The 1950s Betty Crocker Appetizer That's Been Replaced By Its Popular Modern Version

Should you ever find yourself transported back in time to a party in the 1950s, you should first get to patenting all kinds of modern inventions and enjoy the billions to follow, and then start sampling some of the era's vintage appetizers. You'll likely find all manner of Jell-O preparations, throwback dips, and classic cocktail meatballs. And, after you've created the internet, you might come across an even less remembered snack: the hamburger turnover.

This protein-packed pastry is a pretty close approximation for the still-famous hamburger slider, which remains a part of culinary vernacular to this day. The original hamburger turnover recipe, from "Betty Crocker's Bisquick Party Book," essentially called for seasoned sauteed beef to be sealed inside Bisquick dough and baked. If this also sounds a little like an empanada, a pasty, a meat pie, Jamaican patty, or anything en croûte, that's thanks to the versatility of these basic ingredients. 

Betty Crocker, of course, was the preeminent name of the convenience cooking age, with radio shows, cookbooks, and eventually food products all under the moniker. So it's only natural that the fictional home kitchen magnate would eventually combine the latter two in a bit of brand synchronicity that would wrap ground beef in her very own Bisquick. And you can give your sliders the hamburger turnover treatment with your own adaptation.

The easiest way to combine sliders and hamburger turnovers is to take the primary components that give each item its separate essence and hammer them together. The bun, for example, isn't purely what makes a slider a slider, for one could sandwich virtually any other filling for a totally different result. No, a slider is what it is because of its miniature meat patty, which should remain your focus.

The principle remains the same for the hamburger turnover. What makes it different than, say, Iowa's iconic loose meat sandwich, is its pastry vehicle, herbs and seasonings notwithstanding. So you want to marry the slider's shrunken meat patty with the turnover's exterior for a combination that fully expresses these linked but disparate foodstuffs' chief characteristics.

As long as your sliders are pressed into two-ounce or so squares, you can season however you wish, and cook them quickly on the stovetop. The challenge is to not overcook the mini meat, particularly since these babies will ultimately be heated twice. It helps to choose a homemade or store-bought dough encasement that can also cook up quick to minimize heat exposure and stave off dryness. Refrigerated crescent roll dough can be folded to your precise slider specifications, and it finishes in as little as 10 minutes. That carb's most famous mascot, the Pillsbury Doughboy, wasn't even created until 1965, so maybe you can also sneak a claim on that one in any of those time travel scenarios, too.