Recipes with onion

The onion is almost never the dish, yet it decides how the dish tastes. Raw, it bites: that sharpness comes from sulphur compounds released by the knife, the same ones that make you cry. Cooked, it changes sides — its sugars caramelise slowly and give a brown sweetness no other everyday vegetable supplies so cheaply. Deciding which of the two onions you want is the whole question before you start slicing.

Two schools share the recipes below. On one side the raw onion, cut fine and made edible by acid or salt: Sri Lankan lunu miris pounds it with chilli and lime, ensalada chilena soaks it in cold water before it meets the tomato, and Ethiopian timatim salata keeps to that same trio. On the other the long-melted onion that becomes the foundation: French onion soup, Lebanese mujaddara with its almost-black fried onions, potato tortilla, Ethiopian shiro wat.

For those long cooks the trap is too much heat: above a gentle sizzle the onion browns on the outside before it has given up its water, and stays raw within. Allow thirty to forty minutes over a low flame, stir rarely, and salt from the start — salt draws the water out and speeds things along. For potato pierogi and varenyky, that melted onion can be made the day before and loses nothing.