The magic of deep-fried onion rings: From Kirby’s Pig Stand to A&W

A&W is credited for popularizing onion rings after adding them to their menu in the 1960s. I make my own contribution to their continued popularity here in Thompson, Manitoba many a Wednesday evening while stopping by my local A&W for a $5.25 order of onion rings on my way between the University College of the North (UCN) Thompson campus library and Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. I could call it a pandemic takeout indulgence perhaps except for the fact I’ve been doing it since around 2015.

Roy Allen and Frank Wright, founders of A&W Restaurants, were very likely the first true hamburger franchisers, selling franchises in California way back in 1921. In 1956, the first A&W drive-in restaurant in Canada opened on Portage Avenue right in Winnipeg.

It wasn’t long after A&W added onion rings to their menu in the 1960s that I discovered them, thanks to my late Uncle Bob Barker, who lived in Crown Point, Indiana at the time, and introduced me to onion rings on a visit, with my Aunt Joan, and cousins Lynne and Bob, to our home in Oshawa, Ontario circa 1970. I was about 13 at the time. Uncle Bob didn’t buy our onion rings at A&W, but rather at a food truck in Lakeview Park in the south end of Oshawa on the north shore of Lake Ontario. I’ve loved them ever since

I wrote back in September 2014 here: “It is, of course, not fashionable in 2014 to offer praise of any kind for fast food. Let’s put that on our table here as a given right away. But what a satiating trip down memory lane, admittedly as guilty pleasure, it can be to recall those more modest ghosts of hamburger joints past.” Almost three years later in March 2017, I would also write here in a post headlined, “The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger” that back in 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism? Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food?

An onion ring is a form of appetizer or side dish commonly found in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and some parts of Asia, mainland Europe, and Latin America. They generally consist of a cross-sectional “ring” of onion (the circular structure of which lends itself well to this method of preparation) dipped in batter or bread crumbs and then deep fried; a variant is made with onion paste. While typically served as a side dish, onion rings are often eaten by themselves. The cooking process decomposes propanethial oxide in the onion into the sweet-smelling and tasting bispropenyl disulfide, responsible for the slightly sweet taste of onion rings.

The exact origins of deep-fried onion rings are unknown. A recipe called “Fried Onions with Parmesan Cheese” is included in John Mollard’s 1802 cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined. Within the recipe, it suggests cutting onions into 1/2 inch rings, dipping them into a batter made of flour, cream, salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese then deep-frying them in boiling lard. It also recommends serving them with a sauce made of melted butter and mustard. A recipe for onions that are dipped in milk then dredged in flour and deep-fried appeared in a 1933 advertisement for Crisco in The New York Times Magazine.

One claimant to the invention of the onion ring is the Kirby’s Pig Stand restaurant chain, founded in Oak Cliff, Texas in the early 1920s. The once-thriving chain, whose heyday in the 1940s saw over 100 locations across the United States, also claims to be the originator of Texas toast.

A Dallas entrepreneur named Jessie G. Kirby built the first Pig Stand along the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway in October 1921. It was a roadside barbecue restaurant unlike any other: Its patrons could drive up, eat and leave, all without budging from their automobiles. (“People with cars are so lazy,” Kirby explained, “they don’t want to get out of them.”) Kirby lured these car-attached customers with great fanfare and spectacle. When a customer pulled into the Pig Stand parking lot, teenage boys in white shirts and black bow ties jogged over to his car, hopped up onto the running board—sometimes before the driver had even pulled into a parking space—and took his order. (This daredevilry won the servers a nickname: carhops.) Soon, the Pig Stand drive-ins replaced the carhops with attractive young girls on roller skates, but the basic formula was the same: good-looking young people, tasty food, speedy service and auto-based convenience.

That first Pig Stand was a hit with hungry drivers, and soon it became a chain. (The slogan: “America’s Motor Lunch.”) Kirby and his partners made one of the first franchising arrangements in restaurant history, and Pig Stands began cropping up everywhere. By 1934, there were more than 130 Pig Stands in nine states. (Most were in California and Florida.) Meanwhile, the chain kept innovating. Many people say that California’s Pig Stand No. 21 became the first drive through restaurant in the world in 1931, and food historians believe that Pig Stand cooks invented deep-fried onion rings, chicken-fried steak sandwiches and a regional speciality known as Texas Toast.

