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The Seedy Side of Pompeii,
King Cadwallader Carries the Day,
An Odoriferous Constellation,
Demons, Tigers, and Evil Eyes,
The King of Poland’s Soup,
and A Tulip Tragedy
It’s hard to imagine civilization without onions.
JULIA CHILD
Since the 1930s, “to know one’s onions” has meant to be well informed, on top of things, competent, and equal to the odd emergency. Taken literally, however, knowing one’s onions is much easier said than done. Clearly it has driven taxonomists wild: the common onion, scientifically Allium cepa, is a member of a genus said variously to belong to the Lily family (Liliaceae), the Amaryllis family (Amaryllidaceae), or possibly to the Alliceae, a separate family all its own. At a guess there are around 700 species of alliums, many of them edible, including shallots and potato onions (A. cepa aggregatum), Egyptian or tree onions (A. cepa proliferum), Welsh bunching onions (A. fistulosum), chives (A. schoenoprasum), garlic chives (A. tuberosum), rakkyo (A. chinense), leeks (A. porrum), kurrats (A. kurrat), and garlic (A. sativum).
There are also ornamental alliums or “flowering onions,” grown solely for their looks, among them A. moly, the lily leek or golden garlic, the plant that kept Circe from turning Odysseus into a pig, and the spectacular A. giganteum, which bears lavender flowers the size of small grapefruits on towering four-foot stems. The flower cluster (inflorescence) is umbellate, meaning that the stalk or stem terminates in multiple flowers all born from a common point, a structure that resembles a Koosh ball.
Umbellate comes from the Latin umbella, which means parasol, since the individual flowers are often parasol-shaped.
In the common vegetable garden, the common onion rarely reaches the point of flowering. A. cepa is biennial: the tasty bulb that gardeners seasonally yank was intended by the onion plant as food for the following year’s flowers and seeds. Onion bulbs — like ogres, as pointed out in the 2001 animated film Shrek — have layers. Like their possible relatives, the lily and the amaryllis, onions form true bulbs, each composed of a series of tightly overlapping fleshy leaf bases, or scales, surrounding a central bud. “The onion and its satin wrappings,” wrote Charles Dudley Warner, “is among the most beautiful of vegetables and is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can be said to have a soul.”
The scales are crammed with water and starch and held together by a basal plate of stem tissue, from which roots will develop if the onion bulb is planted rather than eaten. The crackly skin (officially known as the tunic) protects the scales from drying out. Because the bulb is a single united entity rather than a conglomeration of separate cloves as in garlic, it was referred to by the Romans as unio, meaning united. From unio came the medieval French oignon, the Anglo-Saxon onyon, and the modern onion.
Onions were among the earliest of cultivated foods and probably among the first vegetables routinely nabbed by primitive hunter-gatherers, who could have easily identified them by their distinctive smell. They are believed to have originated in central Asia and have been domesticated for at least 6,000 years.
Moslem legend imprecisely dates them to the exit from the Garden of Eden: as Satan hastily departed, the angel with the flaming sword hot on his heels, onions are said to have sprung from his right footprint and garlic from his left.
The earliest known written reference to the onion is a Sumerian cuneiform tablet from about 2400 BCE, in which the onion appears as an innocent bystander in a complaint against the city governor, who had illegally co-opted the temple oxen to plow his onion and cucumber patches. Culinary onions are featured in the Yale Babylonian Tablets, which date to 1700–1600 BCE and constitute what may be the world’s first cookbook. The tablets are a collection of caramel-colored clay slabs listing forty recipes for such Babylonian specialties as gazelle, pigeon, partridge, and goat, all heavily supplemented with onions, leeks, and garlic.
According to Herodotus, sixteen thousand talents (960,000 pounds of silver) were spent on onions, radishes, and garlic to feed the laborers for the twenty years it took to build the Great Pyramid at Giza, completed in 2650 BCE and the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Onions appear on a wall painting in the pyramid of Pepi II (circa 2200 BCE), and Ramses IV, who died in 1160 BCE, went to his rest with onions placed in his eye sockets.
