Where did popular deep fried foods originate?

Concession stands are often synonymous with hand-held fried food. But where did those foods come from? It can be challenging to figure out where foods were created, but we'll do our best to sift through the sands of time and come up with at least a good story.

On our path, we'll encounter conquerers, refugees, and traders. We'll meet entrepreneurs looking to improve old recipes to make more popular food. They'll all share their crispy creations with the people they encounter, no matter where their journies take them.

Where did French fries come from?

The famous thinly sliced potatoes fried in boiling fat until crispy are ubiquitous worldwide. While the name implies a French origin and the Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire in the 1500s made them the first Europeans to come into contact with potatoes, it's most likely the Belgians who created french fries.

Local legend says the delicacy was created in the 1680s in Namur, Belgium. That winter, the story goes, the rivers froze, preventing the locals from catching and frying fish, a favorite regional food.

They turned to the potato, and a few centuries later, when American doughboys fighting in World War I encountered the thinly cut batons of deep-fried potatoes, they assumed they were French because that was the language spoken in the region.

While the American soldiers may have misnamed french fries, the name or phrases it derives from predate The Great War.

Who made the first onion rings?

Slicing onions, coating them in a batter, and deep frying them is obviously delicious; it's no wonder it's been developed worldwide.

One of the earliest examples of batter-coated fried vegetables is pakora, originating in India in the 16th century.

A recipe that essentially gives you the modern onion ring was first published in 1802 by John Mollard in the British cookbook "The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined."

The first published reference in the U.S. comes more than a century later in a 1908 edition of the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Sentinel, with a "French Fried Onions" recipe by Fannie M. Farmer. Two years later, the New York Sun reported french fried onion rings had become "a novelty that progressive New York restaurants are introducing with great appreciation from their patrons." A Crisco ad in a 1933 edition of The New York Times Magazine is created as one of the first widely published recipes for onion rings.

As more and more Scottish people migrated to the southern United States, they brought their fried chicken techniques with them. In her seminal 1824 cookbook "The Virginia House-Wife," Mary Randolph published a recipe that would clearly be fried chicken to modern diners.

A likely reason for the development of the recipe is who was cooking it. By the mid-19th century, enslaved African Americans had fully embraced the cooking method as part of their culture and probably brought West African traditions of seasoning to it.

While it was also key to the food culture of white people in the antebellum south, it "became a route to economic empowerment for many African Americans." An example of this from pre-refrigeration days was African American women selling fried chicken to train passengers because it traveled easily. This led to roadside fried chicken restaurants, the most successful of which was Harland Sanders'. "Colonel Sanders," as he became known, was the founder of what would become KFC. He's also credited with popularizing using a pressure fryer which he used instead of a frying pan.

The quicker cooking method allowed Sanders' restaurant to franchise across the planet, cementing the connection of southern-style fried chicken as the quintessential fried chicken, sometimes supplanting, sometimes influencing, and sometimes existing alongside fried chicken traditions in South Korea, Japan, Guatemalan, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere.

• Spear a hot dog on a wooden stick.
• Coat it in a batter containing at least some cornmeal.
• Deep fry it.

In the first several decades of the 20th century, sausages or hot dogs encased and baked in cornmeal were popular. In 1940, more than 70,000 were sold over three weeks in New Orleans alone, and there are mentions of them being all the rage in Dallas the year before.

A 1929 catalog includes a listing for the "Krusty Korn Sausage Dog Pan." The device baked a hot dog inside batter while shaping the batter into something resembling an ear of corn.

The earliest mentions of sausages fried in cornmeal date to the 1920s, first in Texas, where German immigrant sausage makers dipped them in batter and fried them to make the links more appealing to customers who shied away from the non-fried sausages.

The second case was in Adel, Iowa, where Roger Newman ran out of hot dog buns while serving food at a high school sporting event. He went to his tavern, coated the hot dogs in cornmeal batter, fried them, and brought them back to the game.

Notice the lack of sticks in both examples.

A 1927 patent by Stanley Jenkins of Buffalo, N.Y., shows us sticks for the first time.

When was battered, deep-fried fish created?

Tracking the history of fried fish will be simpler if we limit the definition to fillets coated in a batter of flour and eggs and deep-fried until crispy.

So for simplicity's sake, we will.

But this straightforward answer still has a long and far-reaching path.

The first recorded recipe for battered fried fish comes from a 12th-century Moorish cookbook. The recipe, called hut mu'affar, starts with lightly poached fillet rolled in a mixture of bread crumbs or wheat flour, eggs, pepper, coriander, cinnamon, and spikenard (an ingredient now mainly used in hair tonics like Vitalis), and then fried in olive oil.

The method spread from the Iberian Peninsula through trade routes to southern France, coastal Italy (where it's known as filletto di baccala), and Greece.

After the Reconquista asserted Spanish and Portuguese dominance over most of the peninsula, the dish, known as pescado frito in Spanish, spread in other ways.

