two years later in 2009, the massively influential food blog Smitten Kitchen published a similar recipe for Salted Brown Butter Crispy Treats. “I’m enthralled enough with these to declare them … epic,” wrote Smitten Kitchen’s founder, Deb Perelman. Readers were clearly enthralled too, because it didn’t take long before it became standard practice to give Rice Krispies Treats the brown butter treatment — particularly among nostalgia-minded millennials.
The introduction of brown butter also seemed to open the floodgates for other flavor-enhancing improvements. Today, an online search yields recipes that promise to share the “secret ingredient your Rice Krispies Treats are missing,” and augment the cereal bars with crushed pretzels and chopped chocolate, peanut butter, salted caramel, miso paste, sweetened condensed milk, and matcha. One contemporary recipe by Genevieve Yam for Serious Eats recommends using brown butter (no surprise), but also toasting the cereal itself to “bring out the grain’s nutty, earthy notes.” Somewhere along the way, it seems, an entire generation of recipe developers and home cooks collectively acknowledged that our beloved childhood favorite needed a little help to live up to our sweet memories.
New York Times food writer Eric Kim has a different theory. Kim’s Black Sesame Rice Krispies Treats include both sesame oil and whole sesame seeds toasted in brown butter to create, “an aromatic whammy of nutty sesame flavor.” But instead of salvaging a flawed recipe, he views his modifications of the classic as playing on a blank canvas — and as an opportunity for palate education. “Everyone already knows and loves Rice Krispies Treats, which means you get to introduce new ingredients into something familiar,” she says. “They are like the Trojan Horse of snacks that get people excited about their pantries.”
Leah Koenig is a food writer and the author of seven cookbooks, most recently the IACP-award winning book, Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
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