Mark Kurlansky explains the historical and cultural importance of the lowly onion in his book The Core of An Onion and gives tips on tear-free onion cutting, the different varieties and how to use them. Sommelier Jacqueline Coleman introduces us to Virginia wines.
Food, News & Views with Linda Gassenheimer
Food, News & Views, Ep 231: All About Onions! Mark Kurlansky, Virginia Wines, Jacqueline Coleman
(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm the degast and I'mer and welcome to Food News and Views. Glad to have you joining us. But what are some of the staples you might have in your kitchen? Possibly an onion is one of them. I personally use onions in a lot of my cooking without thinking about their significance, just their flavor. So I was fascinated when I read Mark Kalansky's latest book, The Chloro of an Onion, Peeling the rarest common food, featuring more than 100 historical recipes. Mark Kalansky is a New York Times bestselling author and a James Beard award winner. And he's here to tell us more about the fascinating history and the properties of an onion. So welcome Mark Kalansky. - Thank you, nice to talk to you. - Well, thank you for joining us. The core of an onion. So why did you decide to write about this common ingredient, the onion? What was there? - Well, you know, it's a funny thing about things that we call common. Things become common because they're really great. And everybody wants them and that's how they become common. Common, there's a tendency people think of common as ordinary, but if they were ordinary, they wouldn't be common. - Well, I must say that I couldn't do without it and many of my recipes. - Yeah, I mean, onions, not only do they have this powerful and distinct flavor or several flavors, depending on what you do with them, because a raw onion and a sauteed onion and a caramelized onion are three distinct flavors. But they're just a very unusual plant. I mean, there isn't any other vegetable that if you attack it, it has a defense mechanism where it will spit sulfuric acid in your eyes. - Well, I was fascinated when I heard that in your book that it isn't what, maybe the only plant that has sulfuric acid, I mean, explain that. - Yeah, you know, it's this property that in the evolution of onions was a defense mechanism for against mammals. - So the onion was defending itself against them. So the onion was defending itself against a mammal. - Yeah, I mean, if you've ever done any gardening, you know that mammals are always attacking vegetables to get gardens, but they're not gonna mess with an onion. But human beings are willing to endure the pain. - All right, so well, then why did you suddenly decide to write about the onion? What brought that to your attention? - Oh, I don't know. I just wonder around thinking about things. - Are you wandered into your kitchen perhaps? - Periodically say, oh, this should be a book. - So, but then you started looking into it. And how and why did the onion become so important to world cultures? Because you write about that in the book that there's so much significance in so many different areas of the world. Explain that to us. - Well, first of all, it's a characteristic of onions that they grow just about anywhere. All right, really that picky about soil will grow in deserts that will grow in tropics, they'll grow in the arctic. So everybody can have onions. So they started off in sort of the Middle East, maybe the premier mountains, Kazakhstan, maybe it's a bet in that area. We're not really sure where it started because curiously, the original wild onion that our onions descend from has disappeared. So we don't know exactly what it was or where it was, but it was somewhere in that area. But it followed trade routes that also stores well. So it's a great thing for traveling and for trade. And so just about every country in the world ended up with onions. - And it seems there was a folklore about the onion. What was that? - Well, I mean, there were many folklores about the onion, but Egyptians had a lot of beliefs about onions. All the agents had their beliefs about onions. Egyptians thought the structure of the onion was the structure of the universe. This layering, layer after layer, was how the universe was built. So they gave tremendous significance to onions and put them in their tombs and drew them on walls. But many cultures attached significance to. - When I read about that, I thought, yes, you know, how many thousands of times have I cut into an onion or used an onion? I never thought about all the peeling of all the different layers, which was very interesting to think about. - Yeah, and the thing is to me, you peel layer after layer after layer and there's nothing inside, there's no pit, there's nothing. There actually is something that you can't see up in. There's a kind of an inner root in the very center, but to the lay eye, it gets you nowhere. - But also, in addition to flavoring so many of our dishes, you mentioned that it was used as medicine. It was considered an important medicine. - Yes, and a lot of cultures, Hindus, Buddhists, and Arabs, and many cultures, it was attributed to many theories for various diseases. And of course, inevitably, it was decided that it was an aphrodisiac. - Of course, there's so many ingredients considered that one wonders, but-- (laughs) - Right, anything that has any powers attributed to it, eventually they decide it's an aphrodisiac. - Must be, it must be. - You know, all of course, other things, that it gives you power, Greeks believe to give you power, the Greek athletes in the Olympics, used to rub onions, eat onions, and rub it on their bodies before going into a match. - That would keep people away from you, for sure. - Yeah, well, I don't