ONIONS Peeling back the mystery of
Pity the poor onion. Always the culinary bridesmaid. Never the bride.
You don’t sit down to a nice bowl of onions for dinner. No one makes onion-flavored soft drinks, or if they do, I don’t want to know about it.
Even the lowly garlic bulb is the sole focus of at least two restaurants in California. But onions? Nada.
Onions are the supporting players in a dish — important as a flavoring, but used only to make the star attraction taste better. When served a plate of carbonnades a la flamande, no one ever says, “the beef was good, but those onions were really spectacular.”
But the time has come to give the humble onion its due. To bring it to the fore. To peel back the layers, so to speak, of what makes them so good.
Therefore, I prepared a handful of dishes that brought the onion out front and center and put it in the spotlight. With these dishes, the oftoverlooked onion is finally the bride.
I stared with the simplest and most straightforward of all onion entrees, an onion sandwich.
If your initial reaction to the idea of an onion sandwich is anything like mine, right now you are saying “ick.” But bear with me, because I saw the recipe for it in a cookbook by Jacques Pepin, and it is his re-creation of a favorite dish he was served by James Beard.
Those are two of the greatest food minds of the last 80 years. If they like onion sandwiches — nothing more than thin slices of sweet onion on white bread spread with a mixture of mayonnaise and mustard — then I, for one, am going to try them.
So I tried them. And let me tell you, Jacques Pepin and James Beard know what they are talking about. Sweet onions are mild enough to be eaten raw, in small doses. And the combination of mayonnaise and mustard — which is basically Durkee Famous Sauce sandwich spread — is the smooth and lightly spicy counterpoint the onion needs.
Next up was a dish I’ve made several times over the years, an onion tart.
This tart takes full advantage of caramelization, an easy but fairly slow process that brings out all of an onion’s rich, golden sweetness. I caramelized the onions by cooking them over low heat for about a half-hour and then spread them over a sheet of puff pastry. I added kalamata olives for flavor, and a few anchovies.
The classical French way to make this tart is with anchovies. I happen to like anchovies, though I recognize I am in an ever-shrinking minority. If you don’t enjoy them, the tart is still perfectly good without them. It just doesn’t have the happiness that anchovies bring it.
I next wanted to make onion soup. Because a particular French onion soup is quite Famous in town, I decided to make a different kind of onion soup altogether. I made a curried onion soup.
It’s an onion soup with curry powder, which, as it turns out, goes extremely well with onion soup. Fresh lime juice brings a nice, tart edge to it, and if the curry flavor is too strong or spicy, you can always temper it with a little cream.
No, that’s not just an excuse to add cream to soup, but yes, it also is. A little cream makes almost any soup taste better; it’s an old restaurant trick.
While searching for temptingly suitable dishes to make for this story, I stumbled upon a recipe for lettuce soup over a smooth onion custard. The lettuce soup was not onion-forward enough for my purposes, but I couldn’t get the idea of onion custard out of my head.
It sounded heavenly, and it was. The recipe is from Joel Robuchon, who was even more of a culinary light than Pepin and Beard. The only question was what to do with it that still made the onions the centerpiece of the dish.
Strawberries go with onions, I thought (and they do, though the idea is unconventional). Balsamic vinegar especially goes with onions. And nothing can touch strawberries macerated in balsamic vinegar.
So I topped my onion custard with balsamic strawberries. Though sweetened strawberries with balsamic vinegar is often served as a part of dessert, my unsweetened version was savory. Try serving it as a side dish at an elegant dinner and watch your guests’ looks of
curious surprise turn to ones of total delight.
For my last dish, I went back to my concept of making the onion inescapably at the forefront of the dish with Marinated
Slow-Roasted Onions.
The simple marinade is red wine vinegar diluted with an equal amount of water and flavored with fresh rosemary. The onions are cut in half and allowed to soak in the marinade overnight before being roasted to bring out their natural sweetness. A bit of brown sugar in the marinade gives it a lightly sweetand-sour tang, and the browned onion halves are also gorgeous.
It is the type of dish that could be served on a weeknight or for a big holiday dinner. It is so hearty and good that your family and friends won’t even stop to think that eating onions by themselves is unusual.