Pepper Mill prefers her iced tea unsweetened
[quote=“Sitnam, post:87, topic:921836, full:true”]
Middle of nowhere, Western PA. Readily available at most supermarkets.
Growing up in New England, clam chowder meant one thing; milk based. I couldn’t image people eating tomato or clear clam chowder - those are so different that they should be called something else. Trying Manhattan clam chowder for the first (and pretty much only) time left me confused and angry.
My introduction to White Castle came when we took a study break at Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, summer of 1981.
For a short time, I took a part-time job at a seafood restaurant near Waikiki. It was the only place where they had both white and red chowder (and I developed a fondness for the red). That said, the word “chowder” conjures up thoughts that suggest it should have a default meaning of something creamy and toothsome, such as “corn chowder.”
It SHOULDN’T just mean “Here’s some clams!”
Growing up & going to school in SoCal I’d heard of them via media, but had never seen one for real. Ditto my time in the service; I was always where they weren’t.
Eventually in my late 30s I moved to St. Louis, where they’re commonplace. Once we got connected with a local gang of new friends, it was time for the Grand Initiation into all things White Castle-ish. One of the St. Louis natives said: “I gotta warn you: the standard phrase about White Castle is ‘they’re best after midnight or under 30’”.
Boy was she right; yecch!!! Maybe if one was blotto after the bars closed, needed to dilute the booze, and Denny’s was closed they’d be just the ticket. Then again, I’d sooner expect those “sliders” to come a slidin’ right back up about 5 minutes after they went down. Not good.
Good point. The name “sliders” really needed a vector assigned.
Funny related story.
Years after that Initiation, the same gal who warned us brought a large glass baking dish of pâté to a potluck. She called it Pâté Maison Blanche and it was the hit of the party. Everybody loved it.
Yup: she’d run a couple dozen WC sliders through the food processor and smoothed the resulting goosh into her dish.
Hehehe, my wife’s from Bowling Green, KY. As far as I know, it’s the only place you can buy Krystal burgers across the street from White Castle. We decided to do the Pepsi challenge with them, and fed them to each other blindfolded. We both agreed the Krystal burger was superior, and you could pick it blindfolded, but the WC burger was close. Krystal’s fries easily beat White Castle’s fries, though.
My tragedy of assumptions orthogonically related to tiny cheeseburgers was that when Krystal moved into Texas, they offered scrumptious spicy chicken sammiches, and that was my default when we visited. When we stopped there outside of Texas, I found that it was only offered in their Texas locations, which I think are all now gone. Teeny spicy chicken sammiches, I salute you, knowing I will probably never have your pleasure again.
Oddly enough, the first time I remember going to a UDF was just a few years ago, even though my parents grew up in the area. They needed gas, so they chose UDF so we could get ice cream at the same time. Didn’t know it was based in Cincinnati.
Which reminds me. I think it’s time to try making buckeyes. Never done it before, but now would be a good time.
People love what they love.
When I was working at an upscale hotel, we would do wedding receptions, birthdays, corporate events and meetings. We weren’t cheap, events usually started in the $10k range, and easily broke $50k for some of the bigger shindigs.
We did a function for retired Cincinnati Bengals players. The whole thing was around $20k. One of the items they requested was 700 White Castle sliders.
There were some leftovers of some of the items we prepared, but they demolished those little burgers.
My Chef picked them up in his Cadillac SUV, and complained that the smell lingered in his car for weeks.
Ah, buckeyes. Now there’s a great idea, let’s make a candy based on the looks of a poisonous nut.
Great slider story!
About the same as the genius that decided to package laundry and dishwasher soap in those tasty-looking candy-colored “pods”.
I grew up in New Jersey but spent holidays and chunks of summer vacations in upstate NY at my grandparents’. Even though it was only about 300 miles away, I learned at a pretty young age that certain local specialties, restaurant chains, and brands were just that: local.
My neck of the woods in NJ was home to three distinct styles of hot dog (Hot Texas Weiner, Ripper, and Newark/Italian), but I knew no one outside the area really knew about them. I grew up drinking Brookdale Soda and eating Charles’ Chips, but these were unknown in upstate NY.
New Jersey is the state that loves White Castle so much that it was home to bunch of stand-alone knockoffs that are still in business (and much better than WC) after 50 years, but there were no White Castles upstate. My older cousins from upstate took their first got my license/got a car road trip down to see us in NJ and decided to treat us and themselves to cheeseburgers and pulled into a White Castle drive-through and ordered one hamburger for each person.
One hamburger per person, or one sack of hamburgers per person? 
Even as a wee lad, one White Castle was never enough to fill me up! 
My cousins had never seen a White Castle before, so they thought one hamburger per person would be plenty.
I never ate at White Castle, but growing up in Connecticut, we saw their commercials and we wondered about the chain. There was one commercial in particular about some transplants in I think Arizona who missed White Castle so they ordered a large amount by mail order or sent a truck for it or something. Googling, I think it was this commercial. (And there was a White Castle we’d pass in the Bronx when we drove into Manhattan.)
I really miss their fish sandwiches, too. I remember those coming in around 1965, about the same time as the Filet-O-Fish and Whaler at McD’s and BK, respectively.
Damn, those Whalers were good! Sadly, I don’t think BK offers them anymore. (I eat out once in a blue moon.)
I think I mentioned above you can sometimes buy boxed WC burgers at supermarkets here in the GTA. I always buy 2–3 boxes of six when I can find them. It never takes more than a couple of days to devour them!
There is a reason that Harold and Kumar go to White Castle is set in New Jersey (and in some respects is a love letter to the state)
Charles’ Chips! I’ve never eaten them, but I’ve seen the tins several times, at several different people’s houses when I was a kid. They seemed to never be distributed to Texas, but a lot of transplants brought their tins with them.
My husband had a bumper sticker that said” I break for White Castles’. Read somewhere they do a bang up business with their frozen product. When we lived in Doha, Qatar some grocery stores had the frozen ones.