The regional table / Oklahoma
Fried Onion Burger
Half a pound of onion for a pound of beef is not a garnish, it is arithmetic, and it turns out to make a better burger than the beef could manage alone.
The state's own reference work gives this burger a single clause. In the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Thomas L. Hedglen's entry on Canadian County says that the local celebrations honour the heritage of the Chisholm Trail and the legacy of onion burgers sold by laid-off railroad employees in El Reno. That is all of it, and it is more than the Encyclopedia's long Foodways survey manages: that entry walks through Native, African American and upland southern cooking in Oklahoma and never mentions a hamburger once. The railroad part is not decoration. The OHS entry on El Reno describes a town that became the crossroads of the Rock Island's main north-south and east-west lines, with a division repair shop and a coach-building centre employing around thirteen hundred people by the 1950s, and a railroad that shut down in 1980 in bankruptcy. A town living on railroad wages feels a layoff at the meat counter first.
I wanted a first dated appearance in print and did not get one. The Gateway to Oklahoma History, the state's own newspaper archive and the obvious place to look, now meets an automated request with a proof-of-work challenge page and serves nothing else, so the Oklahoma papers of the Depression stayed shut to me; I could not open them and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What is open is the syndicated press, and it says something useful by saying something different. When American papers of the mid-century print the words onion burger they mean a canned-soup dish: the Plattsmouth Journal of Nebraska on 26 April 1956 and the Cleveland Courier of Georgia on 4 September 1959 both run the same wire recipe, brown a pound of ground beef, stir in flour and a can of condensed onion soup, spoon it onto eight toasted buns. Cecily Brownstone's column in the Athens Banner-Herald of 14 October 1958 heads a family lunch with Onion Burgers and means a pound of beef mixed with two teaspoons of instant onion and two tablespoons of milk, shaped into four patties. Nobody in that record is shaving a raw onion into the face of a patty on a griddle. El Reno's burger is not in the national papers because it never left the counter it was invented on, and the claim that it began there in the Depression is El Reno's claim, repeated by the state's historians. The cooking below is the method's own logic, worked out for this page.
Why this version works
Shaved, not sliced. Sixteenth-of-an-inch shavings collapse into a mat that the meat can grip. Anything thicker behaves like a ring: it steams, it stays crunchy, and it slides out of the bun on the first bite, taking the crust with it.
Onion by weight, not by garnish. Three ounces of onion to four ounces of beef sounds absurd until you cook it. The onion gives up its water, shrinks to almost nothing, and what is left is sweet, dark and welded into the crust. Half the patty is onion and the burger tastes more of beef than a plain one does, because the onion browns at a temperature that pushes the meat browning along with it.
One smash, straight through the onion. The onion goes on the raw ball and the press drives it into the surface, so it is set into the meat rather than sitting on it. Then the burger is flipped onion side down and finishes cooking in the fat the beef has just rendered, which is the only frying medium that tastes of anything.
Salted and squeezed before it meets the pan. Onion is mostly water. Salt it, leave it ten minutes and wring it out, and you drop a couple of tablespoons of liquid that would otherwise hit the griddle and stall it. A wet onion steams the meat grey; a wrung-out one fries.