The cooking method spread when Portuguese traders arrived in Japan in the 16th century. In Japanese, it became simply tempura.

What's the history of mozzarella sticks?

Bread and cheese is a timeless combination that speaks to the hungry stomachs of all humans. But wrapping that hunk of cheese in the bread and throwing it into a vat of boiling oil is an act of madness so great it's genius.

Our earliest written recipe for batter-coated cheese fried in fat is from a 1393 French book called "Le Menagier de Paris." The recipe for pepefarces calls for mixing egg yolks, flour, salt, and wine and rolling thin slices of cheese in the batter. The cheese is fried in a skillet of beef marrow. However, Dr. Joel Jensen, an author and food historian, told Thrillist in 2017 that modern cheese sticks didn't take their cues from medieval French appetizers. "In fact, modern mozz sticks probably have less in common with the long and storied history of Italians and French frying their cheese and more in common with pizza or French fries," Jensen told Thrillist.

The modern mozzarella stick results from a confluence of culinary trends in the United States.

By the 1960s, mozzarella cheese was being mass-produced to meet growing demands for Italian-American food and pizza.

Where are funnel cakes from?

Frying batter is an ancient practice. Some sources claim fried cakes were made in Egypt and China as far back as 8000-5500 BCE.

Yeast-risen fried dough dishes are traced back to early-medieval Persian and Arab cuisine. The recipes spread to Europe; an early recipe is found in Anglo-Norman manuscripts. Many of these recipes use yeast and sourdough as leavening agents.

When Pennsylvania Dutch settlers came to Pennsylvania in the 17th and 18th centuries from what's now Germany, they brought recipes of batter poured through a funnel into hot oil with them. Eventually, baking soda became the leavening agent, and the modern funnel cake began to take shape, with a recipe appearing in 1935.

The treat took off in popularity in the 1960s at the Kurtztown Folk Festival. Funnel cakes spread nationwide over the next few decades as deep fryer technology improved.

Arkansas restauranteur Bernell "Fatman" Austin is credited with popularizing fried dill pickles at his restaurant, the Duchess Drive-In in Atkins, Ark., about an hour west of Little Rock.

In 2014, Fatman's son David Austin told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that in the early 1960s, his dad started thinking about a way to use pickles to drum up business (the Duchess was located across the street from the Atkins Pickle Company).

He eventually hit on deep frying them and spent the next two years refining his recipe. By the summer of 1963, he'd perfected the recipe: cutting surfboard-shaped planks from whole dills pickles and breading them in a secret coating only known to fewer than 20 people.

The Hollywood Cafe in Robinsonville, Miss., also claims to be the birthplace of the salty, crunchy snack, but the Hollywood Cafe didn't open until 1969, a year after the Duchess Drive-In closed and Fatman had opened his second restaurant, the Longer.

Deep-fried pickles spread nationwide to sports bars, dive bars, and barbecue restaurants in the next few decades. They've grown so popular that national chains feature them on their menus.

When were arancini first made?

Fried rice balls stuffed with meat, tomato, or cheese are a Sicilian staple. Available all over the island at bars, and roadside stalls, arancini are classic street food: easy to carry, quick to prepare, and delicious.

Arancini's were developed during the island's period of Islamic rule.

North African and Arab colonizers brought spices, fruits, and vegetables to Sicily in the 9th-11th centuries. A 10th-century recipe differs from the savory arancini common today. It included ricotta cheese, saffron, and other spices.

The name means "little oranges" in Italian, a fruit introduced to the island during Islamic rule. When Europeans retook the island, their cuisines were integrated into Sicilian food culture, including the reintroduction of pork which became a filling in arancini. After the island's Spanish rulers introduced tomatoes in the 16th century, all the pieces were in place for arancini to become the popular snack it is today.

A recipe using the word "empanada," which comes from the Spanish word meaning to bread or to coat with bread, appeared in a 1520 Catalan cookbook by Robert de Nola. In the book, "Llibre del Coch," de Nola's empanadas are a double-crust pie cut into slices instead of the modern hand-held pastry. Empanadas shrank to their current hand-held size after Spain invaded the Americas in the 16th century, making them easier for workers and soldiers to eat while on the move and away from home.

Today's empanadas differ from region to region. The crust of Argentinian empanadas tends to be more pastry-like. In Venezuela and Colombia, corn flour replaces wheat flour. In parts of Central America and the Caribbean, yuca and plantain are used instead. Filipino empanadas use rice or galapong wrappers. In some places, empanadas are even baked.

But no matter how different they are and how integral to their new homes they've become, they all share a common link to medieval meat pie in Galicia.

The history of food is more than just people making recipes with ingredients they have on hand to sate their hunger. It's about exploration, trade, sharing culture, and adapting to new climates. And while it can also have a darker side of conquest and subjugation, time and time again, we've seen people groups survive and create and share new and existing food traditions wherever they go.