Page 70 - July18LivingSCCLmagazine

Know Your M Onions
any idioms like “know the ropes,” “raining cats sweetness in our spaghetti sauce (plenty of sugar in an
and dogs,” or “high as a kite” have arguable onion), and the “meat” in our onion soup. They are origins. Like them, “know your onions” has several usually too pungent for eating raw in salads or toppings. possible original meanings. Until an idiom appears in
print and can be definitely dated, it is hard to pin down For using raw, it’s best to stick to the sweet onions:
just when and how any phrase came into common usage.
Each year the National Onion Association, onions-usa.org, celebrates only the regular onion onions: the white, yellow, and red bulb onions we use in every month. Knowing your onions can be as involved a pursuit as knowing
the ropes on a ship
or the backstage at a
theater—there are so
many varieties, and
culinarily speaking,
they have many different uses. Good cooks usually know the onion ropes—or have ropes of onions.
The first onions that come to mind and bring tears
to our eyes (it’s the sulphur in them) are the everyday onions. They come in those string or plastic mesh bags and leave their onion skin bits all over our carrier bags and refrigerator vegetable drawers. The now rarely-used thin, stiff, transparent copy paper for typewriters was named for this stuff: “onionskin.” These everyday onions are those best used for cooking. They’re what we want for sautéed onions on our burger, the zing and even
70 LIVING @ SCCL, July 2018
the Bermudas, the Vidalias from our own neck of the woods, the Walla-Wallas, and
their like. They are full of vitamin C. Bermudas are usually available year round, but the real sweet ones arrive in the late spring,
just in time for summer salads. Whatever the onion, whatever the month, for cooking or for eating raw, be aware that the flatter the onion, even with those local Vidalias, the sweeter it will be. Save the pointy onions for sauce.
Along with those large, tasty
bulbs, the allium genus, named for the Latin word for garlic, includes that same
garlic as well as the shallots, scallions, leeks and chives among the dozen or so varieties grown commercially and seen in every supermarket. These add a more subtle flavor to our food. There are hundreds of other onion species growing in the wild. You’ll know them by their aroma, sometimes from many feet away. All the plants in this genus have pretty flowers, especially the chives, but there are many spectacular garden flowers to be grown
in our gardens. They’ve got names like Globemaster, Gladiator, Mount Everest, even Powder Puff. They’re long-lasting and critter-resistant too.
By Lee Johnston
Common onions: (Back, L to r) yellow, white, (center) shallot on top of pearl, green scallions.