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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Tough times for bookstores as Argosy Books and Brittons in Ottawa have already closed this month but in Winnipeg it is a different story as Hull’s Family Bookstores has re-opened

Tough times in the bookstore industry, especially for independents, is far from a new headline or story in Canada. Indeed, the description quite accurately dates back to at least the mid-1990s. The only difference is that 20 years ago it was the twin threats of the birth of bricks-and-mortar  book chain retailing superstores such as Chapters in 1995, followed by Indigo Books & Music in 1996 (they merged in 2001) and online book virtual retailers such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, which started selling books over the Internet in 1995.

I well remember being at the Amherst Centre in northern Nova Scotia in July 2000 when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series, was published. My sister, who is the co-owner of an independent bookstore in Bathurst, New Brunswick, and me made a quick stop at Zellers in the mall (another defunct Canadian retailer, but another story) so she could take a trunk load of the new Harry Potter books back to Bathurst to sell from her  bookstore. Given that she could buy them for her own inventory both cheaper and more quickly from Zellers at their retail price than she could obtain them from her book wholesaler suggested to me something was fundamentally askew in the book business.

Almost 15 years later, the threat to independent bookstores isn’t just coming from book chain retailing superstores or Amazon.com. Digital technology and “document-on-demand” are changing the book publishing industry as much or more at the production end.  There are almost a million digital books published annually in North America, with roughly 800,000 being self-published efforts that sell fewer than 250 actual hard copies.

Argosy Books operated on Dalhousie Street in Ottawa for about 30 years until it closed Jan. 1. Brittons, which carried more newspapers and magazines than any other store in Ottawa, was on Bank Street in the Glebe neighborhood, just south of downtown, for almost 50 years until it closed its doors last weekend.

The closing of any independent new bookstore is sad news. Here in Western Canada, the announcement last February that Hull’s Family Bookstores, which had been in business since 1919, would soon close two of its three stores, including its downtown Winnipeg store on Graham Avenue, seemed like a very sad sign of the times ahead, as it also closed its Thunder Bay bookstore on Brodie Street in northwestern Ontario. The only consolation at the time was that its Reimer Avenue store in Steinbach, Manitoba, southeast of Winnipeg, would be remaining open.

“Bricks and mortar stores contend with showrooming,” said Hull’s last Jan. 29, describing the consumer practice of customers examining merchandise in a traditional retail store without purchasing it, but then shopping online to find a lower price for the same item, as online stores often offer lower prices than their brick and mortar counterparts, because they do not have the same overhead costs

“We simply cannot sell enough books to continue our operation as is. Sir Stanley Unwin, famous for publishing The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien nearly 80 years ago, could not have predicted the changes to come, and was perhaps ahead of his time, when he said with a twinkle in his eye ‘… the most difficult task of all that a mortal can embark upon is to sell a book.’ Please continue to shop at locally owned independent shops if you can. Support the few remaining bookstores. It is our hope that a newly ‘right-sized’ Hull’s Winnipeg location will open at some point in the future.”

Managing director Margo Smith, and her sister-in-law, Kathie Smith, who purchased the bookstore from the Hull family in 1996, also suggested on their Hull’s website last year: “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! should include the fact that all two billion members of the 30,000-plus Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the Christian church today, can agree on one statement of faith: The Apostles’ Creed. If it’s been a sufficient statement for the church for nearly 19 centuries, then it’s a sufficient statement to describe what we believe at Hull’s Family Bookstores.”

Well, indeed, it seems the prayers of many, especially Hull’s loyal customers, have been answered.

Sheila Careless, former office manager of the Graham Avenue store in downtown Winnipeg, and her husband, Bruce, purchased the business, including its Steinbach location and the rights to re-open Hull’s in Winnipeg, and did just that on Dec. 13, unveiling their new Winnipeg location at 1317A Portage Ave.

A re-opened bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Winnipeg. Now that’s counterintuitive.

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Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster

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.

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.

Where I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, while we had an A&W on Simcoe Street, long before there was a McDonald’s with its signature “Big Mac” and “Quarter Pounder,” sandwiches, there was also another great hamburger joint that was, too, part of an American fast-food chain, called Red Barn and their hamburgers of choice were, believe it or not, called the “Big Barney” and the “Barnbuster.”

The Red Barn restaurant was a fast-food restaurant chain founded in 1962 in Springfield, Ohio by Don Six, Jim Kirst and Martin Levine. Originally, the Red Barn restaurants were in the shape of barns with a glass front and limited dining room seating.

Red Barn peaked in its heyday in the early 1970s with more than 400 restaurant locations in 22 states, as well as locations in Canada, and even a dozen in and around Melbourne, Australia.

Servomation bought the company from Foodcraft Management in the late 1960s and then City Investing bought Servomation in 1979. Motel 6 bought Servomation in 1979. By 1987, Red Barn was down to 15 locations after filing for bankruptcy protection in January 1986.

Red Barn was the first major fast-food chain to have self-service salad bars and its chicken and fish were fried in pure vegetable oil.

While Red Barn was long gone from my hometown (it became a real estate office before I left in 1976), as late as 1993 I would have the pleasure of dining at a Red Barn several times a year on drives from Southern Ontario to New England and back.

The last Red Barn restaurant I ever ate at was located along a mountainous two-lane stretch of U.S. Route 7, a road that was part of the original plan for the United States highway system approved by the Bureau of Public Roads in November 1926, up in the Adirondacks in Troy, in Rensselaer County in eastern New York State, 30 miles from the Vermont state line and the Green Mountains.

As fast food goes, I guess that means Red Barn was pretty memorable.