Onions at Easter
Martin Doyle
I adore onions.
When I visit Wellington supermarkets, I love it when the staff heap red onions in those long freezers with mirrors, and a frosty mist rises from their purple, glossy skins. With my eyes closed, I lean over them in a state of deep euphoria and savour their intense aroma.
Onions have got a lot more going for them. In the human race’s long, ever-unfolding tumble through time, they’ve been one of our oldest and steadiest companions. Roman gladiators used to rub onions on their muscles to harden them up. A woman from Taumarunui told me she used onion juice to dye cloth. And Kiwis scrupulously wipe their hot-plates at BBQs with a raw onion.
I know onions can make you cry, but sometimes more than tears are drawn out. With Easter approaching, the onions have called to mind a wonderful experience we used to have as children.
In those distant times, we didn’t have so many chocolate Easter eggs on tap (like today), so we used to do something special with onions.
We’d peel off their big, dry outer skins and boil them in a small pot for a while. Then we’d boil eggs in the onion-skin water, and within minutes we’d have beautiful boiled eggs whose shells, as if by alchemy, had been dyed yellow-gold.
This novelty, and the warm, sunny look of the shells added another layer of excitement to Easter Sunday.
Nowadays, at Easter, we force brown, chocolate eggs into our mouths using both hands. We don’t worry about what it means for our teeth. So maybe it’s time we had a closer look at the old onion again.
When I visit Wellington supermarkets, I love it when the staff heap red onions in those long freezers with mirrors, and a frosty mist rises from their purple, glossy skins. With my eyes closed, I lean over them in a state of deep euphoria and savour their intense aroma.
Onions have got a lot more going for them. In the human race’s long, ever-unfolding tumble through time, they’ve been one of our oldest and steadiest companions. Roman gladiators used to rub onions on their muscles to harden them up. A woman from Taumarunui told me she used onion juice to dye cloth. And Kiwis scrupulously wipe their hot-plates at BBQs with a raw onion.
I know onions can make you cry, but sometimes more than tears are drawn out. With Easter approaching, the onions have called to mind a wonderful experience we used to have as children.
In those distant times, we didn’t have so many chocolate Easter eggs on tap (like today), so we used to do something special with onions.
We’d peel off their big, dry outer skins and boil them in a small pot for a while. Then we’d boil eggs in the onion-skin water, and within minutes we’d have beautiful boiled eggs whose shells, as if by alchemy, had been dyed yellow-gold.
This novelty, and the warm, sunny look of the shells added another layer of excitement to Easter Sunday.
Nowadays, at Easter, we force brown, chocolate eggs into our mouths using both hands. We don’t worry about what it means for our teeth. So maybe it’s time we had a closer look at the old onion again.
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