by Rebecca Rupp
“A stew without an onion is worse’n a matinee without candy.”
Classic French onion soup is said to have been created by the dethroned King Stanislaw I of Poland, father-in-law of Louis XV, who had time on his hands during his necessarily prolonged sojourn at his daughter’s court. (Stanislaw is also noted for traveling across Europe disguised as a coachman and for inventing baba au rhum.) The culinary versatility of the onion is perhaps best illustrated, however, by the story of an eighteenth-century French caterer who, faced with hungry customers and no entrée, served up a pair of old water-buffalo leather gloves, shredded and simmered with onions, mustard, and vinegar. The recipients reported them delicious.
Onions came to the New World with the first European colonists. Alexander Whitaker — the clergyman who baptized Pocahontas — wrote in his descriptive Good Newes from Virginia (1613) that “Our English seeds thrive very well here, as Pease, Onions, Turnips, Cabbages.” Yellow storage onions — still the most common kind found today in supermarkets — traveled to America belowdecks on the Mayflower and were planted in the first Pilgrim gardens.
Wild onions, the new settlers soon found, had preceded them: over seventy species of Allium are indigenous to North America, among them wild garlic, ramp, prairie onion, and tree onion. Such wild onions reportedly saved Jesuit explorer Père Marquette and company from starvation on the way from Green Bay to the site of modern Chicago in 1674. The name Chicago, aptly, comes from the Indian Cicaga-Wunj, “Place of Wild Garlic.”
Ubiquitous in later colonial gardens, the onion was a great favorite of George Washington, who referred to it besottedly as “the most favored food that grows.” Colonial onions were eaten roasted, boiled, or pickled. An interesting, if somewhat vague, pickling recipe survives from Harriott Pinckney Horry’s Receipt Book of 1770: it involves soaking the onions in brine in the sun for two days, then immersing them in “strong Vinegar with a good deal of spice.”
Onions were used to treat insomnia (two or three, raw, eaten daily), pneumonia, diabetes, and rheumatism in human beings, and mange in animals. Onion juice was considered an effective antiseptic well into the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, doctors in the Union Army routinely used it to clean gunshot wounds, and General Grant, deprived of it, sent a testy memo to the War Department: “I will not move my troops without onions.” They sent him three cartloads.
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A Misguided Munch
The most expensive onion ever eaten turned out not to be an onion at all. It was off handedly consumed by a nameless sailor in the 1630s on board a ship transporting, among other items of cargo, a load of tulip bulbs.
The bulbs were headed for the gardens of the filthy rich: Europe at the time was in the throes of tulipomania, a craze that sent the price of individual tulip bulbs, newly introduced from the seraglios of Turkey, to astronomical heights. The sailor, who afterward remarked only that he thought it remarkably insipid-tasting for an onion, had snacked on a Semper Augustus tulip bulb worth fifteen hundred dollars on the open market.
* * *
Onions are loosely divided into two categories: storage onions, which are generally stronger-tasting and more pungent, and sweet onions, including Spanish, Vidalia, Walla-Walla, and Bermuda varieties, these last a favorite of Ernest Hemingway. Collectively, they come in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and colors. Bulbs may be flat, round, pear-shaped, or elongated, as in the foot-long onions of Japan. Colors include white (Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World (1919) lists four grades of onion whites: plain, dull, silvery, and pearly), yellow-green, copper, salmon-pink, blood-red, and purple.
And all are stunningly good for you. Avoided by Elizabethans, who liked their ladies plump, on the grounds that it encouraged weight loss, the onion at 38 calories a bulb is a godsend for the struggling twenty-first-century dieter. It also contains useful quantities of potassium, phosphorus, and vitamin C, and the yellow varieties are good sources of vitamin D.
More than that, however, the onion is now touted as a nutraceutical, a portmanteau word cobbled together from “nutrient” and “pharmaceutical,” meaning a food with medicinal, health-promoting qualities. The onion — so yummy on pizza, so tasty in salad — is also a vegetable medicine chest. Onions are excellent sources of flavonoids, powerful antioxidants that have been shown effective in protecting people from a range of chronic diseases.