The Greeks and the Romans ate onions, though in both societies onions were generally viewed as fare for the lower classes. The first-century Roman cookbook Apicius shuns onions and garlic but does include four recipes for leeks, variously stewed in oil, wrapped in cabbage leaves, cooked with laurel berries, or boiled with string beans. No matter what one’s personal opinion, it would have been politically inexpedient in the first century CE to sneer at the leek: the volatile emperor Nero, who fancied himself a vocalist, consumed them in such quantities to sweeten his singing voice that he was nicknamed Porrophagus, or “Leek Eater.” Nero, who murdered his mother and stepbrother and tossed multitudes of Christians to the lions, was not an emperor to cross in the matter of vegetables.
The largely lower-class Roman military, unashamedly fond of onions, garlic, and leeks, distributed them across Europe in the wake of their conquests. Alliums were portable, adaptable, and easy to plant; one authority points out that the expanding boundaries of the Roman Empire can be tracked by plotting range maps for garlic. The legions’ passion for alliums likely derived at least in part from the plants’ time-honored reputation for promoting strength and courage. The fitness food of the day, onions were fed to Greek athletes in training for the Olympics, and gladiators were massaged with onion juice before entering the arena. In Aristophanes’s play “The Knights,” warriors stuff themselves on garlic in preparation for battle (“Well-primed with garlic, you will have greater mettle for the fight!”). Fighting cocks and warhorses were fed garlic; and in Rome, garlic was dedicated to Mars, the god of war.
Onions were strengthening in other senses too. Archaeologists uncovered a basket of onions in the ruins of Pompeii in the biggest and best of the town brothels — appropriate, since onions were said to “serve for no other thing but to provoke and stirre folke to the act of carnal copulation.” Pliny the Elder mentions that garlic is an aphrodisiac (when pounded with fresh coriander and taken with neat wine); he also lists over a hundred and twenty medicinal uses for various alliums, and claims that leek skins make a nice dye for graying hair. In the Talmud — written around 500 CE — Ezra directs that garlic be eaten on Fridays to encourage Jewish husbands in the performance of their marital duty.
Onions, along with beans and cabbages, were the prime vegetables of the Middle Ages. They were staples of monastery gardens, and Charlemagne, in his detailed Capitularies, listed six kinds to be grown on his imperial estates, including onions, shallots, leeks, and garlic. Chaucer’s Summoner in the fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales was an onion lover: “Wel loved he garleek, oynons, and lekes, and for to drynken strong wyn, reed as blood.”
The Forme of Cury (1390), compiled by the cooks of Richard II, includes a recipe for garlic, boiled whole and served as a vegetable, spiced with cinnamon and saffron; and describes a “Salat” of onion, leek, garlic, and herbs, all torn into little pieces and mixed with oil and vinegar. Chopped and mixed with violets, onions comprised a favorite savory; plain, they were recommended for dog bites, cystitis, and the stings of “venomous worms”; and mixed with honey and hen grease, they were said to remove “red and blue spots” from the skin.
By Elizabethan times, uses of the onion had multiplied. Medicinal uses ranged from the soothing of hemorrhoids to the healing of blisters, and Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, William Clowes, used onion juice to treat gunpowder burns. John Gerard, who must never have tried it, claimed that “the juice of an onion anointed upon a bald head in the sun bringeth the haire again very speedily,” but warned that overindulgence in cooked onions could bring on headaches and dimness of vision.
In the Sky, with Onions
According to Indian legend, it’s onions that we have to thank for the star cluster called the Pleiades. A group of seven young Indian wives, the story goes, were fond of eating onions, but their husbands, disliking the smell of onion breath, became angry and forbade the practice. The wives, after thinking it over, decided that they preferred their onions to their husbands, so they used magical ropes made of eagle down to float up into the sky, where they remain to this day as the Pleiades, presumably eating onions to their hearts’ content.
