Today, for reasons opaque, I look at onions:

Sweet by any name: Because a ubiquitous marketing campaign has proved once again that Marketing Is Everything, many folk here in the eastern United States don’t realize the Vidalia onions of Georgia aren’t the only sweet onions, and they aren’t the progenitor of (most) of the others. Quoting from Oregon Live, a website for The Oregonian, “The Vidalia sweet onion was first grown, completely by accident, in 1930 by a farmer named Mose Coleman.” In contrast, the Walla Walla sweet onion came into being when Peter Pieri immigrated to the United States from Corsica in the late 1800’s, bringing “a bunch of onion seeds from Corsica” when he did so. Sweet onions aren’t any sweeter than ‘regular’ onions, but they have only half the pyruvic acid of the typical mild onion, the yellow. Sweet onions thus have less bite (by half!). They’re planted in the fall in low-sulfur volcanic soil–hence another celebrated sweet onion, Maui Sweets. Because sweet onions are juicier, i.e., they contain a lot more water, they’re softer which means they have to be picked and processed by hand, and their shelf-life is short.

I’ve never had a Maui sweet onion, but I’ve had both Walla Walla’s (hey, they’re grown only 160 miles from my boyhood home) and Vidalia’s, and I prefer the former. The Vidalia’s just don’t seem as sweet to me. The linked article in the previous paragraph notes the Walla Walla’s hit the palate with sweetness first followed by pungency, whereas the Vidalia do the opposite. Maybe that’s it. All I know, is I know how to caramelize an onion thanks to Vivian Howard’s book This Will Make It Taste Good which emphasizes the lengthy period of time necessary to caramelize them, and the need to overload the skillet to use the moisture in the onions to steam them as they caramelize.

A final onion note (a thoroughly intended pun): here’s a great onion novelty song from 1966, the year I left elementary school. May your tears be of joy or at least may they promise a tasty near-future.