The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Food worth crying over
From medieval England to modern Paris, this paean to the onion is a joy
240pp, Bloomsbury, T £16.99, RRP£20, ebook £14
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I’m a bad cook, but I do like frying onions: it’s the only part of cooking I do like. I braise them with ginger and garlic for Cornish chicken korma or burn them for dumplings for Cornish Jewish chicken soup. (The burning is essential. It makes the dumplings sweet.) Onions are the beginning of all the foods I love.
Mark Kurlansky, Bon Appétit’s Food Writer of the Year, feels the same. But he has analysed his onions. This is part history, part memoir, part recipe book – who doesn’t want competing recipes for onion soup (so good for a hangover) with annotations? He offers onioneating celebrities – Ernest Hemingway loved peanut butter and onion sandwiches while fishing, though Kurlansky does not recommend them. Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh painted them. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote that a gift of an onion “could save your soul”. “Though I am bad,” said Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, “I did once give away an onion.”
So is Kurlansky the Dostoyevsky of onions? He must be. “According to a family myth,” he writes, “unproven and unprovable, as all myths should be, once, as a small child, I stole a freshly baked loaf of onion rye bread and hid under the bed and ate the whole thing. I suppose” – and I found this oddly heartwrenching – “it is my madeleine.” The book is similarly elegant.
Kurlansky understands my partiality for cooking onions and nothing else: it is the beginnings, and I am not a patient woman. “Cooking begins with onions because once onions are sautéed, the kitchen fills with a warm, sweet, inviting fragrance that seems to promise delectable things to follow.” That’s it: without wanting to sound too much like Kurlansky, who keeps his prose out of Pseud’s Corner anyway, onions are about promise.
In language they give us metaphors for the ordinary. The French say, “ce n’est pas mes oignons” (it’s not my onions – or business). In
English, men are exhorted to “know your onions”. But they are not ordinary. An onion is a bulb, not a root, “perhaps the most delicate of all bulbs”. If an onion flowers, it will not be a good onion: “it can’t do both [bulb and flower] well.”
Even so, Kurlansky mourns its possibilities, because it is a truism that biographers fall in love with their subjects: “It is surprising that the onion has not received more recognition as a flower.” It is “an extraordinary lily, certainly far more talented than other lilies”, he writes, adding, “which is why modern botanists don’t classify them as lilies anymore.” It is more aggressive than a lily: “If the bulb of an onion is attacked, it spits back with a ferocity unmatched by other plants.” That is, it emits sulphur.
I now realise this is one of the things I like about onions. A cooked onion can be more than 50 times as sweet as table sugar. They are combustible. Ramses IV had onions placed in his eye sockets at death. (To Egyptians, the onion – it comes from the Latin union, or “one” – was “a metaphor for the structure of the universe”.) Ancient Greek athletes rubbed themselves with onions and ate them by the pound: did Ernest Hemingway know?
But that’s the thing with a common bulb: everyone has a take. The second part of The Core of an Onion is recipes with multiple variation, which are useful. (I will keep this book.) Kurlansky tells us that as women were historically excluded from respectable careers, the clever often gravitated to cookbook writing. Each recipe comes with its history and a list of its appearances in culture. In medieval England people drank onion soup with cloves and milk; in southern France they made it with vinegar and sometimes tomatoes.
The superb one is from Paris, where they serve it with toasted bread and grated cheese. Kurlansky, through obsessive searches of the archives, believes the toasted bread-and-cheese variation originated with Cora Millet-Robinet, a Poitou political progressive: beyond that, the trail runs cold. But at least I know who to thank. I don’t think for a minute that this book is really about onions and, probably for that reason, it is definitive.
Ancient Greeks would rub onions on their skin; one pharaoh had two placed in his skull
BETWEEN FRIENDS by Elaine & English Showalter 496pp, Virago, £x.xx
Charting the interwar correspondence of novelists Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, this collection maps their unlikely but sustaining friendship – a great feminist partnership.