Back in 2002, I acquired three stepchildren, one of whom loved Oreos. These cookies were hard to get hold of in East Anglia then and online shopping was in its infancy. Occasionally, I’d find Oreos on trips to London but our stash would soon run out. It’s hard to imagine these now-ubiquitous cookies as scarce but there you go, and I needed to find another way.
In 2008, Kraft launched the Oreo cookie in the UK. The campaign that accompanied the launch traded heavily on American culinary nostalgia, something that British audiences were already familiar with through their own diet of American films and TV. If you’ve seen the 1998 version of The Parent Trap, you would have known that Oreos are especially good with peanut butter and the discovery that they both adored this combination caused these separated-at-birth twins, (played by Lindsay Lohan), to realise that they were related.
But what to do in the interim?
Enter Todd Wilbur, inceptor of the Copycat recipe website,Top Secret Recipes. numerous books, and creator of the only Oreos recipe I have ever trusted. I owe Todd a lot. Food is love so they say, and his precise, reverse-engineered Oreos helped me start to build a relationship with that small boy. It was hard and for a few years we went backward as much as we moved forward, but I will always remember his face when I presented him with his first batch of cookies. He ate every single one.
The history of copycat recipes is a fascinating but poorly documented one (and yes, I dream of writing this book). Women especially have shared recipes torn from the back of boxes and packets and newspapers; they’ve jotted them down hastily as they listened to one of the many Radio Homemakers of America broadcasts (and more on this subject in a later newsletter). They did their best to replicate the meals their children were trying out in the new chains that were springing up all over the USA.
In this age of the Internet with its inexhaustible supply of catch-up TV and radio, we forget how fleeting these recipes could be. You had to move fast. An Iowan friend of mine has a primrose yellow formica table which once belonged to a grandmother who lived an isolated life on a farm. The table has a recipe for an orange icebox pie scribbled on its surface with an indelible marker during one such broadcast. These recipes were shared and adapted and ur-versions would emerge, acquiring their own local cachet. It was a form of informal copycatting and important social currency. They showed that you were modern, part of the shiny new postwar generation who kept their eyes relentlessly focused on the future and not the past: innovate or die withered on the vine of the Old Country from whence you came seemed to be the mantra.
Gourmet Magazine’s ‘You Asked For It’ column was launched in 1944 and was arguably one of its most popular and interactive features. Offering an unparalleled insight into what the USA was eating at any given moment and, more crucially, what it aspired to eat at home (many of the requested recipes were for dishes eaten in restaurants), over time the column began to solicit recipes from the restaurants themselves for facsimile (or as near as dammit) recreation in a domestic kitchen. I often wonder how these requests were phrased because, as my friend, Scott Fisher once told me: “When I had a restaurant column from 1988-96, I learned a great truth. Whenever I wanted to know how a chef did something, I didn't ask them directly. I'd ask them with one fact that I KNEW to be wrong. Their sense of outrage was such that they would tell me the truth, no matter how secret the recipe was.” Such was the frenzy about copycat recipes, urban legends grew around them too. The origins of the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe was itself an update on the Red Velvet Cake legend from many years before. Scott Fisher tells me that Jan Harold Brunvand was the expert in these kinds of legends.
During the mid-1970s, journalist Gloria Pitzer had to leave her job as food editor at a local paper because of a clash between her and her editors. Pitzer believed in supplying her readers with the recipes they wanted and after quitting her position, she saved to buy a mimeograph machine and began to put out a newsletter called The Secret Recipe Report which was renamed Gloria Pitzer’s Secret Recipes Quarterly. Fame via TV and radio appearances followed, alongside several books which collated her most in-demand recipes. She even appeared on Phil Donahue to show him how to make Twinkies. Sometimes her recipes are more expensive ingredient-wise than the original snack foods and restaurant recipes they seek to replicate. Even more often they contain ingredients in combinations that don’t actually appear in the originals. Her recipes are hit and miss in my opinion, but what they did capture was the heady food days of the baby boomer, that time of culinary adventure and plenty.
Since then the Internet copycat/hack recipe sites have flourished although most of them are pretty poor. There are interesting offshoots too, for those cooks who like the idea of marshmallow fluff, Twinkies, Big Macs, and Little Debbie cakes but who balk at their ingredients and declasse status. J. Kenji López-Alt, author of The Food Lab and the chief creative officer of Serious Eats talks of taking a hot dog as seriously as the fanciest restaurant meal and in the process, reverse-engineers all kinds of recipes using a solid evidence-based approach and ingredients and techniques palatable to the middle-class food-obsessed cook. Then there's Stella Parks, the American pastry chef and author of a baking book. Brave Tart who, according to her colleague Lopez-Alt “has the power and skill to make a homemade bowl of Lucky Charms that taste not like actual Lucky Charms, but like a childhood memory of Lucky Charms, which is infinitely better.” (I find this a charming quote but I am looking for facsimile recipes, not an imperfect memory). In the UK, there’s Felicity Cloake whose ‘Perfect’ column for The Guardian interrogates well-known recipes from our best food writers then constructs its own ur-recipe according to what she feels works, and what does not, and Dan Toombs aka The Curry Guy whose books help us replicate curry house choices at home. This extends to fine dining too: my old Gary Rhodes cookbook contains a recipe for his version of the British Jaffa cake although it bears only the loosest resemblance to ‘proper’ copycat recipes.