Red onions, for example, contain more than twice as much of the flavonoid quercetin as kale, more than thirty times as much as broccoli, and forty times as much as green tea. Regular consumption of onions reduces the incidence of stomach and colon cancers, and the risk of cardiovascular disease. The onion’s smelly sulfur-rich compounds have antiasthmatic properties, and its fiber content, primarily in the form of a polysaccharide called inulin, is not only good for the bowel, but has also been shown to reduce blood sugar levels in diabetics. Onions may even be good for your bones: in animal studies at least, an onion peptide has been shown to inhibit osteoporosis, a condition that affects some 44 million Americans.
Unlike the ordinary bulbous onion — where the rule is one seed, one onion — shallots and potato onions are multipliers, and accordingly much more generous with their returns. Shallots are named for the ancient city of Ascalon (now Ashkelon) in Israel, where they were once intensively cultivated. They produce loose clusters of bulbs or cloves, milder-tasting than onions and, unless homegrown, much more expensive. The related potato onions first arrived in the United States in the early nineteenth century: New York seedsman Grant Thorburn offered them as a new introduction in 1828. Larger than shallots, these produce seven or eight deep-yellow-skinned lateral bulbs per plant. Their number and underground location apparently reminded some early grower of potatoes.
Egyptian onions, also called top or tree onions, were unknown in Egypt, but grow wild throughout temperate North America. These peculiar perennials bear their bulbs at the tips of the leaf stalks, hence “top” onion. Both bulbs and leaves are edible. Similarly perennial are chives and garlic-flavored Chinese chives, grown for their tangy leaf stalks, and Welsh bunching onions, which originated not in Wales, but in eastern Asia. The “Welsh” is believed to be a corruption of the German welsch, meaning foreign.
Leeks, sometimes called the poor man’s asparagus, look at first glance like obese scallions. They do not form bulbs, but are grown for their enlarged leaf bases, as are the related Mediterranean kurrats. Rocambole, also called sand leek or serpent garlic, produces both underground bulbs and aboveground bulbils (edible) at the tips of twisted snakelike stalks.
True garlic, multicloved and potent, is beloved of herbal medics and Italian cooks and anathema to vampires and cabbage worms. The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon gar-leac, gar meaning spear because of the vaguely spear-shaped cloves, and leac meaning plant or herb. There are two major subspecies of garlic, colloquially known as hardneck and softneck. Hardneck, A. sativum ssp. ophioscorodon, produces six to eleven cloves around a central woody stalk; softneck, A. sativum ssp. sativum, up to twenty-four cloves around a soft middle stem. Silverskin, the most common garlic in grocery stores, is a softneck.
Thomas Jefferson planted and ate it, but Amelia Simmons of American Cookery (1796) held that “Garlick, tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In Which
PEAS ALMOST
POISON GENERAL
WASHINGTON
plus
Robin Hood’s Revenge,
Thor’s Dragons, An Early American
Pea Contest, Thomas Knight’s
Pocket-Knife Plant, and
Winston Churchill’s
Bare Necessities
How luscious lies the pea within the pod.
EMILY DICKINSON
King John of England, the uncongenial monarch under whom Robin Hood wreaked so much havoc on the rich, died on October 19, 1216. According to the encyclopedia, death was due to dysentery and fever, bu
t according to food historians, it was due to overindulgence in peas, seven bowlfuls at a single sitting. (Alternatively, the fatal dish was lampreys, unripe peaches, or toad’s blood in the royal ale.)
If peas, King John could have done better for himself in the way of last meals. The thirteenth-century pea was tough, starchy, and unpalatable compared to the sweet tender varieties grown today. Even under a heap of feather mattresses, it would have given the sensitive heroine of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea (1835) a lousy night’s sleep and turned her black and blue.
According to Norse legend, peas arrived on earth as a punishment sent by the god Thor who, in a fit of pique, dispatched a flight of dragons with peas in their talons to fill up the wells of his unsatisfactory worshippers. Some of the peas missed the mark and fell on the ground, where they sprouted and developed into pea plants. The new vegetable was placatingly dedicated to Thor and thereafter eaten only on his day, Thursday — and from then on, Thor, when peeved, sent dwarves to pick the pea vines clean. The Chinese claimed that peas were found on journeys through the countryside by the (probably mythological) Emperor Shen Nung, known as the “Divine Farmer,” who also taught the Chinese people to grow wheat and rice, invented the rake and the plow, and discovered tea.