John Evelyn, in Acetaria (1629), says of onions: “The best are such as are brought us out of Spain, and some that have weighed eight Pounds. Choose therefore the large, sound, white, and thin skinned. Being eaten crude and alone with Oil, Vinegar, and Pepper, we use them in Sallet, not so hot as Garlic, nor at all so rank. In Italy they frequently make a Sallet of Scallions, Chives, and Chibols [a type of leek] only seasoned with Oil and Pepper, and an honest laborious Country-man, with good Bread, Salt, and a little Parsley, will make a contented Meal with a roasted Onion.” To dream of such a contented meal, however was an ill omen, said to warn of impending domestic disaster.
The problem with onions, almost all agree, is that they smell. Onion breath has been bedeviling the socially sensitive since the first hunter-gatherer ate the first wild onion bulb. Once you’ve eaten an onion, everybody knows it, which is why Don Quixote cautioned Sancho Panza to “Eat not garlic nor onions, lest they find out thy boorish origin by the smell.” The American cowboys called onions “skunk eggs.”
One source suggests that smell made the leek the national emblem of Wales. The story goes that when the Welsh under King Cadwallader set out to fight the Saxons in the seventh-century Battle of Heathfield, their patron Saint David directed them to wear leeks in their caps. The usual explanation is that the identifying leeks allowed the combatants to tell friend from foe. An alternative holds that the Saxons were vanquished not only by Welsh military prowess, but by the “horrible odor” of leeks as well.
Occasionally we’ve even gone so far as to ban the horrible odor by law. In Hartsburg, Illinois, for example, it’s illegal to snack on onions in a movie theatre; in West Virginia, children are forbidden to come to school smelling of “wild onions”; and in Alexandria, Minnesota, husbands are forbidden to make love to their wives if their breath smells of garlic, onions, or sardines. Proposed remedies for onion eaters include post-onion mouthfuls of parsley, celery tops, coffee beans, cardamom seeds, and cloves; and Pliny the Elder swore by roasted beetroots.
Demons, Tigers, and Mosquitoes
The dynamic duo of smell and sting have given the onion and its relatives a reputation as a powerful all-purpose repellent, thought since ancient times to be capable of fending off devils, demons, vampires, witches, serpents, and the common cold. The ancient Greeks hung out strings of garlic to deter witches. The Koreans ate garlic before traveling through the mountains to protect themselves from tigers.
In medieval England, a mix of garlic and holy water drunk from a church bell was said to divest the possessed of demons; and in the thirteenth century, garlic was used to ward off the Black Plague. An onion, thrown after a new bride, was said to protect her from the Evil Eye, and in Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Professor van Helsing drapes Lucy in garlic to fend off the vampiric Count Dracula.
What garlic does appear to fend off — at least somewhat — are mosquitoes and ticks. Garlic preparations are used in natural anti-insect sprays.
Nothing, unfortunately, does much good. Onion, digested, generates an array of odoriferous volatile oils that enter the lungs where, exhaled, they create onion breath. The only truly effective solution, unacceptable to most of us, is not to eat onions.
The molecules that bring about this social stigma are sulfur-containing compounds that ordinarily function in the onion plant as an anti-pest defense. When an onion is sliced, chopped, bitten, stabbed, or otherwise attacked, cell disruption activates a chemical booby trap, bringing an up-until-then stolid and quiescent molecule called propenyl cysteine sulfoxide in contact with the enzyme allinase. The resultant rapid reaction spews out dozens of volatile, smelly, and eye-stinging substances that serve as the equivalent of Mace for threatened vegetables. Foremost among these in the onion is the sulfurous n-propylthiol; and the prime mover in garlic — one of the three most disliked odors in America, according to the San Francisco Chronicle — is diallyl disulfide.
As well as the odoriferous sulfur-based volatiles, onions exude pungent fumes that make the eyes water. The tear-inducing compound, powerful enough, said Benjamin Franklin, to “make even heirs and widows weep,” is formally called the lachrymator, from the Latin lacrima, “tear.” Its chemical structure, dickered over in laboratories since the 1950s, was definitively identified in 1979 by Eric Block and Robert Penn at the University of Missouri as a specific conformation of propanethiol S-oxide.
