‘The Core of an Onion’ Review: A Tale Both Raw and Sweet
Until I read Mark Kurlansky’s “The Core of an Onion,” I gave little thought to the contents of the red net bag in the corner of my cupboard. Although I’m pretty sure that I eat more than the national average of more than 20 pounds a year, I had never rubbed one of the odoriferous alliums all over my body to improve my workouts, eaten one to enhance my performance in bed, tossed one in my children’s bath water to make them grow taller or mixed the juice of one in my coffee to beat a cold.
These are just some of the fascinating uses for onions in Mr. Kurlansky’s lively cavalcade of onion facts and lore from around the globe and across the ages. The author’s longtime specialty is to explore the world through single items in our diet. In his book “Cod” (1997), he tells the story of how one fish drove the exploration, and later the exploitation, of the North Atlantic, from the time of the Basque fishermen to today’s Newfoundlanders. “Salt” (2002) observes world history through a grain of sodium chloride. “The Big Oyster” (2006) makes the case that New York’s economy and culture were built on the bivalves.
Julia Child said that it was hard to imagine a civilization without onions. They inspired still-life paintings by Renoir and Cézanne. To the short-story writer O. Henry, a stew without onions was “worse’n a matinee without candy,” even though his contemporaries referred to them as “skunk eggs.” The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda described the onion as “more beautiful than a bird.” As for the rest of us, we can’t eat enough of them. Today, onions are the second-most-produced vegetable in the world, behind only tomatoes.
High in vitamin C and containing calcium and iron, onions are a staple of cuisines the world over. In ancient Egypt, slaves building the pyramids ate them for strength. According to the Book of Numbers, the Hebrews grumbled to Moses about having nothing to eat but manna from heaven. They felt deprived when they wandered in the onionless desert. “If you free your people and give them food from God,” Mr. Kurlansky observes tartly, “you don’t expect them to complain, ‘But where’s the onions?’ ”
Olympic athletes in ancient Greece prepared for the games by eating onions and also used the plant’s juice both as a beverage and a body rub, for stamina and good fortune. Inhabitants of North Africa thought the pungent vegetables conferred a very different type of energy. The “Perfumed Garden,” a 15th-century Arabic sex manual, noted that onion juice mixed with honey improved performance in bed. Perhaps their aphrodisiacal attributes explain why archeologists excavating Pompeii found onion remains in the ruins of a brothel.
Onions were also believed to have wide-ranging medical benefits. They were said to prevent hair loss and cure coughs. Hippocrates recommended them as a defense against pneumonia and used them to help heal cuts. Medics traveling with Ulysses Grant called on onions’ antiseptic properties to treat wounds during the Civil War. As recently as World War II, Russian soldiers applied them to injuries to prevent infections. French revelers turned to pre-dawn bowls of oniony soupe d’ivrogne (“drunkard’s soup”) to sober up.
In Mr. Kurlansky’s description, onions take on anthropomorphic qualities. They are “mild unless attacked, he writes. “But bitten or cut, they retaliate” with a “toxic spittle” that reacts with the water in their assailants’ eyes to produce painful sulfuric acid. Other sulfur compounds in the plant combine with ammonia and pyruvic acid to generate the pungent taste and smell humans either love or hate.
Heat brings about a complete transformation in onions. Cooking removes their bitter pungency and creates a chemical compound that can be more than 50 times sweeter than sugar. Perhaps it was inevitable that humans would try to sidestep the cooking. Plant breeders are going one step beyond sweet Vidalias and Walla Wallas to develop a variety lacking the chemicals that produce tears. “Supposedly, it will be oniony without the pain,” writes Mr. Kurlansky. “But will that be an onion?”
“The Core of an Onion” is aimed at those looking to enjoy the full spectrum of the vegetable’s qualities, offering more than100 recipes for soups, sauces, puddings, custards, cakes (yes, cakes!), tarts, sandwiches and more. The recipes primarily function as historical artifacts that shed light on the societies in which the dishes were created—“the days when recipes were truly written,” according to Mr. Kurlansky, and their authors allowed to “wax poetic.” Intrepid cooks may try to follow these, provided they are willing to wade through archaic prose and are comfortable measuring in gills, knobs, pinches and wineglassfuls.
The authors of some of these recipes appear in the book as characters in their own right. Hannah Glasse rose to fame in the 18th century through a series of popular cookbooks that documented preindustrial British cuisine. She became so well-known that Samuel Johnson insisted that she must have been a man—or men—writing under a pseudonym. Agnes Bertha Marshall became a Victorian-era precursor of today’s celebrity chefs, with books and well-attended cooking demonstrations. She even developed a line of merchandise to sell to devoted fans.
No American chronicle of foodways would be complete without an appearance from James Beard, for whom an onion sandwich made a great meal—an opinion he shared with Charles Dickens, who considered a slice of onion and bread a worthy working-class lunch. Beard constructed his sandwich with butter-slathered oatmeal bread and paper-thin slices of onion. Ernest Hemingway, not usually extolled for his kitchen skills, added peanut butter to bread and a slice of onion in his “Mount Everest Special,” so named because he contended it was “one of the highest points in the sandwich-makers’ art.” Mr. Kurlansky dismisses Papa: “Try it if you want, but I’m not recommending it.”
“The Core of an Onion” is unfailingly brisk and pleasant but, especially when compared to Mr. Kurlansky’s other contributions to the culinary oeuvre, it’s something short of a fully satisfying meal. He deftly peels away the layers of the onion only to reveal little of substance at its core.
Mr. Estabrook’s most recent book is “Just Eat.”
Comments
Post a Comment