Onion — Layers of Flavour, Layers of Meaning
Today I made onion soup.
It belongs among the national dishes of France, part of French identity, and therefore also part of that large European treasury of jokes which other nations keep at the expense of the French. Somewhere, long ago, I heard that the only thing harder to endure than French onion soup is a German accordionist. And if he begins to sing as well, then the matter becomes a kind of natural disaster; and, as with all natural disasters, the only sensible response is evacuation.
As it happens, I once listened to German accordion music on an evening in Munich.
Not only did I survive; I even enjoyed it.
The accordionist, a friend of my friends, was blond, gentle, shy, and almost painfully polite. I rewarded him with applause and even asked him to play something else, at which his cheeks turned red and his whole face opened into a smile of satisfaction. And indeed, it was not bad at all. Unusual, certainly — especially for us Serbs, who are accustomed to an entirely different accordion repertoire — but excellent nonetheless.
After the first two songs, some popular German tunes which were not especially kind to my ear, he nonchalantly moved into classical music. It was the first time I had ever heard Beethoven, Strauss, and even Ravel played on an accordion. When he played the Moonlight Sonata, he definitely won me over.
Of the two supposedly unbearable things on the European continent, then, only one remained for me to try: onion soup.
So, here we are.
While browsing the internet, I found several versions of the famous French soup. I peered into the refrigerator and, delighted to discover that I had everything I needed, tied on my frilled apron, took out my grandmother’s wooden spoon — a true status symbol in our family, inherited rather than bought, made of cornelian cherry wood, more than half a century old, and still a source of envy among my cousins — and plunged into aromas, skins, small pebbles of cheese, and juices.
Very soon I discovered that a good deal of philosophy, and quite a lot of psychology, can rest inside a single onion.
I remembered Paravindra, a Sikh acquaintance of mine — Indians with turbans and eyes darkened with kohl — who once assured me, on a sweltering day while we wandered through a bazaar, that the onion represents the ego. It is leafy and layered, he said, and when those layers are peeled away, instead of reaching a solid core, one arrives at emptiness. And that, according to him, is what the ego really is.
The thought stayed with me.
Naturally, curious as always, I began to look further. And it turned out that Paravindra was not alone at all. Far from it. People had been seeing more than a humble vegetable in the onion for thousands of years.
The wise Egyptians revered the onion. Its spherical form and concentric rings seemed to them to suggest eternity, the return of life, the mystery of what continues beyond the visible body. Onions were placed in burials, and their strong scent was believed to possess a kind of awakening force, as if the dead might be called back through smell itself.
There were other, more earthly associations too. The Egyptians believed that onion juice, and especially its powerful smell, stimulated the flow of sexual fluids. The onion was not merely food; it belonged to the body, to vitality, to heat, to those hidden forces by which life insists on continuing.
The Greeks, practical as ever when the body was concerned, gave onions to athletes, believing that they would lighten or balance the blood. Roman gladiators, on the other hand, were rubbed with onions before combat, as if the plant’s sharpness could pass through the skin and firm the muscles for battle.
And then there is Plutarch, who records that the Romans avoided onions in certain contexts because they associated them with the waning of the Moon. So the onion, that ordinary thing we chop without ceremony beside the stove, had already moved through the ancient world as symbol, medicine, stimulant, taboo, and bodily charm.
During the Middle Ages, onions became so valuable in parts of Europe that they were sometimes used almost like currency. They could be given in payment, used to settle rent, offered as wedding gifts, or presented as gestures of goodwill. Remarkably, in Siberia, onions continued to function as a form of exchange well into the middle of the eighteenth century. All this from something that makes us cry over a chopping board.
After less than an hour, the soup was ready. My child was sceptical. Onions are not exactly a favourite food of children.
My mother, however, bravely dipped in her spoon and made the first furrow across the liquid surface.
I stood there, grinning with all fifty-two teeth, holding my breath. It felt as though the entire kitchen had fallen silent and was waiting for judgement. I awaited the verdict of the greatest culinary authority in the neighbourhood, and it seemed to me that her spoon was travelling far too slowly towards her lips.
