Kenji agrees:
Humans have been cooking meat with onions for at least as long as recipes have been recorded, but I’d argue that the combination was simplified to its primal core during the Great Depression, when Homer Davis and his son Ross invented what they called the Depression burger at the Hamburger Inn in El Reno, Okla.
By smashing shaved onion — a half-onion’s worth per burger — into a few ounces of ground beef, they not only offered his customers a better value in their five-cent hamburger. They also inadvertently created a sandwich that, like pizza margherita or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I consider a culinary endpoint: a creation so perfect in its simplicity that it cannot be improved upon, only tweaked.
