“One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world” – Robert Farrar Capon
It starts underground. Twofold, really, the growing of the onion and the making of good steel. Both come from the earth and both are elemental transformations. The act of smelting and the act of cooking are humanly transformation, divinely inspired. It was cooking that led us to alchemy. If fire and water and salt could transform something pungent, bloody, uncontained into one of savor and energy, what else could be transformed? We’ve made gold before, so we tried to make it again. But I skip ahead of myself. We are still underground and in the elements. And onion and knife are our goals, but we still have months and months until we eat.
An onion takes twenty to thirty days to reach full maturity if planted green, 100 to 175 days if planted as a dry bulb. Meanwhile, for our steel knife, we need the building blocks of iron and carbon, elements not created but discovered. Instead of a growing, we have a making. This may take a while, so we may as well settle in.
There are two things we really need: 1) a mature onion 2) a sharp knife. Both bring equal, if opposing virtues, to the table.
An onion, like all of us, starts as a seed. Do we start as a seed? I think we do.
Right now my son or daughter is growing in the darkness and my wife is vomiting in a toilet every day and that is a kind of fertilizing of a field. Is it strange to make a comparison between my unborn child and the onion that we’ll be chopping for stew or caramelized in transformative fat? Probably. Yet an app on my phone tells me every morning what fruit or vegetable our small human is comparable to. Today our child is an onion, a tin solider, or a croissant with fingerprints. But this is no Solomon and his court of advice, no children born or yet unborn will be harmed in the creation of this meal.
The point is: we have more in common with an onion than we might like. If we share a certain amount of our DNA with a banana ((between 41-50% depending on the source, certainly more than I’m comfortable with), how much more so with an onion? Onions have, in fact, five times the amount of DNA as humans. There’s a famous genetic test associated with the vegetable named the Onion Test. The Onion Test puts us humbly in our place. Scientists used to think the more DNA an organism had, the more complex a being it was. Into this enter the humble onion, with a cellar structure so simple you can identify the building blocks of life under a simple, middle-school science class microscope. That extra DNA, scientists concluded, must be junk DNA – DNA that serves no purpose. The DNA is on standby, like an onion on your cutting board, awaiting something no one can quite predict yet, its final purpose unclear. So, it is possible that when you cut an onion you condemn a complex being to oblivion. Or, alternately, to a higher purpose.
Is this layered onion more complex than my yet born son or daughter growing organs within the nurturing confines of my wife’s organs? I don’t know, but the question rings with a certain energy of inadequacy. If an onion so outranks us in a realm of genetic excess, how much do we have thin strands of genetic connection with every cellular organism threaded throughout this planet? It’s in our genetics, it’s in the wombed darkness we begin with, and the one that we return to as well. It should be noted onions can be transplanted or jumpstarted by planting immature bulbs. This too is not so different from us, a comfort we can all take.
We have less in common with a sharp knife, though we should arguably have a fiercer desire to knife relation than to onion kinship. There is iron in our blood. We could do worse than to hang on a kitchen shelf or fasten ourselves magnet-like to a wall and be sharpened every 6 months, rinsed after use. We could be something important in the process of alchemical creation, the reducer of truckloads to mouthfuls, and the instigator of a good meal. Of course there’s the other part to consider – a knife’s ability to harm. A sharp knife almost took off my finger as I slammed it into an avocado that I held in my hand (the intention being to impale the pit and remove in sort of a splintering flourish, with more elegance than can be achieved via spoon) The real result? Knife cut through flesh then skin then skin again and flesh, much cussing and small scars. So perhaps we do have as much in common with a knife as we do onion, an onion being our genetic compatriot and brethren in the miasmic soup of life and the knife being our spiritual match—the metaphor of our behavioral and social markers – utility battling inherent harm, capacity for creation versus capacity for destruction.
So chopping an onion then is an experiment in self dissection. I must then amend my previous instructions. We need three participants: 1) a mature onion 2) a sharp knife 3) a willing instigator. All three parties carry a kind of harmony of spirit and intent; a modified syzygy of sorts – earthy bodies of no consequence aligned heavenly in a small act of destructive creation. This we can agree on as a good point to start. Onion, knife, and self balanced in trinity.
As for the process of cutting it must first start with the process of contemplating. I’ll confess we have a head start on that, but we’ve missed one crucial step: we have yet to be officially introduced to Robert Farra Capon Rumination should begin by shaking hands with Capon. In good conscience, the responsible and most prudent thing would be to read his entire book: The Supper of the Lamb. His book is without a doubt a spiritual wellspring of any meditation on the nature of onions, and a great debtor to this one. And if I owe Capon, I then owe my dear friends who introduced me to his obscure book – urban monks who excel at both fasting and feasting, braid challah dough with floured hands, and who taught me food is both spiritual and ordinary, necessary and transcendental.
