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French Fried Onions
Peel onions, cut in one-fourth inch slices, and separate into rings. Dip in milk, drain, and dip in flour. Fry in deep fat, drain on brown paper, and sprinkle with salt.
Fannie Farmer's method is the ancestor of every onion ring recipe since, and it works, but the original assumes a cook who knows deep-fat frying by feel. Two details carry the whole dish.
- Fat temperatureThe book expects you to test fat by dropping in bread; for these, hold 360-375F. Below that the rings absorb fat and go limp, above it the flour scorches before the onion softens.
- Dredge twiceMilk, drain, flour is a single thin coat. Returning the floured rings to the milk and flouring again gives a sturdier crust that will not slide off in the fat.
- Onion choiceLarge yellow or Spanish onions slice into rings wide enough to handle. A quarter inch is deliberate: thinner and the onion disappears, thicker and it stays raw inside.
- "Deep fat"At the time this meant rendered fat such as lard in a deep kettle. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job; you need at least 2 inches so the rings float free.
- Brown paperOld kitchens drained fried food on grocery paper. Use a rack over a sheet pan instead, or paper towels; printed paper and newsprint are not suitable.
- Batches and timingFry in small batches so the fat temperature does not crash. Rings are done in 2-3 minutes, when the coating is pale gold rather than deep brown.
- Salt and servingSalt the instant they leave the fat, while the surface is still wet enough to hold it. The recipe gives no quantities; two large onions will make roughly a side dish for four. They collapse quickly and are worth eating within minutes.
French fried onions belong to a family of dishes the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book grouped under "French fried" — meaning cut up and cooked in deep fat, as with French fried potatoes — rather than anything specifically French. The usage is often connected to the sense of "to french" as cutting into strips, though the history is less settled than it is sometimes made to sound. That these appear in the Vegetables chapter rather than as a snack or garnish says something about the period: deep-fat frying was ordinary vegetable cookery, done in a kettle on a coal range, and the milk-and-flour dredge was one light coating in use before batters made with egg and leavening became the norm for onion rings in the twentieth century.