But wartime gasoline and food rationing hit the Pig Stands hard, and after the war they struggled to compete with newer, flashier drive-ins.

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This is how Parliamentary democracy works: We change the governing party from time to time

Brian Pallister has been premier of Manitoba going on 12 hours now and as far as I can tell the world hasn’t ended, although Humpty Dumpty no doubt did take a big fall off the wall here in Northern Manitoba in last month’s 41st general election.

There has been a change in government in Manitoba today for the first time since Oct. 5, 1999. That’s how Parliamentary government works. We change governments every now and then. Truth be told, most elections are far more a referendum on the governing party than they are a vote for the imaginative new ideas the opposition parties put forward in any given campaign.

The April 19 election was a referendum on former Premier Greg Selinger, more than anything, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the rest of the long-governing NDP. Given how our Parliamentary system of government works, voters (at least outside his Winnipeg constituency of St. Boniface) couldn’t vote “yea” or “nay” to Selinger directly, so they did what Canadian voters have done since before Confederation: They threw the bums out, the lot of them, as the old saying, which probably started in the United States in the 1920s, as a chant by spectators at boxing and wrestling matches, before moving in due course to baseball, and finally politics, goes.

This year the bums happened to be the NDP. Other years it has been the Progressive Conservatives or Liberals. And as grand a day as this is for the Pallister Progressive Conservatives, who won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly April 19 – tying a record for most seats set way back in 1915 when Premier Tobias Crawford Norris’ Liberals also won 40 seats in the Aug. 6 election in a legislature with 47 seats – they will in due course find a time when the people throw them out, and they are the bums again. That’s how government and elections work in Canada.

One good thing about a landslide win, which this was for the Manitoba PCs, is we’re spared the interminable debates that inevitably follow many closer election results in Canada, where the usual suspects argue in favour of either the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system we use in Canada, or more likely in recent years, argue for some form of proportional representation (PR), which is the most common system among well-established democracies.

It’s not that I haven’t taken enough political science courses in university to understand how much fairer PR would be, in theory anyway, compared to FPTP. No, it’s more a case of me being something of a self-admitted contrarian and pot-stirrer. Something like the federal election campaign of 1872 might appeal to me.

During the federal election campaign of 1872 – the country’s second after Confederation in 1867 – voting began on July 20, just five days after the writ was issued, and finished on Oct. 12, which was 89 days after the writ had been dropped – making it the longest in Canadian history, still surpassing last year’s 78-day federal election campaign. In fairness, it is something of an apples and oranges comparison because 1872 was still part of the fading era of multiple day voting, whereas 2015 was a single day contest last Oct. 19. The longest single day contest before last year was the  74-day campaign leading up to the Sept. 14, 1926 federal election.

Back in 1872, in all provinces except Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, elections were held on different dates in different ridings. The system allowed the party in power to hold elections in a safe riding first, hoping in this way to influence the vote in constituencies less favourable to them. The system even enabled a candidate who lost in one riding to run again in another. Steve Ashton might still be our NDP MLA in such a scenario applied provincially, although I’m not sure which constituency we might have him run in, if not Thompson.

The 1872 federal election was in fact the first time Manitobans, who joined Confederation as the fifth province – appropriately enough smack in the middle of 10, time-wise, as well as geographically – on July 15, 1870, got to participate in a federal election – and the last before the secret ballot was widely introduced (except for New Brunswick, which had adopted the secret ballot in 1855) , replacing oral voting – which really put a damper on politicians “treating” voters approaching their voting place with offers of cash, alcohol, pork, flour and other foodstuffs. In the 21^st century, politics is a bit more opaque and nuanced then it was in the 19^th century when it comes to those sort of enticements. The transparency was to be found back in 1872.

Let’s face it. When it comes to politics, elections (first-past-the-post or proportional representation or some other form of voting) and democracy, all rolled together, is a bit like sausage-making; the finished product tastes pretty good at the ballpark with a cold beer, or on the grill in the back yard, but you don’t necessarily want to see how the sausage is made. Same with governments. Unless you want to go back to 1872.

My old reporter friend Johnny Driscoll at the Peterborough Examiner used to say that sausage adage applied equally well to newspapering, and he was right.

As former Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in the British House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time….”

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