THE INVALUABLE ONION

Talking of the proper need of appreciation that might be rendered to some of nature’s goodly gifts, if only they were presented to us as something rare and novel—what of the humble but invaluable onion? “The onion,” as Stevenson says in his masterpiece, Prince Otto and great was my satisfaction when I first read the pronouncement, “which ranks with the truffle and the nectarine in the chief place of honour of earth’s fruit.”

Truffle and nectarine are doubtless honourable terms of comparison, but I make bold to believe that any well-constituted jury of epicures would not hesitate to award the humble onion the place paramount among all the savours of civilized cookery. There are a certain number of curiously constituted people who absolutely refuse to countenance the onion in any connexion, however subdued and distant; who profess, whether in Æsthetic affectation or through some innate queasiness, to look upon it as pure abomination. There are also those who assume a similar intolerant attitude towards tobacco. But who shall deny that, even as tobacco to the meditative and restful moments, the savoury onion has not added through the ages an incalculable zest to the hour of physical restoration? There could be no cuisine, on any varied scale, without it.

“If the onion did not exist,” said a great cordon-bleu, paraphrasing a well-known philosophical pronouncement, “it would have to be invented.”

Discreetly introduced, and subdued by happy blendings, it holds the finest of fumets for your gastronomist’s palate: and, in all its own undisguised vigour, it will invest the coarsest or most tasteless food with never-failing allurement for robust appetites, whatever changes be rung upon the raw or pickled, the white-boiled, the golden-fried, or the brown-stewed.

It must have been that russet background of onion which justified my youthful preconceived notion of the pricelessness of “Red Pottage” as an article of food. It no doubt fixed the taste for life. Of course, in all matters of earthly enjoyment, the “psychological” moment which, by the way, is so often purely physiological plays an important part. Certain tastes reveal themselves only as pleasurable in certain surroundings. A draught of coarse, dark wine of la Mancha, sucked out of the goat-skin sack, with its obtrusive, pitchy twang, will be a pure delight on the side of some dusty, stony Castillian road. And no one who has not had, in some wild out-of-the-way mountain village, to break his fast at peep-o’-day upon a chunk of grey bread, stone-ground and tasting of the wheat-fields, a handful of salt and a couple of Spanish onions, will ever know all the excellences of that juicy bulb.

It is reported that, like his furiously assertive relation, garlic, the onion has very definite medical virtues. Some claim for it a power to cure sleeplessness—dreaded distemper—and also various antiseptic properties. This is as may be. The province of the precious plant, the duty which it fulfils well and simply, is that of supplying savour to things that may be nutritious but lack appetizing virtue. Many are the instances that might be adduced in support of this economic plea, but none more directly to the point than that of the soupe À l’oignon, which your thrifty French housewife contrives at shortest notice—the traditional “soup meagre,” object of such bitter contempt in our beef-gorging Hogarthian days.

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This new culinary topic sets me once more back in the streets of old Paris, on the occasion when I made personal acquaintance with the possibilities of a penny meal—the best appreciated breakfast I have ever known.

It was in the very last of my French days. Paris had then recovered from the miseries of the German siege and the nightmare of Commune anarchy, three years past. Within the next few months a new life was to be opened to me in England. The prospect of the great change, albeit fraught with some features of gravity, was exhilarating.

The LycÉe, for all its admirable scheme of studies, had lately been abandoned in favour of a quaint old British scholar, very poor, very learned, who lived on the heights of Montmartre, in the oddest little house—so filled with books that almost everywhere one had to move literally edge-ways. The very stairs, for lack of shelves, were piled on both sides with volumes, old and modern, tattered or nobly bound, stored regardless of subjects, merely in sizes for the sake of room.

Long could I talk about you, O my dear Mr. Gilchrist—you with the keen eyes and the vigorous hook nose always half-filled with snuff; with the flowing beard of venerable threescore and ten, who taught me to read “the classics” after the English manner, i.e. with a regard to quantities; who, for the modest and evidently much wanted fee agreed upon, gave me daily at least five hours tuition sometimes more instead of the stipulated three! Hours, be it said, that went by lightly enough in that queer, snuffy room, where we sat facing each other on two straight-backed chairs—eager boy and no less eager old man. For, the Latin and Greek tasks over, there always followed excursions, one more fascinating than the other, into the deep and still unknown forest of English letters. And such was the variety and the happy choice of excerpts that, incredible as it may seem, the scholar of fourteen was oftener sorry than elated to leave the garrulous and enthusiastic mentor on his hill-top and return to the paternal house in the lower planes of the Champs ElysÉes.

An odd way of life for a youth, during those last few months of spring and early summer in Paris! It was full of glad aspirations towards the future, it is true, but at the same time not without an almost regretful enjoyment of the present. The distribution of time was peculiar. There was in it a kind of unconscious anticipation of that light-saving Bill of Mr. Willet which has so little chance of being embodied in an Act. The queer boy, in his transition stage, had taken a cranky turn on the subject of hours. Having made up his mind, on the one hand, that he had an enormous amount of new things to read and assimilate before his fresh start in England; and, on the other, having heard that one hour of morning study was worth on what authority it matters little now two after noon, he had invested in a specially ferocious alarum clock. The merciless clamour of this machine drove him out of dreamland daily at a quarter to five ante meridiem; and, strange as it undoubtedly was, it is not on record that he ever failed during that period to obey the summons.

There must have been somewhere at the back of so unnatural a submission, of such a persistency in a purely self-imposed and unnecessary discipline, a sort of romantic smack of mediÆvalism.... The “sedulous escholier” so warmly commended by Saint Louis was found awake and already absorbed in his search for lore as returning day began to whiten his window.

The net result was a couple of hours of really earnest work before it was time to dispatch the morning bowl of cafÉ au lait and the pain de gruau and hasten to the ascent of Mons Martis, where impatient Mr. Gilchrist looked for his scholar’s appearance at eight sharp. It was very special reading—English History—a subject with which the cours d’histoire at the LycÉe could only deal in a sketchy manner; but the early-rising escholier, greedy of new knowledge, was fortunately helped by the appearance in that year of Green’s “Short History of the English People,” and fell under the charm of the captivating work.