Not Hamburger Helper: The Forgotten Boxed Noodle Dinner Boomers Once Loved

Boomers have lived long enough to see some major changes in the world and that includes in the culinary realm. Many old-school chain restaurants are in decline or gone, and plenty of food products they once loved have also gone the way of the dinosaurs. One of these latter now-defunct packaged foods was a boxed noodle kit that made a quick and tasty dish. It was noodles Romanoff and Betty Crocker arguably made the best-known version. Noodles Romanoff is a dish made with egg noodles, sour cream (and sometimes cottage cheese), aged sharp cheese, garlic, onion, and a few other ingredients. It was typically billed as a side to accompany various meat dishes.

Betty Crocker's boxed version, which came out in 1961, included the egg noodles and a dried sour cream sauce mixture with cheddar cheese and herbs that only required adding milk or butter to make. This was the era of convenience food when women were joining the workforce in record numbers while often still being expected to cook for their families, so you could whip up this packaged noodle mix in a hurry. While this dish sounds vaguely Russian, it was actually created by a notorious scam artist turned Beverly Hills restaurateur before Betty Crocker made it a convenience food.

The history of noodles Romanoff's rise to popularity is more surprising than you might think. Mike Romanoff, formerly Harry Gerguson, was an international con artist who went by various aliases and pulled a series of scams and thefts in Europe and the U.S. before going straight in 1940 and opening his restaurant, Romanoff's. He embarked on this new and legitimate venture with the financial help of such Hollywood elites as actor Cary Grant and Darryl Zanuck, the film producer who helped found 20th Century Fox. In the 1940s and '50s, the restaurant served up dishes, including noodles Romanoff, to a who's who of movie stars. While Romanoff is credited with the dish, its antecedents can likely be traced to Eastern Europe, where these kinds of creamy noodle dishes are common.

The same year Romanoff opened his restaurant, a recipe for noodles Romanoff appeared for the first time in the "Betty Crocker Kitchen Clinic," a newspaper feature put out by General Mills, its parent company. Just over 20 years later, Betty Crocker came out with its packaged version that was a hit, and by the mid-1960s, Kraft and Noodle Roni both had their own versions, and were later joined by Stouffer's.

By the late 1990s, it became harder to find some packaged noodles Romanoff. The last Betty Crocker newspaper advertisement for the product that we found in our research is from 2005. If you're a boomer missing this dish or a curious foodie simply wondering what the Betty Crocker version tasted like, there are a variety of knock-off recipes online. But, of course, none of them are as simple to throw together as the packaged version.