know that you really want to have an onionized opponent, so maybe that works. - Yes. And well, now how did you go about finding the research on this? - Well, I mean, talking to people in places where they're really involved in onion culture, but also, I mean, to start with at this point, I probably have, I mean, you can see what goes on here. I probably have one. - Let me tell everyone that was listening, that I'm talking with Mark Kolesky, and he's in his library or his office, I said that. And I thought I had a lot of books in mind, but it's nothing compared to all the thousands of books that he has there. - Right, and a lot of them have to do with food history. So, you know, to begin with, it's going to my own library. And to look into the history of food. So, but why did you decide on it? I mean, you've written about card, you've written about salt. So, how did onion come into it? - To me, there's something to be a book. It has to be a great story. And food usually is a good story, but you have to find the story. But all this, I mean, card was a definite story, and salt was a story. And the story of onions is how this remarkable plant became the most common thing in the world. - Well, what were some of the myths as opposed to the realities of the onion that you discovered? - Well, there's lots of myths about dealing with the onion. You know, how to keep from tearing when you're slicing onion. There's tons of myths about that, you know. You run parsley, put a wooden spoon in your mouth, crust of bread, all these different things that don't work. - That was another one, going to be one of my questions. Please help us. How do we cut into an onion? And none of them do this? - Well, one of the ideas that does have a little sign so it is to slice the onion near running water. - Near it. - And the reason it says that the chemical compound that attacks your eyes, the reason it knows to go to your eyes is it's drawn to water. So if you have a faucet running, that's like a better offer than your eyes. - Oh, interesting. - It doesn't 100% work, but you will find that you're tearing less if you're sliced by a source of running water. Another thing that I find works that strangely enough is hardly ever mentioned is just weird glasses. - Well, yes, I was sent one time, onion goggles. - Yes, there are onion goggles, but you know, wearing onion goggles while you're slicing onion is just a definition of an uncool chef. You know, we live in an age where chefs really want to be cool. You can't be cool if you're wearing onion goggles. - Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so I've never worn them. All right? So, well, what are the most, well, I'll just tell you one thing that I found personally is that if you, if they're in the refrigerator, which normally we don't keep them there, that it's easier to cut into them than leaving them out in the room temperature. - Yes, yeah, the cold sort of slows down their defense mechanism. - Right. - I always keep onions in the refrigerator anyway. - Oh, all right. Well, and I wouldn't do what is commonly told to me is to light a match and put it in your mouth and blow it as it blows out. The fumes will keep the onions from cheering, your eyes from cheering from the onions. But I don't think that's a good idea to suggest that. - Have you tried that? - I did once. It was not a, it was not a, shall we say it wasn't a successful situation. - Yeah, I wouldn't think that would work. - Well, it might have if the match hadn't been burning too much. Anyway. - Well, I mean, if that were going to work, would you be better off just smoking a cigarette? - Maybe, perhaps. Well, what was, what are some of the most common types of onions that we use and why? - Well, you know, people in general think, in terms of color, the yellow onions, white onions, and red onions, but there's a lot more. There's hundreds of varieties of onions. And they have different flavors. Red onions are one of the really great pungent onions. And then there's the whole phenomenon of sweet onions. Now, to grow sweet onions, you have to be in a place that does not have a lot of sulfur in the soil or in the air. It's the most famous sweet onions that we've done. Yeah, it's in Georgia, but they're actually our, they're starting to grow sweet onions in Florida. They grow a lot of them in Texas and in the Imperial Valley in California, where they grow absolutely everything, Walla, Walla, Washington, and Hawaii, Maui, they grow sweet onions. But, you know, the problem with Hawaii with everything is that Hawaii is just the most isolated place in the world, it's just not near anything. And so it takes a long time to, you know, you want to send it to California where they grow their own sweet onions. How are you going to compete when it takes, you know, days by ship for it to get there? Right. So most people outside of Hawaii have never had a Hawaiian sweet onion, but they're very good. Okay, well, I was fascinated in your book that there's so many recipes from around the world and a couple of the recipes, the historical recipes were one was that Hemingway, Hemingway liked raw onion on his peanut butter sandwich. And that doesn't seem like something I'd like to have. Neither, neither. This is his idea of a good snack while you go fishing. It's one of several reasons why I would hesitate to go fishing with Hemingway. On the other hand, James Beard made onion sandwiches with slice of raw onion and canned sardines on oat bread. And that is a great sandwich. Is it? Well, I was going to say, I was a little skeptical about it, but maybe I'll try it. Oh, yeah. No, that's good. I mean, onions and sardines is a natural. All right. A lot better than peanut butter, right? Okay, no comment there for people