And this brings us back to Todd Wilbur who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this piece. I bought his books out of order; my first purchase was ‘More Top Secret Recipes’ published in 1994. (Julia Moskin was one of his editors at Plume.) It is in this book that you will find his cloned Oreo recipe, complete with diagrams, technical-drawing style. In his preamble, Todd tells us that when the original Oreo was sold to the public, it was much larger than today’s version. Apparently, it kept shrinking until Nabisco realised it had become too small, and set about enlarging it again. You’ll also find clones of Popeye’s red beans and rice, Bailey’s Original Irish Cream, McDonald's hamburger, and Cinnabon cinnamon rolls. What more can I say? Todd Wilbur is the best.
An interview with Todd Wilbur.
Copycat recipes have been informally swapped for a long time from person to person and via old newsletters and pamphlets but what gave you the idea to get cooking and, then, set up your website?
That’s right. To save money in college in the early 80’s we passed around a hack for re-creating Kahlua using cheap vodka, instant coffee, and vanilla because Kahlua was expensive, and we were broke college kids
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But before I got the Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chip Cookies chain letter recipe in the mail in 1987 (more about that here), I hadn’t considered that copycat recipes, if done right, could become a popular niche in home cooking. The popularity of that cookie recipe lit a lightbulb over my head, and I began building a list of recipes that I felt I could reverse-engineer in my own kitchen. That cookie was first. The Big Mac was second. And I never stopped. Now I’ve cracked somewhere around 1,300 popular recipes.
After I completed my 3rd book, Top Secret Restaurant Recipes, the internet was on the verge of becoming a pretty big deal. I learned a little HTML and how to build a website and got the first version of TopSecretRecipes.com online in late 1996. In 2002, TSR was ranked the #7 food site in the world, ahead of McDonalds.com (#8) and BettyCrocker.com (#10). This was good news, but I was totally unprepared for the site’s success. When I went on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997 (Todd made a clone of TGI Jack Daniels Friday's Glaze), the surge crashed my website and I couldn’t get it back online for almost two weeks. I probably lost a bunch of online opportunities back then because my idea grew faster than I was able to comprehend or handle. And I was doing everything alone.
My first books were small, cheaply made pulp paperbacks that were more novelties than cookbooks. I don’t think the food writing industry thought of them as much more than a fad or curiosity, much like the food columns in local city newspapers that would run copycat recipes for dishes from regional restaurants. But the books changed over the years, the recipes got much better, the books hit bestseller lists, I found myself doing more appearances, and I eventually had a TV show.
Today the copycat recipe niche is bigger than ever, and the concept has become extremely popular online. Mom bloggers, food sites, and YouTubers focused on food copycatting are plentiful these days. And since I’ve now sold around 5.5 million books based solely on dish cloning, I would hope that food writers look at what I do as a legit cooking niche, even though cooking schools and trained chefs will probably never consider copycat cooking a respectable culinary skillset. It takes years to learn how to do this right, and very few trained chefs are good at it. But even so, let’s just say I never expect to hear that my James Beard Award is in the mail.
How do you decide which recipes to decode? Do you crowdsource suggestions? And if you don't, what do you need to do to stay abreast of new food products?
Since my first book was published in 1993, I’ve been receiving a fairly constant flow of food cloning requests from readers. Back then I got a stack of letters every month filled with reader suggestions for my next hacks. These days the requests still come in, but now through email. I regularly compile those suggestions into a master list that grows and changes over time as the trends in food change. When I need ideas, I go to that list and work on the most popular requests firsts. Producing good clone recipes is important in this gig, but so is good recipe selection.
How many requests do you get to decode food products which are no longer with us? Is this even possible? (For example, I would literally sell an organ to get a copy of the recipe for the old Ponderosa's cinnamon muffins!)
I refer to famous foods that are no longer with us as “Dead Foods.” The McD.L.T., Spatini Spaghetti Sauce Mix, and Coca-Cola Black are just a few of the many products which have died for one reason or another, and I’ve always received requests to decode them. Fortunately, I was able to copy those three recipes before they vanished, so I had an available sample of the product to work from. But sadly, any other Dead Foods which I’m not able to get a sample of will likely remain nothing more than a delicious memory. If I don’t have access to the original product, creating a satisfying clone recipe is a nearly impossible task and those Dead Foods will only exist in the edible afterlife.
