Onions and Garlic by Martha Jay

Author:Martha Jay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Picturesque poverty: John Singer Sargent, Venetian Onion Seller, 1882.

Léon Bonvin, Cook with Red Apron, 1862. This French watercolour depicts a simple scene in which the cook prepares commonplace vegetables: leeks, turnips, lettuce and carrots.

The English social researcher Henry Mayhew, in his London Labour and the London Poor (1851), reported that even the lowest of the low ate onions. This magisterial book of social research contains thousands of interviews with the working people of London, from street entertainers to prostitutes and mudlarks, who searched for sellable items in the mud of the banks of the Thames. He confirmed that ‘The greatest sum of money expended by the poor upon any vegetable (after potatoes) is spent upon onions – 99,900l. being annually devoted to the purchase of that article’, adding that a piece of bread and an onion was ‘to the English labourer what bread and an apple or a bunch of grapes is to the French peasant – often his dinner’. He also described the poor onion-sellers of London, many of whom were Irish. ‘Onion selling can be started on a small amount of capital’, he explained, and quoted one Irish lady:

I’ll tell you the thruth – we does best on ing-uns [onions] . . . The three of us now makes 1s. and sometimes 1s. 6d. a day, and that’s grand doin’s. We may sill [sell] bechuxt [between] us from two to three dozin ropes a day.

Even then, though, complaints were made about foreign street traders who undercut their competitors’ prices, and one costermonger expressed a fear that this meant that he would soon no longer earn a living wage.

That Victorian housewife par excellence Mrs Beeton wasn’t fond of garlic, but used onions liberally in sauces, soups and stews, as well as serving them up baked as a side dish (which, she reports, would come in at the thrifty sum of tuppence a head). She suggests the handy time-saving tip of caramelizing onions with water, sugar and vinegar and bottling the resultant elixir for use in gravy. In her Book of Household Management, she outlines the onion’s properties, with just a little bit of caution:

Of all the species of allium, the onion has the volatile principle in the greatest degree; and hence it is impossible to separate the scales of the root without the eyes being affected. The juice is sensibly acid, and is capable of being, by fermentation, converted into vinegar, and, mixed with water or the dregs of beer, yields, by distillation, an alcoholic liquor. Although used as a common esculent, onions are not suited to all stomachs; there are some who cannot eat them either fried or roasted, whilst others prefer them boiled, which is the best way of using them, as, by the process they then undergo, they are deprived of their essential oil. The pulp of roasted onions, with oil, forms an excellent anodyne and emollient poultice to suppurating tumours.

One can indeed make onion wine, although homebrew Internet forums report that it is best used as a marinade for chicken or fish, rather than a ‘drinking wine’ – a nice distinction.

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