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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1968: Bobby Kennedy, described by Arthur Schlesinger as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Representative Men’ for his times

On the morning of Wednesday June 5, 1968, I was an 11-year-old nearing the end of Grade 5 at St. Christopher Separate School, as it was known then, a Catholic elementary school on  Annapolis Avenue in Oshawa, Ontario, about 30 miles east of Toronto. My mother and me had a daily ritual of listening to the 7:30 a.m. news together at the kitchen table from CKLB, Oshawa’s AM radio station, as I ate my breakfast getting ready for school.

That morning,  as the news came on, I saw the same look on my mother’s face that I had seen on my father’s just two months earlier on the evening of Thursday, April 4 when the television news bulletin interrupted regular programing: Shock, and something else; fear.

The world was turned upside down.

At 3:50 a.m. EDT on that June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel. Only two months earlier, Martin Luther King had been was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Although I was only six on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, I remember well that same look on my teacher’s faces that afternoon at St. Christopher, and again on my parent’s later at home, when Bobby Kennedy’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, 46, riding in the presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, and three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository.

If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. While the memories of the Kennedy brothers and King’s assassinations were no doubt shaped by the endless news coverage we subsequently, for those of us, like myself, who were quite young in the 1960s, the flashbulb part of the memories may well be the looks we saw contemporaneous with hearing or seeing our first news coverage of the events on our parent’s or teachers’ faces. I can only speak for myself, but shock and fear were not looks I often saw on my parent’s faces: it registered. I saw similar looks at times during the summer of August 1968 during my first trip outside of Canada on a visit to the United States on both sides of the racial divide as we drove through the South Side of Chicago. “Don’t roll your windows down, don’t stop,” my uncle from Crown Point, Indiana, a long distance truck driver previously from Beamsville, Ontario, warned my dad.

America was metaphorically, if not literally at times, burning. But truth be told, I may have missed the full significance of that history unfolding, as 11-year-old Cathy Ryan, a cute Catholic girl from Crown Point, and most fortuitously, a friend of my cousin Lynne’s, the same age as me, had also caught my eye during that summer visit.

Bobby Kennedy had been the attorney general of the United States in 1963 when his brother was assassinated in Dallas. By 1968, he was a 42-year-old United States senator from New York and the presumptive heir-apparent to the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, as the incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), mired deep in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, had announced in March he would not seek re-election.

Johnson, who served as JFK’s vice-president, was also in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Johnson, who was riding in a car behind the president, with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix.

A year later in 1964, as the Vietnam War was just starting to heat up, Johnson, basking in the still fresh memory of Camelot, had easily defeated Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, to be elected president.

Senator Robert Kennedy was shot at 12:50 a.m. in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by  22-year-old Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian national, born a Christian in Jerusalem under the British Mandate for Palestine, who angered by Kennedy’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War, which had begun exactly a year earlier on June 5, 1967, stepped forward with a rolled up campaign poster, hiding his .22  Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver. He was only a foot away when he fired eight rounds at Kennedy. Five bystanders were also wounded. Kennedy, mortally wounded, died almost 26 hours later the following day.

Sirhan, now 71, was convicted at trial and sentenced in April 1969 to die in California’s gas chamber for Kennedy’s assassination, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 after the Supreme Court of California’s decision in The People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, which  held the death penalty violated the California state constitution’s prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment, and further declared its decision was retroactive, thereby invalidating all prior death sentences in effect that had been imposed in California. The death penalty was later restored in California.

Sirhan is currently serving his sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a medium-maximum state prison in San Diego County, California. He has been denied parole 14 times. Sirhan’s next parole hearing is scheduled for March 2, 2016 when he will have served 47 years of his life sentence.

By June 1968 Bobby Kennedy was perceived by many to be the only person in American politics capable of uniting the country with his integrity and devotion to the civil rights cause. After winning California’s primary, Kennedy was in position win the Democratic presidential nomination and face Richard Nixon, who won the Republican presidential nomination in Miami in August, in the November 1968 general election.

Writing a decade after Kennedy’s assassination in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

What if Bobby Kennedy had lived and been elected president in 1968 and Richard Nixon had remained a historical footnote?

Would the Vietnam War have ended years earlier?

Would RFK have advanced the cause of civil rights and the promise of America in a way that would have meant the 1970s would not now be remembered as the “Me Decade” after the 1960s, as novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, published by New York magazine in August 1976 referring to the 1970s and the atomized individualism that followed the communitarianism of the 1960s?

These many years later, I still can’t see a news clip of Bobby Kennedy speaking and not experience heartache at some level for the lost possibilities of what might have been. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, quite rightly warned us of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur.

We just don’t know.

Especially when it comes to 1968, which has been described by many as the year that rocked the world. Apart from the Kennedy and King assassinations in the United States, there was popular rebellion in the air across societies and cultures over disparate issues around the world in 1968, including Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France (“May 68” and the student strikes in Paris, led by Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit, a.k.a. Dany le Rouge) West Germany, Mexico and Nigeria and the civil war surrounding its oil-rich southeastern state of then secessionist Biafra, just to name a few.

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