Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (79 page)

If you’re ever in Quebec, it’s worth stopping by the Bombardier Museum to see his original garage, where many of his prototypes and custom-built tools still reside. And if the roads are impassable, you can always hop on a snowmobile to get there—and you’ll know exactly who to thank for it.

Onions, leeks, scallions, garlic, shallots, and chives are essential ingredients in modern cooking. And they’re all part of the same family
.

T
HE ONION’S PEDIGREE
Archeological records suggest that onions have been cultivated for more than 5,000 years. It’s believed they originated in Asia, though they may grow wild on every continent. The ancient Egyptians considered them sacred and believed that the round shape and concentric rings symbolized eternity. According to some records, the slave laborers who built the Great Pyramid of Cheops, at Giza 5,000 years ago, were fed mainly chickpeas, onions, and garlic. Ancient Greek athletes ate onions and drank onion juice to give themselves energy. Roman gladiators were rubbed down with onion juice in the belief that it would make their muscles firm. By the Middle Ages, onions were common throughout Europe and were eaten by rich and poor alike (one of the few foods that were).

Onion superstitions are common throughout history: They had the power to absorb poison (every onion was checked before cooking; bad onions were tossed out because it was assumed they’d absorbed poison); they cured colds, headaches, earaches, laryngitis, snakebites, and dog bites; they cleared warts and prevented baldness; if hung in the home, they warded off disease. And onions were good travelers—especially on ships, since they keep for long periods in cool, dark places.

Onions are edible bulbs (most bulbs—tulips, for example—are inedible), with leafless stalks that grow at least a couple of feet above ground. Cultivated onions are divided into two categories:

•
Short-day onions
, so called because they require only 11 to 12 hours of daylight (per day) to mature, or “bulb up” in the United States. They’re usually grown in the South—if you draw a line from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., short-days are grown
below it. Short-day onions are planted in the fall and harvested in spring and early summer. They tend to be thinner-skinned and milder in flavor than their counterparts, the long-day onions. Most are yellow or white, but they can be red, too. Popular short-day varieties: “sweet” onions like Grano, Granex, Vidalia (a type of Granex that can be called “Vidalia” only if it’s grown in Georgia), Texas Super Sweet, red and white Bermuda, and red Torpedo.

•
Long-day onions
need 14 to 16 hours of daylight to bulb up, so they’re usually grown in the North during the long days of summer and harvested from August through autumn and winter. Long-days tend to be more pungent in flavor, thicker-skinned, and hardier than short-day onions, and can be stored through the winter in cool conditions. They’re the ones available year-round at the supermarket, for use when a recipe calls for yellow or white onions. Spanish onions are long-day onions.

Some raw onions are mild enough to bite into, but others will bite you right back. That strong flavor had a defensive purpose in the evolutionary survival of the onion—it kept animals from eating them. Here’s why they’re so pungent: The onion plant draws sulfur from the soil, which creates sulfur compounds in its cells. When a raw onion is bitten into (or cut), the cells are crushed and two things happen. First, a pungent odor is released; second, a volatile chemical called a
lacrimator
flies into the air and lands in the eyes and nose of the nearest person (or animal), where it attacks nerve endings and causes pain and tears.

The good news: The sulfur compounds are water soluble and heat sensitive, which means that if you rinse a cut onion in water or cook it, the strong bite will diminish. The milky liquid you see when you chop an onion is the residue of the sulfur compounds, so the more you rinse away, the less you’ll cry. Of course, it’s hard to chop an onion under cold water, but you can rinse an already-chopped onion in cold water. (Chilling it before cutting helps, too.) And when you cook the onion, it calms down even more. Cooked fast in a hot pan, the onion will lose a little bit of its bite; cooked slowly over low heat, it develops a sweeter, mellower flavor. And that’s true of garlic, leeks, shallots, and scallions as well.

• There are more than 1,000 kinds of onions, grown in at least 175 different countries.

• Onions aren’t rich in minerals or vitamins (except vitamin C), but they’re low in calories and have no fat, cholesterol, or sodium.

• China and India are the leading growers of onions. China harvested 2.2 million acres of onions in 2005; India harvested 1.3 million acres.

• In 2007 the value of the U.S. onion crop was $840 million ($334 million for short-day onions; $506 million for long-day onions). Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and California were the big producers of spring onions; Oregon, California, and Washington were the leaders in storage onions.

• A survey by researchers at Texas A&M University showed that men eat almost 40% more onions than women do.

• Americans eat roughly 20 pounds of onions per person per year.

• What are pearl onions (the ones that people serve in cream sauce at Thanksgiving)? They are simply ordinary white onions harvested when they’re still small.

