The Core of an Onion
Peeling the Rarest Common Food—Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
An Eater Best Food Book of 2023
A Smithsonian Best Food Book of 2023
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cod and Salt, a delectable look at the cultural, historical, and gastronomical layers of one of the world's most beloved culinary staples-featuring original illustrations and recipes from around the world.
As Julia Child once said, "It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions."
Historically, she's been right-and not just in the kitchen. Flourishing in just about every climate and culture around the world, onions have provided the essential basis not only for sautés, stews, and sauces, but for medicines, metaphors, and folklore. Now they're Kurlansky's most flavorful infatuation yet as he sets out to explore how and why the crop reigns from Italy to India and everywhere in between.
Featuring historical images and his own pen-and-ink drawings, Kurlansky begins with the science and history of the only sulfuric acid–spewing plant, then digs through its twenty varieties and the cultures built around them. Entering the kitchen, Kurlansky celebrates the raw, roasted, creamed, marinated, and pickled. Including a recipe section featuring more than one hundred dishes from around the world, The Core of an Onion shares the secrets to celebrated Parisian chef Alain Senderens's onion soup eaten to cure late-night drunkenness; Hemingway's raw onion and peanut butter sandwich; and the Gibson, a debonair gin martini garnished with a pickled onion.
Just as the scent of sautéed onions will lure anyone to the kitchen, The Core of an Onion is sure to draw readers into their savory stories at first taste.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Food historian Mark Kurlansky goes deep on one of the first foods cultivated by humans. Onions are second only to tomatoes in worldwide popularity, in part because they can be grown pretty much anywhere. (Did you know that Americans eat over 20 pounds per person per year?) But as Kurlansky details, onions are more than just a food—poets and philosophers have long used the bulb as a metaphor for life. Across the world, onions are an important cultural symbol: the Welsh have used the leek as a patriotic symbol for centuries, and Native Americans have been fighting for decades for their right to harvest ramps, a type of wild onion, in national parks that used to be tribal lands. Kurlansky really shines when he examines centuries’ worth of recipes for onion dishes, from French onion soup to India’s pakora fritters to the humble onion ring. Cooks and history buffs alike will be charmed and fascinated by The Core of an Onion.
