Maybe this is not a 1990’s thing but one thing that I remember from my childhood was the slider burger. You look around today and it was like it never existed. So I have created a blog post all about the great “Slider Burger”!

Sure, Ronald McDonald is larger than life, and Burger King established the elusive link between royalty and ground meat, but it was the slider that enticed America to bite on the burger. The slider, for the uninitiated, is the bite-sized (okay, maybe two-bite-sized), onion-drenched, pickle-covered burger that has made White Castle a fast-food legend, not to mention a standing culinary joke. The little treats are also known endearingly as “belly bombers,” “gut busters” and “whitey one-bites.”Go ahead and laugh. But prior to the birth of the slider 75 years ago, you couldn’t find a fast-food burger. You might be able to get a greasy ball of hamburger on a roll at the county fair, but no one was in the business of selling grilled patties. Thanks largely to “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s stomach-churning book on the Chicago stockyards, most Americans had too much trouble getting past the image of rotting beef to develop a hankering for a dripping mound o’ meat.

Along came Walt Anderson, a Wichita, Kan., short-order cook. He was inspired to flatten the meat onto a bed of water and onions, steam the lot and slide it all onto a heated bun to retain the juices. He started selling them in renovated streetcars, then in 1921 teamed up with Wichita real estate man E.W. “Billy” Ingram. Together they borrowed $700 to go into the hamburger-stand business. They thought big thoughts, calling their five-seat, cinder-block diner “White Castle” — White “signifying purity and cleanliness” and Castle representing “strength, permanence and stability.” For all the grand imagery, the place cranked out ’20s finger food — palm-sized, square burgers that sold for a nickel. But nobody bought just one, which brought more inspiration. Soon they were selling them by the “sack” — a bag of 10. And so, burgers-to-go was born.

With neon blazing, White Castle tore up the fast-food business, or what there was of it, by standardizing its product and keeping everything simple. It made restaurants of shiny porcelain steel modeled after the turreted Water Tower building in Chicago and designed to be easily moved if necessary. By 1930 there were 100 White Castle diners, all owned by the company and all as spare as the menu — burgers, coffee, Coca-Cola. That’s it. In 1931 came another breakthrough — containers that kept the burgers warm. In the 1940s another evolutionary leap: White Castle began selling fries. A few years later it created its trademark five-holed burger — the holes allowed cooks to steam the patties without having to flip them. By then Ingram had bought out Anderson and moved the headquarters to Columbus, Ohio. And by then White Castle had turned the corner on fighting burger phobia.

It took some imagination. The company dispatched “Julia Joyce,” its own version of Betty Crocker, to women’s clubs to deliver slider recipes, coupons and invitations to see how clean the restaurants were kept. To calm fears about the dubious nutritional value of it product, the firm commissioned a university study in which a medical student lived on nothing but water and White Castle burgers — about two dozen a day — for three months. He survived.

Slowly, as other burger operations came on the scene, White Castle turned bold. It plunged into selling shakes in 1956, and in 1962, the year after it became the top burger chain in the country, it pulled out the stops and introduced cheeseburgers. Before long, however, the Castle would no longer be king. Today the company has 299 restaurants; McDonald’s opens a new location about every 299 minutes.

But White Castle will always be mythic in fast-food lore: The stories of famous slider junkies — Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Vanna White, Ray Charles, Willard Scott. The tales of great feats — Indiana native Jug Eckert once ate 102 gut busters to win a bet. The inspiration for stunning culinary expression — as part of a contest, an Illinois woman named Amy Jackson proposed the Dessert Slider Surprise: “Coat 10 White Castle hamburgers with dark chocolate, insert a popsicle stick and freeze.”