The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food – Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes
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. Uniquely 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. Abundantly commonplace yet extraordinarily indispensable, the onion is 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 behind the only sulfuric acid–spewing plant, then digs through the twenty varieties of onion and the cultures built around them. Onions were seen by the ancient Egyptians as a symbol of eternity, the Greeks as an agent of strength, and the Chinese as a supplement for intelligence. In the kitchen, Kurlansky celebrates the raw, roasted, creamed, marinated, and pickled. Including a recipe section featuring more than 100 dishes from around the world, The Core of an Onion shares Parisian 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.
Where to Buy
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Hardcover
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023
ISBN: 978-1635575934
Other Editions
The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food – Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes
Audiobook
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023
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Reviews
One of Eater’s Best Food Books to Read in Fall 2023
“A sweet, earthy aroma permeates this book, as Kurlansky delves into our enduring love affair with onions … [an] engaging, colorful book. Kurlansky, acclaimed author of Cod, Salt, Salmon, Milk!, and other food-related books, has a wonderful time with his subject, noting that onions have long been eaten in nearly every corner of the globe … A delightful journey that unravels the story of a key piece of nearly every national cuisine.”
Kirkus Reviews
“In cuisines across the world, there are few ingredients more ubiquitous than the humble onion. And there are few authors better suited to exploring the history of the onion than Mark Kurlansky, who has penned deep-dives into , salmon, and (among other subjects) … Kurlansky manages to make the cultivation and culinary use of the onion feel like an epic tale as he follows the beloved allium across history, across the globe, and of course, across our plates.”
Eater, Best Food Books to Read in Fall 2023
“Playing both starring and supporting roles in virtually every culture’s cuisine, onions are indispensable for most cooks. Kurlansky, a prodigious cataloger of comestibles, peels away the agricultural, culinary, and cultural history of onions layer by layer … He surveys centuries of recipes for onions, whether in soups, stews, or braises; raw, cooked, or pickled; chopped, whole, or stuffed; creamed, fried, or baked … Many photographs amplify the fun and a sizable bibliography enhances the usefulness.”
Booklist
“The Core of an Onion gives the starring role to the humble yet essential onion, combining beguiling nuggets of literature, art, medicine, botany, and agriculture with assured, bouncy writing and more than one hundred recipes … A sparkling mix of snappy prose with Kurlansky’s own illustrations, The Core of an Onion is a perfect treat that demonstrates the dictate that ‘onions have a way of taking on unexpected significance.”
Foreword Reviews, starred review
“Journalist Kurlansky follows up his deep dives into salt, cod, and oysters with a charmingly eclectic look at the onion’s uses across history and culture … Kurlansky’s gentle humor and seamless transitions from history to science to culinary appreciation are a delight, as are the charming recipes interspersed throughout. When he asserts in the final chapters that ‘there is no better vegetable,’ many readers will be convinced. It’s a delicious celebration of an underappreciated food.”
Publishers Weekly
“Food historian Mark Kurlansky goes deep on one of the first foods cultivated by humans … 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.”
Apple Books, Best Books of November