The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food—Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes

by Mark Kurlansky

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. 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. Among the first domesticated and cultivated crops, 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. Entering 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 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.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, History, Cookbooks, Cooking, Microhistory, Nature

231 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 7, 2023

About the author

Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and author who has written a number of books of fiction and nonfiction. His 1997 book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1997), was an international bestseller and was translated into more than fifteen languages. His book Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006) was the nonfiction winner of the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Reviews

[Helga Martiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
This book is about onions; how they have been cultivated throughout history, their remedial uses and their importance in almost every culture and every cuisine. There are also recipes included.
And here’s a poem by my favorite poet, praising onion.

Ode To The Onion by Pablo Neruda

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

To use a food metaphor, this felt like a word salad about onions. It starts off with several quotes from plays, poems, etc to onions without any connection. There were lots of interesting facts about onions thrown in. My favorite was how coffee, onions, and sugar were considered a cold remedy. Hopefully your nose is stuffed because that sounds horrible if you could smell/taste it! But there was a lot of bouncing around without any natural progression to the course of the book. And then it finished up with a bunch of recipes without much discussion about their place in society, the people connected to them, etc. I would have preferred fewer recipes and more background. Overall, lots of interesting information but it felt a lot like a rough draft.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for a copy of the book. This review is my own opinion.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess I'm not as interested in onions as I thought I was. Lots of recipe for boiled onions.

[Paige]

DNF at 42%

I loved Salt and Paper, but it’s like Kurlansky forgot how to write with this one. Clunky sentences, next to no transitions, and poor organization.

Thoroughly disappointing.

1.23.24

[Lucas Grand · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love onions so much

[Lina Fredj · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have so much to say! But all I’ll put in this review is this: excellent spectrum book, one star deduction for the Zionism.

[Julie Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

for the foodies and history buffs. It’s not the MOST compelling read, but as an audiobook it’s delightful because it’s read by the author (endearing old man) who slightly mispronounces a surprising number of words considering he, you know, wrote them

[Simone Louey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly I lied when I said I finished this book, I got a bit bogged down in the part where it’s just recipes for onion soup and gave up but the onion facts were very enjoyable!

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad Mark Kurlansky got the chance to talk about his special interest, onions
Is the book a little garbled and random? Sure, but that love for onions holds it together
I would like for someone to pay as much attention to me, as Kurlansky pays to onions
Garlic might remain my favourite allium, but dang, I learned some delightful notes about onions, and I am glad

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 and a half. Read for Glenview Public Library's Tiny Book Club podcast. A really fun book to talk about, as it turns out. He's such a good writer, well-traveled, and deeply knowledgeable about many topics, most of which he's written a book about, 39 of them in fact. Subtly funny, opinionated, conversational. A nice change from my reading fare of late. Plus, news you can use! to chop an onion without tears first scald it. Place in a bowl, add a pinch of salt, cover with fast boiling water, leave one minute, strain. I will try.

[Beverly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many thanks to Bloomsbury for this complimentary copy. I am a foodie, but this was a slog.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

*This book was received as an advanced reviewer's copy from NetGalley.

There's nothing like a good micro-history. Taking an innocuous object and exploring it in depth. And this one was especially layered (yes, I realize that joke is way over done, too bad). The tale of the onion, ubiquitous in cooking, delicious, able to make you cry with a mere slice.

Kurlansky delves into the allium with a history of its uses, common farming practices, and the general population that eats them (hint, almost everyone). From the different varieties (and lost varieties), to the other domesticated variations this bulb can contain, he doesn't leave much unknown. I can't say there was a ton of new stuff in here that I hadn't read in other food books, but I did like it consolidated for this particular food item. That was the first half of the book anyway.

The second explored recipes. This section I had a little more trouble with, just because I really don't care for reading recipes in narrative format. Some people do, and vintage cookbooks are perfect for those people. I am not one of them. I just find it tedious and I loose interest really quickly. But I won't fault the book for my own foibles in appreciating this format. Even so, it was nice to see how much hasn't changed about the onion and its uses in cooking (and some of the random ways it used to be used).

If you love onions (or micro-histories), this isn't one to miss!

Review by M. Reynard 2023

[Karyl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anyone who knows me knows I love to cook and I love to read. So this book should have been a home run for me. Alas, while this book has quite a lot of interesting facts (learning about the different onions and their uses was quite fascinating), it tends to be a bit of a slog.

Kurlansky is very thorough in this knowledge of onions and has done so much research for this book.
I appreciated too that even though he’s an older white man, he makes sure to include a great deal of non-Western recipes and thoughts on onions. This book isn’t wholly Europe/North American-centered, which pleased me. However, the writing was so choppy. Kurlansky would say make one point in a paragraph and hie off on his next point in the following paragraph without any transition. It made for a jarring read.

Including so many historical recipes was interesting, but reading historical recipe after recipe without much elucidation bogged down the writing. Plus the book just literally *ends* once Kurlansky tells us about onion sandwiches. I turned the page thinking I’d be onto the epilogue or the conclusion, but no, it was just the acknowledgements.

[Renee Pelletier · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful and chatty meditation on a single food in the tradition of authors like MFK Fisher (of course). It’s a shame so many goodreads reviewers don’t get it—I even saw a review say that most of the historical recipes were just different ways to boil an onion. This is an incomprehensible complaint. Historical recipes are heavy on boiling, if this is such a problem for you then perhaps stick to Smitten Kitchen. Funny, clever, and well written in a straightforward voice, with gems like:

“Our senses guide us to what is right and what is wrong in food. A blueberry bagel is clearly wrong, but onion and bread is just right.”