who love peanut butter and onions together. All right. So, and just to let everyone know that Mark Kalanski is going to be appearing at the Miami Book Fair here. And it's going to be on November 18th. I'm going to be there with him. And we'll be talking more and more about the onion. He's got some wonderful, fascinating stories to tell us. And I think we will never look at the onion again in the same way. He's made the lowly onion. I think not so lowly anymore. You know, I opened the book with a quote from the brothers, Karamazaka Shanka, wicked woman who toyed with men's hearts. And she claimed that she had saved her soul by once giving someone an onion. And I started with that because it just, it shows what really unreasonable importance we give to onions. All right. The story of the onion. Mark Kalanski, where can we read more about your work or your website? I have a website, markkarlansky.com, which I'm in the process of rebuilding because it's an old website and I'm modernizing it. And I don't know. I mean, well, it's Mark Karlansky. That's K-K-U-R-L-A-N-S-K-Y. That's his website. Learn more about the onion. And some of the fascinating recipes there in his book, especially for onion soup. Lots of recipes there. And the thing about recipes, one of the things I love about recipes is the people who wrote them. Just really interesting people wrote recipes, especially women because it was, you know, it was one of the few things that was open to women. And so really smart women wrote recipes. And you can get almost a history of feminism from onion recipes. Onion recipes, especially your onion soup. His book is the core of an onion peeling the rarest common food featuring more than 100 historical recipes. Mark Kalanski, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Pleasure talking to you. I'm Linda Gassenheimer. And this is Food News and Views. Joining me now is Somalia Jacqueline Coleman. And once more, I have to say, she's back from a wine tasting visit. Where were you this time, Jacqueline? Linda, well, this time it was a little bit closer to home. I stayed on the East Coast and was up in the Virginia area to do some wine tasting in Northern Virginia right outside of Washington, D.C. I had no idea. Not only recently, I've been talking about Virginia and the wines there. Is that a big area now for wine? Well, it's a relative term because, obviously, California is a big wine-producing state here in the US. But Virginia, I think, falls to fifth on that list of production. So is it big that the industry there has been growing significantly in the past 10 years or so? So it is much bigger than it was back when I lived in the area in 2010. But it is still a very small producing state in terms of volume. And you don't see a lot of it exported just because most of the producers are small family-owned producers that are making smaller quantities than they can export outside of the state. OK. I've just been noticing by listening to you is that the wine regions are simply growing. They're changing with climate change. They're different climates. They're able to grow the grapes. And it's interesting to see what's happening now. Yeah, I mean, if you talk to any winemaker, they'll tell you about climate change because they're experiencing it on a very micro level with the grapes and when grapes are ripening. And that changes when they're harvested. And so there's all sorts of things that go into winemaking that are directly impacted by climate change. But in Virginia, specifically, the climate, of course, is an east coast climate. There's way more humidity than there is out in California and some of the west coast wine growing areas. So that does cause some problems and some challenges. But the climate is very similar to, in a lot of ways, two parts of France. And so they're able to make wines in Virginia that are kind of a little bit of a hybrid of an American style and a French style wine. So not quite California, not quite France, but very uniquely Virginia and somewhere in between. Well, so interesting. So what were some of the wines you tasted, then? Well, I did. I'm sure you tasted all of them. I tasted them. I tasted a lot of them. I was at, let's see, maybe three or four wineries. There is a great merlot coming out of a winery called Walsh Family Wine, which is in Loudon County. They're in northern Virginia, near Leesburg, Virginia. One of my favorite Virginia wines is their Rust Mountain Merlot, which is they have two Merlot's. One is kind of an entry-level, easy drinking, light and fruity, and then they have a more serious Merlot. And I think they do that one very well. And Merlot is a grape that you'll see a lot at different Virginia wineries. Well, that's interesting, because you don't hear a lot about Merlot grapes here in the States. Well, not sent sideways. Yeah, you're right. The movie "Sideways" came out in crushed Merlot. But there are people that are bringing Merlot back, I guess we can say. A friend of mine who owns a winery in Virginia called Paradise Springs, which we also visited this weekend. He also has a winery out in Santa Barbara, California, and he labels a wine, his Merlot, as effing Merlot, as a quote from the movie "Sideways." So I think that's pretty clever. But he's trying to bring Merlot back to the central coast there in California. OK. But some of the other grapes, Vignet, does very well in Virginia. It is actually the official state grape. So you will see Vignet on a lot of wine lists there in Virginia. And then a unique thing they have in that state is the Norton grape, which is a Native American grape. Most of these grapes that I'm talking about here are European grapes. They're vidisphenifera grapes that were vines that were brought over