The Butterball help-line office, with a doorbell that gobbles and an inflatable roast turkey, is not a place where culinary envelopes are pushed or global perspectives are embraced. Culturally, the talk line is as white as a turkey breast. The help it offers — based on hundreds of tests on Butterball products — is safe, reliable and seasoned with not much more than salt and pepper.

That’s what callers are usually looking for. At least it was for Jee Won Park, a New York publicist who called the Butterball line in 1997, when she was in her early 20s.

A friend in New Jersey had bought and stuffed a big turkey, and she headed over to help him cook it. After about four hours, a little red plastic button inserted into the breast as a guide to indicate doneness had failed to pop up. Was it done?

Ms. Park didn’t know anything about roasting turkeys because her Korean-born parents never did it. A call to his friend’s mother, who had immigrated from China, was equally fruitless.

In those days, internet searches were still cumbersome. There was no other option than to call Butterball.

“It gave us some agency,” she said. The woman on the other end of the line was wonderful, but ultimately couldn’t help the desperate cooks because they didn’t know how much the turkey weighed, nor did they have a meat thermometer. They ended up roasting it for about six hours, and it was awful.

“It didn’t feel like a gimmick, and that’s the beauty of it still,” Ms. Park said. “In some ways it’s a selfless kind of thing. I know they benefit, but it doesn’t feel gross to me.”