The onion is but the name for a large family, of which shallots, garlic, and chives are chief and most honoured varieties. Moreover, country and climate work upon it changes many and strange. In the south it becomes larger and more opulent, like the women. And yet, as it increases in size, it loses in strength—who shall say why? And the loss truly is an improvement. Our own onion often is strong even unto rankness. Therefore, as all good housewives understand, the Spanish species for most purposes may be used instead, and great will be the gain thereby. Still further south, still further east, you will journey but to find the onion fainter in flavour, until in India it seems but a pale parody of its English prototype. And again, at different seasons, very different are its most salient qualities. In great gladness of heart everyone must look forward to the dainty little spring onion: adorable as vegetable cooked in good white sauce, inscrutable as guardian spirit of fresh green salad, irreproachable as pickle in vinegar and mustard.
Garlic is one of the most gracious gifts of the gods to men—a gift, alas! too frequently abused. In the vegetable world, it has something of the value of scarlet among colours, of the clarionet's call in music. Brazen, and crude, and screaming, when dragged into undue prominence, it may yet be made to harmonise divinely with fish and fowl, with meat, and other greens. Thrown wholesale into a salad, it is odious and insupportable; but used to rub the salad bowl, and then cast aside, its virtue may not be exaggerated. For it, as for lovers, the season of seasons is the happy spring time. Its true home is Provence. What would be the land of the troubadour and the Félibre without the ail that festoons every greengrocer's shop, that adorns every dish at every banquet of rich and poor alike? As well rid bouillabaisse of its saffron as of its ail; as well forget the pomme d'amour in the sauce for macaroni, or the rosemary and the thyme on the spit with the little birds. The verse of Roumanille and Mistral smells sweet of ail; Tartarin and Numa Roumestan are heroes nourished upon it. It is the very essence of farandoles and ferrades, of bull-fights and water tournaments. A pinch of ail, a coup de vin, and then—
Viva la joia,
Fidon la tristessa!
And all the while we, in the cold, gloomy north, eat garlic and are hated for it by friends and foes. Only in the hot south can life ail-inspired pass for a galejado or jest.
To the onion, the shallot is as the sketch to the finished picture; slighter, it may be; but often subtler and more suggestive. Unrivalled in salads and sauces, it is without compare in the sumptuous seasoning of the most fantastic viands. It does not assert itself with the fury and pertinacity of garlic; it does not announce its presence with the self-consciousness of the onion. It appeals by more refined devices, by gentler means, and is to be prized accordingly. Small and brown, it is pleasant to look upon as the humble wild rose by the side of the Gloire de Dijon. And, though it never attain to the untempered voluptuousness of the onion, it develops its sweetness and strength under the hottest suns of summer: in July, August, and September, does it mature; then do its charms ripen; then may it be enjoyed in full perfection, and satisfy the most riotous gluttony.
Shallots for summer by preference, but chives for spring: the delicate chives, the long, slim leaves, fair to look upon, sweet to smell, sweeter still to eat in crisp green salad. The name is a little poem; the thing itself falls not far short of the divine. Other varieties there be, other offshoots of the great onion—mother of all; none, however, of greater repute, of wider possibilities than these. To know them well is to master the fundamental principles of the art of cookery. But this is knowledge given unto the few; the many, no doubt, will remain for ever in the outer darkness, where the onion is condemned to everlasting companionship with the sausage—not altogether their fault, perhaps. In cookery, as in all else, too often the blind do lead the blind. But a few years since and a "delicate diner," an authority unto himself at least, produced upon the art of dining a book, not without reputation. But to turn to its index is to find not one reference to the onion: all the poetry gone; little but prose left! And this from an authority!
The onion, as a dish, is excellent; as seasoning it has still more pleasant and commodious merits. The modern chef uses it chiefly to season; the ancient cordon bleu set his wits to work to discover spices and aromatic ingredients wherewith to season it. Thus, according to Philemon,—
If you want an onion, just consider