from Europe. But Norton is actually an American grape. So this grape grows well in Virginia. There's a lot of winemakers that are doing really interesting things with Norton experimenting with it. When I was there a few years ago, I met with Jenny McLeod, who is a character in the wine industry there. She's a great winemaker. Chrysalis vineyards outside of Leesburg, again, in the Loud and Counting area. And she is making a carbonic maceration, Norton. So Norton in this style of Beaujoleil. That's not all of us know what a carbonic, whatever it is. Think of Beaujoleil, a Beaujoleil nouveau that comes out every November around Thanksgiving. So that kind of light and fruity style of wine. So she's making that sort of style of Norton. But it's made something that we compare it to. And that's a red grape. So it can be in the style of a heavier red wine. But, again, there are experimentations happening. And that's another part of Virginia that's very cool. And exciting is the experimental attitude of a lot of the winemakers there. It's kind of the Wild West. There's not a preconceived notion of what a Virginia wine should be necessarily. So you can do whatever you want. And that creates a lot of interesting different styles and takes on these grapes. Hybrid grapes, you'll see a lot, the Vidal Blancs, the Vall Blanc. These are wines sometimes used in dessert winemaking, but also can make dry white wines. Petite Verdo does very well in Virginia. And, in fact, we were at a winery called Three Creek's winery, which is also in Loudon County. And we had some barrel samplings of the Petite Verdo that the winemaker currently has in the barrel. And it was fantastic. So I'm very excited about that coming out. I'm not sure when he's going to release that. But it was very encouraging to taste this. Because Petite Verdo is usually a blending grape. It's usually used in blends. It rarely is on its own. And when it is, it can be not so great on its own. But Virginia, Virginia does Petite Verdo pretty well. So it's fun to see grapes like that that usually aren't standalone varietal wines being used as varietal whites. And they do it well in Virginia. Well, you've mentioned all of these wines. But you start off by saying that they're not exporting it. They're not selling it outside of Virginia. Is that right? Some are. Some are. It depends also on any of this that I'm asking. Yes, yes. Actually, there are a couple wineries. Barbersville winery. You can find around-- I think they sell it at Total Wine. There is a Virginia wine section at Total Wine, or it might be called American wine or something like that. But there are several producers that do make enough to export. Barbersville is one of them. RDV might be another one that you could find. Like I said, Paradise Springs, my friend winery. He's got wine coming out of California and Virginia. We're trying to get more of his wines here in South Florida. That would be great. He is a University of Miami alum, so it's always good to support fellow alums. But yes, if you go to stores like Total Wine, the bigger stores usually. The boutique shops, sometimes they won't have them. But you can ask about Virginia wineries, and they should have a section that will at least have a few producers there. We'll be fine to taste some of the different grapes. I mean, I come back to this Norton grape because I've never heard of it. Yeah, look it up. N-O-R-T-O-N, Norton. Yeah, it is interesting because usually when we think of American grapes, we think of Muscatine here in Florida, which no comment on the quality of that most of the time. Muscatine is a very sweet, sweet grape. I can say, so if you like a sweet wine, it's not bad. If you do, if you do, if you like sweet wine, absolutely. Again, I have no further comments on Muscatine. I applaud the Florida winemaking community. But Norton is a little bit different than that, and it does produce more, in my opinion, more premium style wines. OK, so it sounds like a very interesting trip that you had in helping us to introduce this to wines closer to home, actually. Yeah, it's great. You can get up to DC in like two hours, two and a half hours. Rinse a car, drive about an hour outside of the city, and you can be tasting wine in no time. So really, if you flew up in the morning, you could be tasting wine by lunch. Let me ask it, but is it easy? I mean, if some of us wanted to do something like that, to take a wine tour, do we just arrive? Do they have tasting areas? Do we contact them ahead of time? So Virginia is pretty flexible in terms of, if you're just in a group of less than about six, you can probably just walk into most of these wineries. Most of them do have tasting rooms and visitor centers or whatever it is. Of course, check the website before you show up. They do ask for reservations if you have a larger group most of the time, but yeah, it's pretty laid back in terms of, you don't have to make reservations like you would say in Europe, where it's customary before you show up. So we didn't make any reservations during our trip. We kind of just walked in and did some tastings, and that's usually okay in Virginia. Well, sounds great. So Jacqueline Coleman, then where can we read about all of these wines you've been tasting? - Well, you can see a little bit of it on Instagram at History and Wine. And I write a monthly wine column for Biscayne Times newspaper here in Miami. - Terrific. Well, Jacqueline Coleman, Somalia, always great to be talking with you and glad to have you back again once more from your many wine travels. - Thanks Linda. I'm Linda Gastonheimer, and thank you for joining me on Food News and Views. Join me next week for more Food News and Views. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]