In the first half of the 20th century, garlic was considered low-class in the United States. Immigrant, working-class Southern Italians received most of the scorn: Garlic was called “Italian perfume” and “Bronx vanilla” (because there was a large Southern Italian community in the Bronx in New York City). That may seem unthinkable today, when Americans of every income level, religion, background,
and
ethnicity eat nearly three pounds of garlic per person annually. The shift began in earnest during World War II, when the U.S. government wanted dehydrated garlic to season food for the troops and turned to some California growers to meet the need. A few years later, a California farmer in Monterey County took a chance and grew 10 acres of the plant without anticipating much success in the marketplace. Today California is America’s major garlic producer.

Like the onion, garlic has a history at least 5,000 years long, and a lot of it lies in garlic’s purported medicinal powers. If you were an ancient-Egyptian bald man or if you had tuberculosis,
backaches, gas, and not much sex drive (it’s like Uncle John has a twin!), garlic would have been the medication of choice. Over the centuries garlic has also been used to treat arthritis and rheumatism, dysentery and dyspepsia, chicken pox and measles, malaria and typhoid, dandruff, constipation, and the common cold. Eighteenth-century doctors thought it could cure the plague. It can’t, but modern medical researchers continue to look into garlic’s potential curative powers.

• What causes garlic breath? According to experts, it’s chemicals called
thiols
, which are related to the chemicals in skunk spray. What gets rid of them? Browning enzymes—the same things that make apples or peaches turn brown. Browning enzymes are present in lettuce, mushrooms, basil, and blueberries. So consider finishing off your garlicky meal with a green salad or a fruit salad. That should help with your bad breath.

• China is the world’s largest garlic grower (the Chinese produce 75% of world tonnage—an estimated 23 billion pounds annually)—followed by India, South Korea, and the United States.

• Garlic has little nutritional value—its primary value is flavor. (And if you eat too much of it, your skin will smell garlicky.)

Scallions.
Scallions are immature onions, picked when their tops are green and no bulb has formed underground. They’re also known as bunching onions, baby leeks, and green shallots. Whatever you call them, their basic look is this: a slender white stem (with almost no bulb at the base), transitioning into long, straight, tubular green leaves. Both the white and green parts are edible—the white part having a stronger flavor. The green part is often snipped or sliced and used as a garnish.

Leeks.
A leek looks kind of like an oversized scallion, with a sturdy white stalk flaring out into fibrous green leaves at the top. Before cooking, the tough tops of the leaves and the scruffy tuft of roots at the base are cut off, leaving only the central part of the stalk. Then they’re generally braised and served as vegetables in their own right or used as the base for soups (vichyssoise and Scottish cock-a-leekie are two good examples). Leeks are more popular in Europe than in the U.S. and have been cultivated in the Mediterranean region for over 4,000 years. Ancient Egyptians grew them (they can be seen in tomb paintings), and they were favorite vegetables of the Greeks and Romans. The emperor Nero believed that leeks would improve his singing voice, and he ate so many of them that he was nicknamed “Porrophagus”—leek eater. It’s not known how leeks made their way north to England and Wales (possibly with Phoenician traders or with the Romans), but the Welsh have long claimed the leek as a national symbol. Legend says that in a seventh-century battle against the Saxons, Welsh warriors wore leeks on their hats to identify themselves to each other and prevent friendly fire. Even now, Welsh people wear leeks on March 1, St. David’s Day (he’s their patron saint) and celebrate by eating leek broth and chicken-and-leek pie.

Chives.
With most members of the onion family, we use the bulbs (onions, garlic, shallots) or the stalks (leeks), or the stalks and the leaves (scallions). With chives, which don’t form large underground bulbs, the onion flavor is in the hollow leaves, which are used as flavoring in soups, salads, and vegetables. (Their lavender flowers are edible too, and can be added to salads.) The ancient Chinese thought chives could stop bleeding and were an antidote to poison. The Romans used them for telling fortunes, and in the Middle Ages, people hung bunches of chives around the house to protect themselves from illness and evil spirits. Dutch settlers in the New World planted chives in their fields for their cows to munch, in the hope that the cows would give chive-flavored milk. (It worked.)

Life is an onion and one peels it crying.

—
French proverb

Even if a toy is completely original and built around cutting-edge technology, it doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will buy it
.

S
PORTSTALK
By the late 1980s, kids (and adults) were buying baseball cards not just out of love of the game, but also as an investment. In 1989 LJN Toys tried to cash in on the craze with the Sportstalk—a handheld device, about the size of a Walkman, that “played” electronic baseball cards, each of which had a tiny vinyl record embedded on the back. Through the built-in speaker came two minutes of statistics about the player (voiced by Hall of Famer Joe Torre), along with radio calls of famous plays, and players reminiscing about their biggest moments on the field. It probably failed because it cost too much—$28 for the player and $2 per card. Toys “R” Us ordered half a million Sportstalks and sold fewer than 100,000.