Propanethiol S-oxide is so volatile that it barely hangs around long enough to study and is accordingly difficult to isolate and purify. It very rapidly hydrolyzes in water, such as that present in the human eye, breaking down to produce hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid, which in turn irritate the eye and cause tearing. Onion peelers can avoid a bout of weeping by chilling the onions prior to applying the knife — low temperature reduces the volatility of the lachrymator — or by peeling under cold running water, which dissolves the lachrymator before it reaches the eyeball.
In O. Henry’s short story “The Third Ingredient,” the recently unemployed Hetty Pepper sets out to track down an onion for her stew, because “A stew without an onion is worse’n a matinee without candy.” Onions — eaten on every continent except Antarctica, to the tune of 105 billion pounds worldwide per year — are essential components of any number of creative cuisines. They figured prominently, for example, in the sixteenth-century French restaurants, which originally were not food-based business establishments but restorative soups, flavored with onions and herbs. By the eighteenth century, the name had acquired its modern meaning, spreading from the soup to the place in which it was eaten.
“A stew without an onion is worse’n a matinee without candy.”
Classic French onion soup is said to have been created by the dethroned King Stanislaw I of Poland, father-in-law of Louis XV, who had time on his hands during his necessarily prolonged sojourn at his daughter’s court. (Stanislaw is also noted for traveling across Europe disguised as a coachman and for inventing baba au rhum.) The culinary versatility of the onion is perhaps best illustrated, however, by the story of an eighteenth-century French caterer who, faced with hungry customers and no entrée, served up a pair of old water-buffalo leather gloves, shredded and simmered with onions, mustard, and vinegar. The recipients reported them delicious.
Onions came to the New World with the first European colonists. Alexander Whitaker — the clergyman who baptized Pocahontas — wrote in his descriptive Good Newes from Virginia (1613) that “Our English seeds thrive very well here, as Pease, Onions, Turnips, Cabbages.” Yellow storage onions — still the most common kind found today in supermarkets — traveled to America belowdecks on the Mayflower and were planted in the first Pilgrim gardens.
Wild onions, the new settlers soon found, had preceded them: over seventy species of Allium are indigenous to North America, among them wild garlic, ramp, prairie onion, and tree onion. Such wild onions reportedly saved Jesuit explorer Père Marquette and company from starvation on the way from Green Bay to the site of modern Chicago in 1674. The name Chicago, aptly, comes from the Indian Cicaga-Wunj, “Place of Wild Garlic.”
Ubiquitous in later colonial gardens, the onion was a great favorite of George Washington, who referred to it besottedly as “the most favored food that grows.” Colonial onions were eaten roasted, boiled, or pickled. An interesting, if somewhat vague, pickling recipe survives from Harriott Pinckney Horry’s Receipt Book of 1770: it involves soaking the onions in brine in the sun for two days, then immersing them in “strong Vinegar with a good deal of spice.”
Onions were used to treat insomnia (two or three, raw, eaten daily), pneumonia, diabetes, and rheumatism in human beings, and mange in animals. Onion juice was considered an effective antiseptic well into the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, doctors in the Union Army routinely used it to clean gunshot wounds, and General Grant, deprived of it, sent a testy memo to the War Department: “I will not move my troops without onions.” They sent him three cartloads.
A Misguided Munch
The most expensive onion ever eaten turned out not to be an onion at all. It was off handedly consumed by a nameless sailor in the 1630s on board a ship transporting, among other items of cargo, a load of tulip bulbs.
The bulbs were headed for the gardens of the filthy rich: Europe at the time was in the throes of tulipomania, a craze that sent the price of individual tulip bulbs, newly introduced from the seraglios of Turkey, to astronomical heights. The sailor, who afterward remarked only that he thought it remarkably insipid-tasting for an onion, had snacked on a Semper Augustus tulip bulb worth fifteen hundred dollars on the open market.
