Act one: Dipping my toes in Vidalia
I wasn’t a terribly picky eater when I was a kid. I ate most everything, save for the strongest of dinnertime flavors, the usual kid-unfriendly suspects such as asparagus and salmon. I didn’t hate onions, though. Bits of onions in stews, spaghetti and potato salads went unnoticed.
My palate hadn’t yet progressed to an appreciation of large hunks of raw onion, however—a fact my folks lamented whenever we pulled through a Burger King drive-thru. I’d be having that Whopper my way, no onions.
There was a special time at the start of each summer, though, when my parents would start trying to sneak raw onions before me, on burgers and in salads. For a few middling weeks at the start of each season, I’d stop dead in my tracks, my hand hovering over my plate.
“Are these Vidalia onions?”
“Yes. Just taste them.”
“They’re not sweet. They’re not Vidalias, are they?”
I could tell. In reality, I now realize that they’re not that much sweeter. They’re not candy. But even as a child, I had begun to have brand loyalty to sweet onions from a place that I knew was nearby—60 miles give or take up Interstate 16. I had an English teacher in high school who somehow managed to commute from Vidalia to Savannah and back each day in a white Mazda Miata. To me, Vidalia was a mythical place—a place where onions were impossibly sweet, the soil sown with sugar and molasses, I imagined.
If the onions were from Vidalia, I knew it was a whole different story. They wouldn’t burn.
I would gladly press the pillowy soft hamburger bun down into the stack of onion, into the tomato and the Bubba Burger, theonion briefly snapping under the pressure, fracturing additional onion flavor into the burger.
For a moment, then, my childish dislike of raw onions would be cast aside, and with it so could other childlike affectations. I would sit up straighter. I eat rawonion, I’d think. Like a grown-up. I go to the store by myself, sometimes. I am starting to like adult movies like The Fugitive and Forrest Gump. Look at me eating raw onion.
As summer would wane, and regular yellow onions would subsume their sweet counterparts, my hand would return over my plate at dinnertime. No, thank you.
Act Two: Learning to love the burn
My first post-college job was at the University of Georgia Libraries, a fun position that enabled me to read, make money and hang out in Athens while I applied to law school that year.
One day at lunch, a table was set up in the break room by two researchers from the College of Agriculture. They were doing a study on the different pungency of certain onions, and if you volunteered to try two tiny dixie cups-worth of raw onions, you’d be rewarded with a crisp, clean $5 bill.
The odor was sharp, but my desire for two minutes of quick work for money on the fly was sharper. I grabbed the cups and started crunching. One was a regular onion, almost acrid in its bite. The other was sweeter–the Vidalia I’d known from my youth.
It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable tasting session, downing raw onion on an empty stomach before lunch, but I quickly shoved the $5 in my pocket and headed downtown for a free taco lunch on the College of Ag. Haley 1, Weird onion experiment 0.
I thought I was fine after that. But then the hunger began. I craved raw onion in a way that I’d never had before. I began ordering them everywhere, adding them to every taco, hamburger, or sandwich I could get my hands on, no matter the time of year or type of onion. Even the scorching red fury of purple onions proved no match for this desire.
Act three: Finding snack inspiration in history
In 2006, I was reading a collection of stories by famed New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell called “Up in the Old Hotel.” The stories featured incredibly detailed sketches of characters who frequented New York City neighborhoods in the early half of the 20th century.
One of my favorites was about an old-fashioned bar that had sawdust on the floor and only a few types of strong, dark lager on tap. Toward the afternoon, the bartenders of this ancient establishment would put out snack trays.
These edibles usually consisted of salted and brined things, but also huge chunks of cheese and onion to go with bread and crackers. The laying out of food was mainly just to make sure the drunks didn’t get too drunk, too soon, but I figured bar food has always been bar food–and it’s usually crappy and delicious.
It was at this point that my love affair with onions became a household tradition. Prior to this, I’d order them extra while out at restaurants.
But after reading this story and imagining what it’d be like to transport back in time and throw back a bottle of ale with a huge chunk of bread, cheddar, and onion, I knew what I had to do.
My usual snack thus became a handful of Ritz crackers, some chopped up Kroger-brand mild cheddar, and some diced up yellow onion. Vidalias, of course, in the summer, but I welcomed whatever onion happened to be in the fridge.
Epilogue
To this day, I gauge when I have to go to the grocery store by how soon I run out of onions.
When making tacos, I sometimes wonder what one ingredient that, if missing, would force me to abandon my dinner plans.
You can have a taco without tomatoes, I suppose. Without lettuce, definitely. Cheese? Getting one step closer to ordering Chinese take-out. But no onions? Throw it all in the trash.
A house without onions is no home at all.