“And though Médecin’s financial practices were highly questionable, he was incorruptible when it came to matters of Niçoise gastronomy.”

“With cream sauces out of favor creamed onions stand as an abandoned artifact from the days when we were allowed to be fat and happy.”

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first read from Mark Kurlansky and I loved it. I enjoyed reading about the history of cultivating onions and how it varies across different cultures. I also enjoy seeing the different recipes throughout the later chapters with more cultural explanations behind each. While a lot of the recipes are not precise and give more of an indication of how onions are prepared in that type of dish.

It may seem like a trivial topic but the depth of the research has inspired me to cook more which is a positive outcome that I did not anticipate going into this book, so thanks Mark. Although I will not be adding onions to peanut butter on bread.

[Beth]

I skimmed this book, originally picking it up because I hoped to love a good onion story as much as I loved books/stories on bananas and peaches.

Well, as I said I skimmed this one. The thought of the book containing recipes was more interesting than the recipes.

I wanted to enjoy the onion. Here are some tidbits:
- Onions are the second most produced vegetable in the world, beaten only by tomatoes.
- There is a tremendous variety of onions.
- Vidalias are big business.
- There was a queen in the Onion Festival in the 1940 NY World's Fair. That's a nugget for your next cocktail party!! For extra credit - She was Queen Stella.

[Annie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have enjoyed several other of Kurlansky's other microhistories - Salt, Cod, Milk, and the one I'm currently reading, the Basque History of the World. But this one did not land lol.

That said, I knew it probably wouldn't when I chose this. I specifically chose it as an audiobook to fall asleep to - and I usually pick dull nonfictions to lull me to sleep, but this one was almost too boring to fall asleep to.

Also, the author read the audiobook himself - he has a nice voice for conversation, but it's really not an audiobook voice - it's very monotonous which didn't help the joyless subject matter!

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.1 but rounding way up for personal biases

This is not a five star book on any objective measure but it was like a warm hug for me. A tightly focused, short book on my favorite vegetable by one of my favorite authors. Listening to the Kurlansky read it himself was a treat, despite his many mispronunciations and sounding like he is always just about to cough so your mileage may vary.

I normally hate recipes in books which is why I held off on reading this but Kurlansky is surprisingly adept at blending them into the flow of the writing, rather than some mechanical litany that brings everything to a halt.

[Jennifer Wallis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mark Kurlansky must be going through it. Salt was an incredibly written book that used salt as a through line for a coherent story.

This reads like a high school kid’s book report. The same sentence is repeated twice in one paragraph. This just feels like a thrown together series of anecdotes and recipes. Just seems (again like a high school kid’s book report) like he is struggling to hit a word count at 3 AM before the paper is due.

[Bookewyfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so excited to read this book and I loved it! With fascinating history and a handful of historical recipes, if you love culinary history, this book is for you. I have a deeper appreciation for onions now and will be thinking of these histories each time I see, buy, grow, cut, cook, and eat them now.

[Kimberly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is NOT Kurlansky at his best. The writing was a hodgepodge of facts without much organization. There are way too many recipes. Thankfully, these have some facts about onions interspersed or I would not have been able to finish this book. Yes, the title states that historical recipes are included but I had no idea that these would dominate the book.

[Katherine Hagman Prokopchuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meandering journey through the history and cultural relevance of the onion around the world. Listening to the audiobook was sort of like having a one-way conversation with the biggest onion enthusiast in the world as they rambled on, but I actually really enjoyed it. I look forward to trying some of the included recipes.

Editing to add: botany!

[Sam Clayton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read through the history, chemistry, and botany portions of the book which were definitely interesting (can’t review the recipes portion of the book). unfortunately I feel like this book fell into the nonfiction trap of just sharing a lot of facts rather than giving a cohesive narrative. I didn’t find myself retaining a ton of the information presented.

[Kevin Ober · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating history of a remarkably durable bulb. Starts as botany, segues to history, then ends with all recipes from various types and eras. It ends with James Beard’s famous butter and onion sandwich which I ate every time I went to (sadly departed) Expatriate bar.

[Rebecca Silvert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting history of the onion. My mistake was listening to the audio book. Mark Kurlansky doesn't read well, and part two is rather tedious to listen to, with full recipes being read aloud. I'm a big Kurlansky fan, so I got through it, and I'm glad I did, lots of great stories and recipes, just wish I'd read the kindle version so I could skim the actual recipes

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listening to this book as audio was absolutely foolish to do--the last half (?) is just recipes! And while I do like reading a recipe, having one read to you is a surefire way to get to sleep quick.

Also Mark Kurlansky is a truly terrible narrator. He's like having an old white grandpa who has never read a book aloud, and certainly never encountered a foreign word before, reading to you.

STILL, I like onions, this was a cute little history of onions, and the recipes certainly sound good! I think I'll be trying a stuffed onion recipe for a holiday meal this year.

[Heather Pace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charmingly like a kid enthusiastically reciting facts about a favorite dinosaur.

[Andrew Ney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turns out, onions are the most unproblematic food. At least the ones Ive read about that is. If theres a major controversy involving onions let me know, because it isnt mentioned here. Kurlansky details its origins, cultural relevance and many, many ways it was eaten. There are a lot of recipes to skim through, but all the surrounding information is quite interesting. i need some onion rings

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

a delicious read

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me want an onion ring real bad