Talking of the proper need of appreciation that might be rendered to some of nature’s goodly gifts, if only they were presented to us as something rare and novel—what of the humble but invaluable onion? “The onion,” as Stevenson says in his masterpiece, Prince Otto ‹and great was my satisfaction when I first read the pronouncement›, “which ranks with the truffle and the nectarine in the chief place of honour of earth’s fruit.”
Truffle and nectarine are doubtless honourable terms of comparison, but I make bold to believe that any well-constituted jury of epicures would not hesitate to award the humble onion the place paramount among all the savours of civilized cookery. There are a certain number of curiously constituted people who absolutely refuse to countenance the onion in any connexion, however subdued and distant; who profess, whether in æsthetic affectation or through some innate queasiness, to look upon it as pure abomination. There are also those who assume a similar intolerant attitude towards tobacco. But who shall deny that, even as tobacco to the meditative and restful moments, the savoury onion has not added through the ages an incalculable zest to the hour of physical restoration? There could be no cuisine, on any varied scale, without it.
“If the onion did not exist,” said a great cordon-bleu, paraphrasing a well-known philosophical pronouncement, “it would have to be invented.”
Discreetly introduced, and subdued by happy blendings, it holds the finest of fumets for your gastronomist’s palate: and, in all its own undisguised vigour, it will invest the coarsest or most tasteless food with never-failing allurement for robust appetites, whatever changes be rung upon the raw or pickled, the white-boiled, the golden-fried, or the brown-stewed.
It must have been that russet background of onion which justified my youthful preconceived notion of the pricelessness of “Red Pottage” as an article of food. It no doubt fixed the taste for life. Of course, in all matters of earthly enjoyment, the “psychological” moment ‹which, by the way, is so often purely physiological› plays an important part. Certain tastes reveal themselves only as pleasurable in certain surroundings. A draught of coarse, dark wine of la Mancha, sucked out of the goat-skin sack, with its obtrusive, pitchy twang, will be a pure delight on the side of some dusty, stony Castillian road. And no one who has not had, in some wild out-of-the-way mountain village, to break his fast at peep-o’-day upon a chunk of grey bread, stone-ground and tasting of the wheat-fields, a handful of salt and a couple of Spanish onions, will ever know all the excellences of that juicy bulb.
It is reported that, like his furiously assertive relation, garlic, the onion has very definite medical virtues. Some claim for it a power to cure sleeplessness—dreaded distemper—and also various antiseptic properties. This is as may be. The province of the precious plant, the duty which it fulfils well and simply, is that of supplying savour to things that may be nutritious but lack appetizing virtue. Many are the instances that might be adduced in support of this economic plea, but none more directly to the point than that of the soupe à l’oignon, which your thrifty French housewife contrives at shortest notice—the traditional “soup meagre,” object of such bitter contempt in our beef-gorging Hogarthian days.
This new culinary topic sets me once more back in the streets of old Paris, on the occasion when I made personal acquaintance with the possibilities of a penny meal—the best appreciated breakfast I have ever known.
It was in the very last of my French days. Paris had then recovered from the miseries of the German siege and the nightmare of Commune anarchy, three years past. Within the next few months a new life was to be opened to me in England. The prospect of the great change, albeit fraught with some features of gravity, was exhilarating.