It would be remiss of me, probably, to let you assume that my onion treatise is informed solely by out of print Penguin classics and spiritual brethren. No, the man who truly taught me how to dice an onion was Andrew Rea, YouTube chef extraordinaire and the creator of “Binging with Babish.” Rea has taught many of us internet buffoons proper basic knife skills. This is something Capon might be ashamed of, to be included in the same paragraph as the website YouTube, properly capitalized. Or even the word website. Capon championed old things, anachronisms even when he authored his unorthodox book of recipes and theology in 1967. He collected old iron, his grandfather’s wavy breadknife;had that certain backwards nostalgia we might associate with grander generations, say we believe in that type of thing. He also would be horrified, I’m certain, of the Instapot, that grand electrical contraption that most of my own soups now come from. Babish/Rea on the other hand – though a great fan of anachronistic processes himself—is a gadget enthusiast and makes his living as a professional YouTuber (to which I will admit some Capon-like revulsion to typing in a sentence). So, as most modern humans we find ourselves at a state of compromise, caught halfway between our ideals and the reality of convenience. Halfway may not be a bad place to find ourselves, closer to a lens of moral honesty (if not integrity) than most other aspects of our life. So in chopping an onion we also delve into the ethics of cooking and the comparative nature of morality.
Such a thing can’t be avoided – onions make philosophers of us all.
If chopping an onion creates in us a philosopher, then it also makes us simultaneous actors and audience. Perhaps a better, more accurate word pairing is do-er and observer. I cannot chop an onion while wearing glasses. My eyes, seemingly too used to the artificial protection of contacts, have lost their habit of self-guarding. When I cut an onion in contacts, I slice with practiced precision. When I cut an onion with my glasses, I weep. I castigate myself for laughing at the onion protection goggles that populate the landscape of Sky Mall magazines and late-night infomercials. Those are the true geniuses, those avoiders of suffering. Conversely, there is something to be said for paying the true price of mutilation. A small sacrifice of salt and water is fair enough price of lament for something that took months to grow, whose lineage may very well be traced back to the noble first onion and is now at the beginning of its end. While cutting an onion we cut into a crux of human observation, noticing and performing, in a simultaneous loop.
We cannot speak of duality without speaking, too, of past and future. In this process of cooking, we find ourselves in a dual mode: that of remembering and that of planning. Every time we chop an onion, we remember other onions that we’ve chopped. Even water has memory, and an onion is not without its juices. We compound our onion experience, water, and layers, and chopping, spirit memory and muscle memory. This is all automatic, primal, and elemental. The steel of a good cut is tempered in water, supercooled and given strength by the cold. Every time we chop an onion, we visualize what it will become, therefore invoking its future. Past onions and future onions collide on the cutting board as we slice and dice. This happens all without consideration, but it bears dissection.
Yes, dissection. That should bring us to the first cut. But how do we begin without again returning to the beginning? Layer upon, layer of decisions. To borrow from Capon’s descriptions of the noble allium, before we make a cut we must confront the onion’s tongues of salt and fire and sweetness, all intermingled in one entity. I may have been premature. I fear that between the old Episcopalian priest and the internet chef I’ve become distracted: before we begin we need to decide where we’re going.
An onion can become something sweet, given enough time, enough fat to marinate in. Lipids disintegrating, cutting through pungency, milk fat and butter combining to make something in-between savory and the dessert course. A decorator or steaks and a triumph of chemistry. That kind of alchemy we referenced before. Transparency to a rich golden brown, pungency to olfactory delight, tears to cheers, as it may be. Let us all delight in the same when we can find it – drowned in butter, transformed to something richer, a pleasure to taste and behold.
Next, we must set aside a large bowl or Tupperware. Lately, I’ve kept a tub full of veggies ends and discarded meat scraps in the freezer. This is my broth pot – an idea borrowed from a Mennonite cookbook and one in desperate need of a better name, if you have any suggestions. Into the broth pot goes my onion roots and layers of less appealing but no less pungent skin. Nothing should go to waste. We know the time this took, both good onions and sharp knives don’t arrive on our doorsteps overnight, regardless of Amazon Prime subscription. We can respect them by holding onto their leftovers and using them to give second life in a mishmash of edifying stock.
Finally. Now to the actual business at hand— it is time to chop an onion. Or as Capon would put it “only now are you ready for your first cut”. Or how Babish would put it, “it is time to chop up an onion into slightly smaller pieces.” Perhaps less poetic, but that gives us what we’ve sought this whole time – a balance of poetry and practicality. So without further pretense, I bid you begin.