Like fish sticks, fried squid rings are an invention of the modern era, made possible by refrigeration and mechanized manufacture. The history is recounted in various places online. For a snapshot, read the following:
Fried calamari first came into the public eye through a written article published by the New York Times in 1975. Since then, the American people have kept this welcomed dish in high demand. Although, the New York Times was the first media publication to recognize calamari as an ultimate game changer, calamari did not reach popularity until the early 1980’s. During that interim time, calamari remained a very exclusive dish, being offered only in high class and exotic restaurants in prominent cities such as New York and Boston.
That is a kindly, fluffy treatment from a seafood site. Looking elsewhere, one might find a dank piece from The Daily Beast that blames calamari on a consortium of pols and gangsters in Rhode Island:
With virtually no sales of squid in the ’70s, by 1989 127 million pounds had sold nationwide, according to the American Institute of Food Distributors, Inc. By 1994, squid sales were up to 215 million pounds.
Calamari, as everyone who’s been to a white tablecloth Italian restaurant or a TGIFridays knows, eventually became as ubiquitous on menus as chicken. The New York Times has even used its meteoric rise in popularity back in the ’80s to create an index for measuring food trends, called the “Fried Calamari Index.” The time it takes for a food item—say, quiche, pesto, hummus, quinoa, kale—to go from total obscurity to mainstream mania is denoted as one Standard Calamari unit. In the case of the namesake unit, it took about 16 years, as measured by the rise in the number of mentions “fried calamari” or “fried squid” in The New York Times.
Few states know of the now-insatiable demand for squid better than Rhode Island.
The Rhode Island squid-fishing fleet is the largest on the East Coast, accounting for about 54 percent of all the squid landings in the Northeast. It takes in nearly 17.5 million pounds of squid landings per year, valued at $18 million, making it hugely profitable, especially considering the after-catch profits for seafood processors, dealers, and restaurants throughout the state.
(The Rise of Calamari, Fueled by Rhode Island’s Dirty Politics, 2019.)
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