What if she did not like it?
Perhaps it was tasteless. Bland. Or perhaps I had oversalted it. Should I have added more goat’s cheese, firm and strong in aroma? Perhaps I should have used the whole wheel. Or perhaps there was already too much cheese, and the onion — oh, the onion. I should have tasted it first. What if I had bought the wrong kind, that unpleasant sort, juicy but too sharp, bitter as wormwood, and ruined everything? I should have tested it before I threw it onto the butter.
So many thoughts, and several more besides, passed through my head in those few seconds while the spoonful of soup travelled from the bowl to my mother’s mouth.
To prevent this story from becoming longer than the history of the onion itself, my mother said, and I quote:
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“Unusual, but good. Tasty, no doubt about it.”
I liked it too; and my child ate an entire bowl. I believe we shall be making it more often from now on.
God’s Spherical Aphrodisiac
Perhaps Paravindra was right to pause before the onion.
Perhaps every vegetable that has made its way so deeply into human hunger, medicine, ritual, poverty, sexuality, humour, and tears deserves at least one moment of metaphysics.
The onion enters the kitchen as something almost too ordinary to notice. It waits in baskets, cellars, market stalls, string bags, and the bottom drawers of refrigerators. It costs little. It keeps well. It asks for no ceremony. And yet the moment it touches hot fat, the whole house changes.
A raw onion can be sharp, rude, almost aggressive. It stings the eyes, bites the tongue, clings to the fingers, announces itself in the breath. But under heat it becomes something else entirely. Its violence softens. Its whiteness turns translucent, then golden, then brown. What began as a wound becomes sweetness.
Perhaps this is why people have never quite known whether the onion belongs to the body, the soul, the poor man’s kitchen, the lover’s bed, the athlete’s blood, the soldier’s muscle, or the grave.
It belongs, somehow, to all of them.
Layer by layer, it resists simplification. The Egyptians saw eternity in its rings. Paravindra saw the emptiness of ego. Ancient physicians and athletes saw heat, blood, and strength. The Romans saw both danger and power. Medieval households saw value. The poor saw flavour where there was little else to cook with.
And I, standing over a pot of French onion soup with my grandmother’s wooden spoon in my hand, saw something humbler but no less true: the onion is one of those things by which a kitchen proves it is alive.
Without onion, a poor soup remains poor. With onion, even poverty gains depth.
That may be its real secret. It comes to us cheap, sharp, and ordinary, and then, given time, butter, heat, and patience, reveals itself as sweetness hidden under tears.
Recipe: French Onion Soup, Simplified
This is not the grand restaurant version, with perfect bowls, perfect stock, and a theatrical crown of melted cheese. This is the household version: good onions, butter, patience, bread, cheese, and the courage to serve something made almost entirely from what children usually mistrust.
Ingredients
3–4 large onions, thinly sliced
2–3 tablespoons butter
a pinch of salt
1 tablespoon plain flour
a splash of dry white wine, optional
about 1 litre beef or vegetable stock
slices of day-old bread, toasted
grated Gruyère, or firm goat’s cheese
a little extra cheese for the top
Method
Slice the onions thinly.
Melt the butter in a heavy pan. Add the onions and a pinch of salt, then cook them slowly over a low to medium heat until they soften, darken, and turn golden. Do not hurry this part. The soup begins here, in the moment when the onion stops being sharp and starts becoming sweet.
Stir in the flour and cook for a minute or two.
Add a splash of dry white wine, if using, and stir well, scraping the bottom of the pan.
Pour in the stock and simmer gently for 20–30 minutes.
Toast the bread and cover it with grated Gruyère or firm goat’s cheese.
Ladle the soup into ovenproof bowls. Place the toasted bread on top, sprinkle with a little more cheese, and put the bowls under a hot grill until the cheese melts and turns golden.
Serve hot, with laughter and courage. If the child eats a whole bowl, consider the soup a complete success.