What recipe clones provided your own Proustian moment? Which thrilled you the most or made you most proud and why?
I had a Proustian moment when I made my second copycat recipe: a clone of McDonald’s Big Mac. I grew up eating McDonald’s and wolfed down Big Macs off and on throughout my teen and young adult years. I stopped buying real Big Macs in my 30’s for the most part, but I made clones of them often for live cooking demos or on TV. And every time I took a bite into my nearly identical hack of the world’s most famous sandwich, the aroma, texture, and taste would send me back in time to the Golden Arches, as a hungry kid with my small family lined up at the drive-thru.
I find that many have similar experiences with my recipes, reliving the past as they re-create the flavors of food they haven’t tasted in years because they no longer have access to it for one reason or another. I recall several notes from readers thanking me for preserving the taste of Spatini Spaghetti Sauce Mix, a recipe I mentioned earlier. Many describe how their mom made spaghetti with this mix, and the clone recipe triggered a sensory flashback that made them feel like a little kid again. You can see some of those comments here.
Food is a great connection to the past and making food at home that is familiar and nostalgic is one great reason why making copycat versions of famous foods is such a rewarding kitchen experience.
What has been the most frustrating moment for you? What have you failed to crack?
I’ve become more comfortable with the frustrating moments that this job brings with it, and there are plenty. I’d like to think I can re-create every popular food product out there and turn it into a recipe that anyone can use, but it’s not always possible, and lots of time gets wasted.
A while back I spent weeks trying to figure out a way to make In-N-Out Burger French Fries using the most common potatoes found in most supermarkets, but I don’t think the recipe will ever work right without the special variety of potatoes In-N-Out purchases, and at that time they were hard to get. I believe the burger chain uses Kennebec potatoes which have a low moisture content, allowing for crispy French fries to be made from freshly sliced potatoes in a single frying step, without a par-fry. Using other potatoes this way produces soggy fries no matter what methods I tried, so I eventually abandoned the hack after a couple of dozen attempts.
Another example that comes to mind is when I attempted to make my version of V-8, but after buying tomato juice and the other seven vegetables I would have to extract juice from, I realized the recipe would be way more of a hassle than it was worth. And when I was in the supermarket buying the tomato juice my recipe would have called for, there was V-8 right next to it on the shelf, around the same price as the tomato juice. And that was the end of that.
I’ve had many of those experiences, and sometimes that’s just how it goes. I must remind myself to identify recipes that don’t qualify as a good hacking candidate as soon as possible, then bail out and move on to another recipe that’s almost guaranteed to work out before I start yelling at inanimate objects in the kitchen.
You made copycat recipes famous. There are now a plethora of cooks, chefs, and writers who reverse-engineer and clone well-known food products. (Stella Parks, J. Kenji López-Alt in Serious Eats are just some of them.) Who else's work do you find interesting? Do you feel your place in the canon is acknowledged?
Kenji’s pretty good, and Serious Eats comes up with some tasty stuff, but from what I’ve seen all the bloggers out there who share these types of recipes are mostly posting the same bad recipes over and over again, sometimes with meaningless tweaks so that they can take credit for the recipe. In fact, a lot of those recipes are mine and they don’t even know it.
Stella Parks is good with pastries, but chefs like her with formal training often get too creative in their clones, adding ingredients that are probably delicious but don’t work well in a copycat. I wouldn’t put cinnamon and orange zest in a knockoff Fig Newton as she does, for example, because those flavors aren’t in the real one.
I certainly hope that my contribution to food and cooking has been properly recognized since I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now, but it’s hard to tell. I often hear from fans who grew up making my recipes and how they have now passed those old books down to their kids, to the next generation of novice chefs looking for fun things to make in the kitchen. I’ve even been in restaurants where after introducing myself, chefs will go to the back kitchen and pull out yellowed copies of my books for me to sign.
So, I’ve probably made some sort of impact in the food world, but Top Secret Recipes could definitely be bigger and better than it is. We’re trying some new things starting this year to help make that happen.
For example, rather than waiting for years to release new recipes in a book, I’m now premiering new food hacks on my website, TopSecretRecipes.com. And we’ve added a recipe club allowing members to get early access to those recipes so that they can get cooking with new content much faster than when I released new material only in paperback.
Also, I’ve created a line of Top Secret Recipes sauces and other food products which are now appearing in stores across America, including Walmart. That’s all very exciting.
Going forward I’ll keep making new copycat recipes and hopefully, the recipes will continue to get better and better. That’s a promise I make to myself, and to all my fans and followers. I’ll keep making the best copycat recipes in the world, so I can keep riding out this crazy, sneaky, quirky culinary adventure.
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