The Almighty Onion

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That's the around-the-year story of the common storage onion. Insects and disease, you ask? I can't help you there, as I have had neither. If you do, have your soil tested, increase the humus in your soil by adding organic matter, and be sure not to plant onions in the same soil more than once every three years. I don't know of any animals that eat onions except us.

Onions transplant easily; we can start seedlings indoors for any variety that needs at least thirteen hours of daylight to bulb. They should be started about eight weeks before transplanting. The tops may be clipped to five inches at that point.

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I will put any onion on my hamburger, but a thick slab of sweet onion is surely the best. I can't think of sweet onions without remembering the best onion rings I ever had. You may find it hard to believe, but these were served on a Coast Guard cutter.

The Coast Guard is small, has a limited number of ships, and has perhaps an excessive number of four-stripe captains. They occasionally have a very senior captain on a small ship because he needs some sea duty. These Captains have certain privileges: they can have someone transferred. In this case, my ship got a captain who had a favorite chef. He made the best onion rings ever. I think we had onion rings once a week for the eighteen months that the captain was with us. Fortunately, our cruises were only a month at a time, because the sweet onions needed for this delicacy do not store well.

Other members of the onion family — the proper Latin family name is Allium — are also wonderful friends of a chef. When I was a bachelor, I found cooking a meal for a date was not only cheap but made a great impression. Instead of putting raw onions in the salad, I rubbed the wooden salad bowl with a clove of garlic before tossing. I also had a garlic press which I used to squeeze garlic juice into melted butter. I spread the garlic butter between the slices of French or Italian bread and heated it inside a paper bag in the oven.

The main course might have been stir-fry with scallions, omelet with shallots, or spaghetti with onions in a red sauce. Chives might have been sprinkled over any of them. The only member of the family that was ignored was leeks. I never cooked with leeks nor have I ever grown them because, I suppose, they were not grown or eaten at home when I was growing up. I'm trying to remedy that this year; the leek seedlings are up and growing and I'm anticipating vichyssoise in the fall.

Leeks are like fat scallions. They don't bulb. I think one of the reasons I have ignored them, other than not having a childhood memory of them, is that blanching them in the garden — so they have more white than they would otherwise — sounds like work. The instructions for growing leeks say plant in the garden, and when a certain size, transplant into a trench, then fill in the trench as they grow so they will develop a longer white portion. I like the method described in Johnny's Selected Seed catalog. "Sow in flats in February or March, a quarter-inch apart, a quarter-inch deep. Transplant to cell-type containers when large enough to handle. Keep well fertilized. Large transplants will grow the best leeks! In spring, when eight to eighteen inches tall, transplant outdoors, six inches apart, in rows twenty-four inches apart, by dropping plants in holes dibbled about six inches deep. Only an inch or two of leaves need extend above the soil surface. Do not firm soil; allow irrigation or rain to fill in the dibble hole. When using the dibble method, hilling is reduced or eliminated." This all sounds good to me.

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