Onions are arguably the most universal culinary building block, as important to French cuisine as they are to Indian food.
You know these guys—brown, white or red—and how they form the backbone of so many recipes, whether the starting point for a British cottage pie or a classic Indian curry from the south of India; the basis of a Vietnamese wokked dish or the underlying flavour in a French casserole.
Sweated in butter or browned in olive oil, this is one of those ingredients essential to any cook’s canon and one that is so easy to understand (if a little more difficult to master).
Occasionally, such as in Cantonese cooking, the onion is something featured as a more apparent flavour. In Cantonese cooking, for example, onions are cut into quarters or sixths and pulled apart, layer by layer, and cooked in uneven quasi-organic layers.
Embrace it all.
You’ll find that no onion is unloved in any recipe I offer you. My father once told me that “onions are the foundations of flavour”. I have little reason to doubt him given what else he taught me,
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