Actually the origin of the pea is a mystery. It’s a food plant so ancient that nobody knows, botanically or geographically, just where it came from. Hedging their bets, plant scientists propose somewhere in a broad swath from the Near East to central Asia — possibly Afghanistan or northern India. Annoyingly, the oldest pea to date turned up outside the hypothetical primal pea zone. Excavated at the Spirit Cave site on the Myanmar (Burma)-Thailand border, the world’s oldest peas — probably gathered wild rather than cultivated — were radiocarbon-dated to 9750 BCE.
Ancient pea remains, however, are ubiquitous. Peas have been recovered from Swiss lake dwellings and from Neolithic farming villages scattered across Europe, and carbonized leftovers from Near Eastern pea feasts — likely domesticated peas — have been dated to 7000 BCE. All these early peas, archaeologists guess, were far tougher propositions than Pisum sativum, the edible peas of today. In order to choke them down, our ancestors probably roasted them and then peeled them like chestnuts.
Peas, both wild and tame, are legumes, members of the family Fabaceae, which bear their fleshy proteinaceous seeds in a protective pod. The third largest of the flowering plant families, trailing only Orchids (Orchidaceae) and Daisies (Asteraceae), the legumes include some 700 genera and 20,000 species worldwide, popping up everywhere from rain forests to deserts. Pea relatives range from minuscule herbs to massive trees, and include lentils, broad beans, chickpeas, soybeans, peanuts, lima beans, kidney beans, carob, licorice, clover, wisteria, mimosa, rosewood, indigo, and kudzu.
The Greeks and Romans grew peas. Hot pea soup was peddled in the streets of Athens; fried peas — or perhaps fried chickpeas or garbanzo beans (Cicer arietinum) — were sold to spectators in lieu of popcorn at the Roman circus and in theaters. Apicius lists fourteen recipes for peas, including basic peas (with leeks and herbs), peas “Supreme Style” (with thrushes, Lucanian sausage, bacon, and white sauce), and peas à la Vitellius (with hard-boiled eggs and honey). According to the fourth-century Historia Augusta, the extravagant teenaged emperor Elagabalus, whose brief reign ended in an assassination arranged by his grandmother, served peas with gold pieces at his banquets, as well as lentils with onyx, beans with amber, and rice with pearls.
Most peas in the ancient world were consumed dried, the drying process being considered essential to cure the pea of its “noxious and stomach-destroying” qualities. Uncured peas were occasionally left on the vines by farmers, with the intention of poisoning pestiferous rabbits, who thus may have gotten the most out of the classical pea. For the next several centuries dried peas remained the rule, convenient because peas thus treated could be stored almost indefinitely for winter use, as ships’ stores, or as a bulwark against famine.
Dried peas were used to piece out wheat flour, or were boiled to make the ubiquitous pease porridge that, as an ever-present staple on the medieval hearth, was served daily, hot, cold, and in the pot nine days old. Not always a simple dish, one recipe of the early eighteenth century began with beef broth in which was boiled a chunk of bacon and a sheep’s head, then added nutmeg, cloves, ginger root, pepper, mint, marjoram, thyme, leeks, spinach, lettuce, beets, onions, old Cheshire cheese (grated), “sallery,” turnips, and “a good quantity” of peas. To obtain a “high taste,” the cook recommended tossing an old pigeon in with the bacon.
Garden peas — grown in kitchen gardens and eaten fresh and green — began to make a hesitant debut in the fourteenth century; and by the fifteenth, English pea fanciers were growing the Hastings, the first English pea thought worthy of a proper name. They were popular enough to be hawked through the streets of London as “Fresh gathered peas, young Hastings!”
The even more popular — perhaps sweeter — Rouncival pea seems to have been developed sometime in the late fifteenth century in the London gardens of the Hospital of St. Mary of Rouncevalles. (Both names come from Roncevaux, the famous pass in the French Pyrenees where Roland trounced the Saracens.) Thomas Tusser, the English farmer-poet who wrote 500 Pointes of Good Husbandrie (1557) — an agricultural instruction manual in which activities for each month of the year are described in rhyming couplets — mentions Rouncival peas in the tasks allotted to January: “Dig garden, stroy mallow, now may at ease / And set (as a dainte) thy runcivall pease.”
