Of ‘sliders’, ‘cravers,’ and a White Castle where you are monarch of all.

By Dr. Jeffrey Lant

It is the midnight hour here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in Cambridge town. And like my overindulged neighbors, I am in search of something to satisfy a craving, for without satisfaction I shall not sleep. As this is a college town, the ultimate college town, with every kind of taste and flavor readily at hand, all ready to obliterate the hunger pangs of the privileged, voracious herds of students foraging hereabouts, there should be no trouble getting that precise, desired effect.

But the taste I seek cannot be found in Cambridge, or Boston, or even in the whole of New England or even beyond. It is a taste rooted in the Midwest and, thus, I need stratagems to find it… all the while my brain, sharpened by exact desire, screams for the thing, the exact thing, no substitutions, no deceptions, no facsimiles, don’t even try.

This is White Castle… don’t even begin to call it just a ‘hamburger.”

And if you have never had one, do not condescend to judge us who have. We know this thing… and if we are in thrall to a taste… we at least have had it, while you have not and do not know.

This, then, is for my fellow “cravers”… you know who you are… and you know what I am going through now… for you may well be going through it, too…

Born in the heartland.

Harry Truman, sometime president of these United States, once said, “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” I am going to dish up some of that history now.

The White Castle story begins in Wichita, Kansas. It is 1921… America is confident, striding for the first time on the world stage; a heady adolescent among nations… strong, swaggering, a bull in Europe’s epicene china shop. Such a nation, still raw, required food to match. It needed wheat…. and beef… and onions… it was democratic fare… cheap, pungent, delicious, pay your nickle and, laughing with your buddies, wipe your mouth on your sleeve; (your mother cannot see the infraction, so shocking at home.)

The White Castle story is a story of lean, young men, with big ideas; applying science and brains to the hunger of a nation moving to a jazz beat. In such a nation everything was possible… and a young man in Wichita was free to dream and to build and to triumph. In Wichita that year, in America, there was nothing but exuberance, pulsating energies and panoramas of promise.

White Castle aimed to be the fuel for such a people and their ascendancy. And so it began…

Item: White Castle was the first fast-food hamburger chain in the nation.

Item: The first to sell a million hamburgers.

Item: The first to sell a billion hamburgers.

Item: The first to sell frozen fast food.

Founders Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson had an idol… a man of drive, energy, imagination and, always, the ability and desire to improve, make the product better, and grow.

This was Henry Ford, and the founders of White Castle never stopped scrutinizing the Master for ways they could benefit and, in turn, benefit the nation.

“The Jungle”.

The first problem the founders had to solve was one of perception. In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote one of the signal books of the burgeoning republic, “The Jungle”. It was a book inducing anger and nausea, exposing in sickening detail the revolting conditions of the meat packing industry. America blanched and heaved… cleaning up the noisome menace…

The Wichita boys did their bit. They named their baby “White” for something clean, pure and untainted… and “Castle” for something strong and resolute.

Then they started their life-long mission of mechanizing their work, just as Henry Ford was doing at River Rouge.

Their restaurants, made to resemble the famed Chicago Water Tower, were eye-catching, distinctive, octagonal buttresses, crenelated towers, and a parapet wall. Here, well before Huey Long, “every man was king.” The look was pristine, sparkling white porcelain enamel on steel exteriors, stainless steel interiors, employees outfitted with spotless uniforms… never sprinkled with the blood of what you were eating.

Now they could turn their full attention to the most important thing of all… the taste.

First, Founder Anderson invented the hamburger bun, as well as the kitchen assembly line that gave rise to the modern fast-food industry. Due to White Castle’s innovation of chain-wide standardized methods, customers could be sure they would receive the same product in every one of their restaurants; here, too, they lead the way, as they embarked on sure and certain growth.

Since nothing of the mechanized fast-foot industry existed, it all had to be imagined, attempted, instituted, tried, and re-tried, the tested way of progress for people unafraid to risk, to attempt, to improve, and improve some more. It was the American way, and it was a certain formula for greatness.

White Castle, and the hamburger at its center, was a significant part of this glorious cycle of never-ending improvement.

Anderson developed an efficient method for cooking hamburgers, using freshly ground beef and fresh onions. The ground beef was formed into balls by machine, eighteen to a pound, or forty per kilogram. The balls were placed on a hot grill and topped with a handful of fresh, thinly shredded onion. Then they were flipped so that the onion was under the ball.

The ball was then squashed down, turning the ball into a very thin patty. The bottom of the bun was then placed atop the cooking patty with the other half of the bun on top of that so that the juices and steam from the beef and onion would permeate the bun. After grilling, a slice of dill pickle was inserted before serving on its distinctive square bun available at White Castle only. This was the famous “slider”.

Now, putting it all together, you didn’t just have a burger and fries… you had an event, a feast for nose, eye, tongue and brain. You stopped at other burger joints because you were hungry and couldn’t wait any longer for relief at someplace better. You went to White Castle for satisfaction, gratification, bliss.

On this basis White Castle grew, keeping its price, a dime apiece, fair, affordable. Then, in 1933, Ingram bought out Anderson, moving to Columbus, Ohio. The new owner refused to franchise or take on debt to expand, and so White Castle fell behind other purveyors of burgers, relatively small at 420 White Castle outlets; the one I visited assiduously when I studied at Harvard, in Central Square, bit the dust, to my acute despair.

Somewhere along the line the unyielding insistence on growth, improvement, and no limits whatsoever, died. When I called White Castle’s corporate offices yesterday to see how I could buy the product by mail, the voice at the other end of the line was of the “couldn’t be bothered” variety, dismissive, unhelpful, eager to get me off the line and go back to her nails and jeremiads. Thus the dedicated, devoted “cravers” of company lore are cast aside and dismissed. And so as White Castle goes, the once great nation goes… and we are saddened and bereft.