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A few months back, something

spurred me to make the Quaker Oats "famous oatmeal cookies"

I'd baked frequently when I was a girl. I picked up the Quaker Oats

tube only to discover that - horrors! - the reliable recipe

on the back of the box had disappeared, replaced with a recipe inside

the lid teasingly called "vanishing oatmeal raisin cookies."

The good news was, the famous

oatmeal cookies recipe wasn't truly gone. It was in countless recipe

boxes across the country (including mine, now), in compilation cookbooks

such as Ceil Dyer's "Best Recipes" (Galahad Books, $14.95)

and on any number of Web sites.

Famous oatmeal cookies, like

Nestle's Tollhouse cookies and Campbell's green bean bake, started

as a promotional recipe on a product package and turned into an American

icon.

It happens regularly. Back-of-the-box

recipes have a colossal impact on America's kitchen culture, with

the most successful recipes bridging geographic and socioeconomic divides.

It's not clear when the

first promotional recipe on a food package appeared, but the concept goes

back at least to 1891, when the first recipe on a cereal container, something

called "Quaker bread," made its debut on the Quaker Oats package.

And, though back-of-the-box

recipes have a lengthy history, the idea is far from stale. Wander down

the aisles of a grocery store - there are scores of recipes on packages

from Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry to Heinz Red Wine Vinegar.

A Web site devoted to back-of-the-box

recipes, www.backofthebox.com, features more than 1,500 recipes. They

range from the mundane (Ritz Cracker stuffing, corn casserole) to the

almost-sophisticated (rosemary lamb chops, Tuscany bread focaccia), and

new recipes are added every day.

Dyer's "Best Recipes"

cookbook features more than 2,000 recipes that first appeared on various

bottles, cans, jars and boxes.

And Campbell's Soup Co.,

which has created more than 10,000 recipes using canned soup since 1916,

recently cooked up a new idea - recipes on the inside of the label.

In addition to the recipe on the back of the can, the company now features

four recipes that are revealed when you cut off the label.

The idea behind all these package

recipes is, of course, to increase demand for the product. And it works.

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