Channeling Julia

Onions are one of the oldest vegetables in cultivation, yet onion rings are less than a century old.

Our onions are dipped in Tempura batter, then pan fried in canola oil. The earliest known recipe for onion rings was published in 1933, where the onions were dipped in milk, dredged in flour and deep fried in Crisco. Recipe

This places onion rings at the heart of the Fast Food movement, which was first recognized in the 1951 edition of a Merriam-Webster dictionary. Everything in post WWII was devoted to convenience (and look what the results are today). I recall that my father was sent a monthly copy of "Fast Food" magazine in the 1960's because he had a fountain in the drug store. Articles featured fast food chains like MacDonalds and Burger King - both of which serve onion rings to this day.

Though we prepared our onion rings from scratch, almost all onion rings sold by fast food establishments are prepared in factories, frozen and shipped to the point of service (POS) before frying. Some vendors attempt to make their products a uniform shape and size, so they chop up the onions into a paste and create a frozen round shape which is then coated with batter and precooked before freezing for shipment. (this is quite a novel process covered in a patent filed in 1992 and assigned to the Clorox Company, with prior mentions going back to 1972 - USPTO 5,181,456)