That it was grown “as a dainte” indicates that the Rouncival was eaten green, rather than dried and stored. The Rouncival may also have been the first white-flowered garden pea — field pea flowers were a gaudier pink and purple.
By the seventeenth century, the garden or “greene” pea was the pea of choice for the dinner table; the field pea, now designated as “mean,” was the stuff of porridge, pig feed, and the poor. The French were famed for their passion for green peas, a habit they may have picked up from Italy, when Catherine de Medici, who married France’s future King Henry II in 1533, introduced “pisella novelli” from Florence.
By the next century, green pea eating was an obsession at the court of Louis XIV. A May 1695 letter of Madame de Maintenon, last and most successful of the king’s many mistresses (he married her) reads:
“The subject of peas is being treated at great length: impatience to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them, and the longing to eat them again are the three points about which our princes have been talking for four days. There are some ladies who, after having supped with the king, and well supped too, help themselves to peas at home before going to bed at the risk of indigestion. It is a fad, a fury.”
The peas were dunked, pod and all, into a dish of sauce, and then eaten out of the shell. The king himself frequently overdid it in the matter of peas; the royal doctors recommended billiards to alleviate his subsequent digestive woes.
The pea arrived in the Caribbean with Christopher Columbus, who planted some in 1493 in a garden on Hispaniola. It first reached New England in 1602 when Captain Bartholomew Gosnold paused to put in a few rows on the Maine island of Cuttyhunk. The first colonists arrived well equipped with peas. The Pilgrim crop failed the first year (as did the barley, optimistically intended for English beer), but by 1629 the governor’s garden at Massachusetts Bay, according to the Reverend Francis Higginson, was growing green peas “as good as I ever eat in England.” John Smith gloated over the pea crop at Jamestown (“Pease dry everywhere”), and peas figured routinely in the lists of supplies recommended for newcomers by seasoned settlers. One such, dated 1635, calls for “three paire of Stockings, six paire of Shooes, one gallon of Aquavitae, one bushel of Pease.”
Peas were a favorite of Thomas Jefferson, who planted some thirty different kinds in the Monticello gardens. Jefferson was a convivial gardener, known for sharing seeds and plants and delighting in dialogue about the triumphs and tragedies
of gardening. Jefferson family history holds that he originated the Charlottesville neighborhood pea contest, a competition among local gardeners to see who could produce the very first peas of the year. The winner hosted a community dinner in which a featured dish was a serving — or at least a teaspoonful — of the season’s new peas. Jefferson’s peas rarely came in first; the invariable winner seems to have been George Divers of Farmington, a close personal friend, to whom the defeated Jefferson wrote cheerfully and challengingly in 1807: “We had strawberries yesterday — when had you them?”
George Washington noted the appearance of the first peas at Mount Vernon — “Had Peas for the first time in the season at Dinner,” he writes on May 25, 1785 — and, at least according to legend, narrowly escaped death by pea in the Revolutionary War. The story goes that in 1776 Thomas Hickey, a Loyalist sympathizer, had conspired to kill Washington by putting poison in a dish of peas, to be served to him while dining with his fellow officers at New York’s popular Fraunces Tavern. Luckily Fraunces’s young daughter Phoebe learned of the plot and intercepted the fatal dish in time. Hickey was arrested and executed by hanging before an audience of 20,000 outraged patriots.
“The cooking of pease with mint,” wrote Mary Henderson in 1882, “is a good way of utterly destroying the delicious natural flavor of the pea.”
To have peas “in perfection,” Mary Randolph writes in The Virginia Housewife (1824), “they must be quite young, gathered early in the morning, kept in a cool place, and not shelled until they are to be dressed” — after which she recommends boiling for half an hour and serving them up with chopped mint and butter. Actually better yet is to pick them just before popping in the pot, since peas, like corn, deteriorate rapidly after picking. The modern pea, 25 percent sucrose by weight, once picked loses nearly half of its sugar in six hours at room temperature.
