Onions

Onions are beautiful.

They are not fleetingly beautiful, like a rose (yawn) or a younger Anna Nicole Smith. They are enduringly beautiful, like the Chrysler Building or a really solid off-shore tax shelter.

At first glance, onions don't necessarily rock the kitchen. True, they're basically spherical, so they pick up some points for supporting Euclidean geometry. But beyond that, the average onion wouldn't survive the first round of a gustatory beauty contest, where it would face the lean elegance of scallions, the vibrant lushness of strawberries and the striped luminescence of raw salmon.

And yet: There's a lot to consider beneath the surface of the onion. Onions have character. Onions have depth. Onions have magical powers.

To prepare an onion is to confront the profound. You start with a papery skin that's toughened by time. Remove it, and you're staring at a layer of sleek white vegetable flesh. The interior is so smooth, regular and neatly patterened that it looks like something cooked up in Illustrator by a particularly inspired graphic designer. The onion, once rough enough to easily juggle, now slips across your palm.

Now, if you can bear to mar something so tender, take knife in hand and onion to cutting board. Once your blade gains purchase on the slick exterior, it swings easily through the onion, revealing the concentric series of layers that lie underneath, stacked like an organic matryoshka doll. Soon, you've got a pile of crescents within crescents, and you're chopping them down into cookable bits.

Then come the tears. No other vegetable, when chopped, prompts such a precise simulation of our most heartfelt emotional response. Is it because we instinctively weep at the destruction of a regular geometric solid? Is it because the almost majestic order of an onion has been unraveled into a maelstrom of chaos? Is it because cutting onions arouses the gas propanethiol S-oxide, which then joins with the onion's enzymes to emit a passive sulfur compound that blends with the water produced in our tear ducts to produce sulfuric acid?

We will never know the answer.

Onions have a lighter side as well. Anyone's who's snacked on good gourmet pizza or traditional European sauces knows the sensitive sweetness of carmelized onions. What the hell? How does … that … come from that? What's God up to here, anyway? How exactly does one of the culinary world's toughest linebackers transform itself into a pirouetting pillar of haute cuisine?

It's a damn miracle. And it's beautiful, in the deepest sense of the word: It stirs emotion through the senses. And if you can stare at an onion's symmetric grace, weep at its noxious emissions and sample its transformation from tart to sweet without being moved, you don't know what beauty really is.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)

— photo by Becca Dilley (becca@beccadilley.com)