Onions are loosely divided into two categories: storage onions, which are generally stronger-tasting and more pungent, and sweet onions, including Spanish, Vidalia, Walla-Walla, and Bermuda varieties, these last a favorite of Ernest Hemingway. Collectively, they come in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and colors. Bulbs may be flat, round, pear-shaped, or elongated, as in the foot-long onions of Japan. Colors include white (Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World (1919) lists four grades of onion whites: plain, dull, silvery, and pearly), yellow-green, copper, salmon-pink, blood-red, and purple.
And all are stunningly good for you. Avoided by Elizabethans, who liked their ladies plump, on the grounds that it encouraged weight loss, the onion at 38 calories a bulb is a godsend for the struggling twenty-first-century dieter. It also contains useful quantities of potassium, phosphorus, and vitamin C, and the yellow varieties are good sources of vitamin D.
More than that, however, the onion is now touted as a nutraceutical, a portmanteau word cobbled together from “nutrient” and “pharmaceutical,” meaning a food with medicinal, health-promoting qualities. The onion — so yummy on pizza, so tasty in salad — is also a vegetable medicine chest. Onions are excellent sources of flavonoids, powerful antioxidants that have been shown effective in protecting people from a range of chronic diseases.
Red onions, for example, contain more than twice as much of the flavonoid quercetin as kale, more than thirty times as much as broccoli, and forty times as much as green tea. Regular consumption of onions reduces the incidence of stomach and colon cancers, and the risk of cardiovascular disease. The onion’s smelly sulfur-rich compounds have antiasthmatic properties, and its fiber content, primarily in the form of a polysaccharide called inulin, is not only good for the bowel, but has also been shown to reduce blood sugar levels in diabetics. Onions may even be good for your bones: in animal studies at least, an onion peptide has been shown to inhibit osteoporosis, a condition that affects some 44 million Americans.
Unlike the ordinary bulbous onion — where the rule is one seed, one onion — shallots and potato onions are multipliers, and accordingly much more generous with their returns. Shallots are named for the ancient city of Ascalon (now Ashkelon) in Israel, where they were once intensively cultivated. They produce loose clusters of bulbs or cloves, milder-tasting than onions and, unless homegrown, much more expensive. The related potato onions first arrived in the United States in the early nineteenth century: New York seedsman Grant Thorburn offered them as a new introduction in 1828. Larger than shallots, these produce seven or eight deep-yellow-skinned lateral bulbs per plant. Their number and underground location apparently reminded some early grower of potatoes.
Egyptian onions, also called top or tree onions, were unknown in Egypt, but grow wild throughout temperate North America. These peculiar perennials bear their bulbs at the tips of the leaf stalks, hence “top” onion. Both bulbs and leaves are edible. Similarly perennial are chives and garlic-flavored Chinese chives, grown for their tangy leaf stalks, and Welsh bunching onions, which originated not in Wales, but in eastern Asia. The “Welsh” is believed to be a corruption of the German welsch, meaning foreign.
Leeks, sometimes called the poor man’s asparagus, look at first glance like obese scallions. They do not form bulbs, but are grown for their enlarged leaf bases, as are the related Mediterranean kurrats. Rocambole, also called sand leek or serpent garlic, produces both underground bulbs and aboveground bulbils (edible) at the tips of twisted snakelike stalks.
True garlic, multicloved and potent, is beloved of herbal medics and Italian cooks and anathema to vampires and cabbage worms. The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon gar-leac, gar meaning spear because of the vaguely spear-shaped cloves, and leac meaning plant or herb. There are two major subspecies of garlic, colloquially known as hardneck and softneck. Hardneck, A. sativum ssp. ophioscorodon, produces six to eleven cloves around a central woody stalk; softneck, A. sativum ssp. sativum, up to twenty-four cloves around a soft middle stem. Silverskin, the most common garlic in grocery stores, is a softneck.
Thomas Jefferson planted and ate it, but Amelia Simmons of American Cookery (1796) held that “Garlick, tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.”