As historically minded foodies will tell you, some of America’s favorite edibles came about by accident—mistakes and last-minute substitutions in the kitchen that, instead of leading to disaster, produced something legendary.
There’s the Chimichanga, for example, created when Monica Flin, founder of Tucson’s legendary El Charro café, accidentally dropped a burrito in hot oil. There’s the ice cream cone, inadvertently created at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair when a Zalabia vendor wrapped one of his waffle-iron treats in a horn shape to hold a scoop of ice cream.
A lesser-known bit of improvisation took place 32 years ago when an employee for White Castle—helping grandma out at Thanksgiving, the story goes—shoved some of the chain’s sliders (the tiny square burgers) into the turkey. And lo, the Original Slider Stuffing was born.
Six hamburgers crumbled up and mixed with chicken broth, celery and spices might not look like legit stuffing to every household, but one thing is beyond dispute: the recipe looked like legit marketing to White Castle.
“That [recipe] became a big hit for us every year,” the chain’s vice president Jamie Richardson told Adweek. “We still get tons of requests for it—it’s a heavily trafficked part of our website.”
White Castle corporate has logically inferred that, if Slider stuffing was possible, the odds were good that Americans have cooked up other homespun recipes for the chain’s signature item.
Earlier this year, the company issued an open invitation to send them in.
Until Sept. 4, the White Castle Slider Showdown, as the promotion is called, will welcome “slider-centric” recipes for any dish—so long as it calls for six burgers (bought fresh from one of the chain’s roughly 350 locations or via the frozen packages sold in grocery stores.) TV host and culinarian Adam Richman will lead the judging to choose the best dish, with its creator getting to spend a day hanging out at White Castle headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.
Home cooking as marketing
Though it might not be apparent at first, White Castle is following a long-established marketing tradition.
For many years, restaurants have put out recipes (usually in the form of cookbooks) as an astute way to bolster their reputations and get their brand names into Americans’ kitchens and conversations. White Castle’s done it three times, in fact. Starting with its Crave Time Cookbook in 1996, the company’s published two subsequent volumes: Thinking Outside the Box in 2001 and By the Sackful in 2005. It also maintains some 75 popular recipes on its homepage.
White Castle’s approach to recipe marketing is a variation on a theme: Most restaurant cookbooks feature recipes for dishes served in the restaurant itself: White Castle’s recipes feature the chain’s core menu item as an ingredient for meals eaten at home. Either way, the branding benefits are the same.
John Stanton teaches food marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Restaurant cookbooks, he said, can help market an eatery even if nobody actually attempts to cook any of the recipes inside.
“One of the things that’s happening, from a PR point of view, is trying to attach expertise,” he said. “The only people that publish cookbooks are people with some level of expertise. What [restaurants] are trying to do is associate themselves with that trait”—casting themselves as “authorities in their field.”
Can’t get a reservation? Make it yourself
That’s certainly one reason for the sheer number of restaurant cookbooks out there. Odds are you’ve heard that the cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery are pretty good—but 2020’s The Magnolia Bakery Handbook: A Complete Guide for the Home Baker helps to position the brand as an authority. Ithaca, N.Y.’s Moosewood Restaurant was a leader in vegetarian and vegan cuisine when it opened in 1973—and it’s held onto that reputation in part by publishing seven cookbooks since then.
The importance of establishing a restaurant as the final word in a certain type of cuisine also explains why restaurants famed for highly specialized dishes—complex food that even professional chefs might struggle to produce—still put out cookbooks. Chez Panisse, The French Laundry, Eleven Madison Park: all have been hailed for their rarified dishes, and all have published cookbooks. It’s a fair bet that kitchen amateurs would not attempt David Chang’s nine-step, 11-hour recipe to make Momofuku’s signature ramen broth. Nevertheless, Momofuku produced a cookbook in 2009 and its spinoff concept, Momofuku Milk Bar, followed with its own two years later.
A cookbook can also serve as a substitute dining experience for restaurants where getting a table is difficult or impossible. Case in point: Manhattan’s 127-year-old Rao’s, which is full of rich and famous diners every night and accepts no reservations.
“Only if a regular customer does not show up might there be a free table,” reported the New York Times in 1998. “Otherwise the rest of us can taste Rao’s lusty old-fashioned Italian home-style food by … buying the new cookbook.” To date, Rao’s has produced three of them.
Better than a refrigerator magnet
In the Catskill mountains of upstate New York, the Phoenicia Diner has been a destination spot since the early 1980s, a pioneering eatery that demonstrated the merits of sourcing ingredients from regional purveyors long before locavore was a word. Operations manager Shame Davis said that the Phoenicia Diner Cookbook, published in 2020, often sells as a higher-end souvenir of a visit.
“We get a lot of people who are looking for [more than] a t-shirt or a sticker—it’s something useful,” she said of the book. (Each $30 volume also comes pre-signed by the Phoenicia’s owner Michael Cioffi.) Since diner fare tends to be accessible stuff—even Phoenicia’s soft scrambled eggs with smoked trout is within the capabilities of many home cooks—patrons might actually try their hand at a few recipes in their own kitchens.
“It’s a way to extend who we are,” Davis said, “and maybe introduce it to somebody else.”
Straight from the can
White Castle isn’t the only quick-service restaurant chain to use recipes as marketing. In 2017, Shake Shack published a cookbook with 70 recipes, including those for signature menu items like Shack Burgers and crinkle cut fries.
Stanton pointed out that, by using its core offering as a key ingredient for a variety of inexpensive dishes, White Castle is adopting a strategy closer to what Campbell’s Soup began doing in 1916. That year, the company published Helps for the Hostess, a book of recipes calling for Campbell’s condensed soup as the key ingredient.
It’s a tactic that the company’s still using. A quick trip to the Campbell’s website reveals recipes for entrees like Campbell’s Best Ever Meatloaf (which calls for a can of Campbell’s Tomato) and Chicken Taco Casserole (made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken.)
So by offering baked-dish recipes such as White Castle Hamburger Quiche or White Castle Breakfast Casserole, the burger chain is simply upping the number of meal occasions that call for sliders. White Castle’s ethos, Stanton said, boils down to: “I don’t care whether you buy our product and eat it in the store, buy our product and take it home—or buy our product and cook with it. You’re buying our product.”
And since entrants to White Castle’s contest have to post their recipe submissions via a TikTok video or a public Instagram account, the chain is actually getting double marketing duty from the idea: Social media content for the brand before judges even pick the winning recipe.
“For us, it’s about doing things that others aren’t thinking about,” Richardson said. “To be a fast-food hamburger chain that’s got its own recipe book featuring the hamburger is something that gives people a smile. It gives us a chance for meaningful engagement.”
