Caramelized Onions

You’re laying on the couch, the TV is on but you’re not really watching anything, and you’re feeling blah. Maybe it’s that summer has come to an end. You’re in the interstitial period that immediately precedes the season that elevates hypothermia and credit card debt to holiday status.

Fall has begun, the house feels empty. Leaves have fallen, rain has fallen, and is still falling, and a slurry of leaf paste has formed on the ground outside. You’re stuck inside.

You’re tired. The listlessness feels like a yoke tied to your neck, pulling you back down into the personalized crater in the sofa cushion when you try to stand.

You’re hungry. The bag of chips you had for lunch isn’t tiding you over, and it’s only midafternoon. And try as you might, sleep refuses your impatient summons.

So what do you do? Why, you cook of course.

You rummage through your pantry, somewhat skeptically, but going through the motions anyways, hoping but not expecting to pull out a rabbit from thin air, braised and roasted. Instead, you’re clutching various other treasures you’ve blindly pulled out; a dusty tin of anchovies that might be older than you, a sprouting head of garlic that you contemplate climbing in to the field of clouds above, and - oh wait, a bag of onions!

A bag of onions, whatever am I going to make with that? you wonder. Perhaps a topping for eggs, pizza, or pasta. But you haven’t the stamina - or more importantly, the ingredients - to make any of those things.

You shrug, and take comfort in knowing that eating a bag of onions is somehow less depressing than eating a bag of potato chips for dinner.

You pop open the fridge. Ketchup, horseradish, a few sprigs of parsley. On its own shelf, a brick of butter stands tall, a space age sky scraper in a deserted tundra.

This is the recipe ideally suited to you. Not because of the constraints of your ingredients, but because you find yourself in a house for two, cooking for one.

Caramelized Onions

Cooking Time: a long time

Ingredients

A bag of onions

Unsalted butter, 6 tbsp

Salt, 1 tbsp

For your purposes, onions are made of water, sulphur-containing compounds, and sugars. Caramelizing onions is an act of tender negotiation. You want to rid the onion of its moisture and bitterness, while nurturing its sweetness. But do not expect the onion to relent so easily. A soft wooden spatula, a gentle hand, and a patient disposition are by and large the most important utensils at your disposal for this recipe.

Step 1

You cut open the bag of onions, and they spill out on to your countertop. The store calls them yellow, but they more so resemble Alabaster SW-7008, the color of the bedroom that now only you inhabit. You cut each onion from its north pole to its south, applying firm pressure to the knife as it travels the length of the onion. Each cut is staccato and jarring, as the edge of the blade slams against the board, and you begin to regret your decision already.

Onions don’t want to be cut. Over the course of millennia, they’ve evolved to develop a sophisticated defence mechanism so that they can live content lives of solitude, keeping pests and mammals away. When an onion is disturbed, their cells bleed sulphurous compounds, emitting the chemical irritant which is currently causing tears to leak from your eyes. Then tears of the non-onion-induced variety, known more colloquially as sadness, leak out too.

At first your eyes burn, and you keep dabbing at them. But then you come to welcome the sensation, and you feel some relief from the pressure that had been building up near your temples, as though this whole time your tears had been desperately pushing up against a dam wall.

When you’re done chopping, you have no tears and a ten pound pile of onions. You feel a satisfying soreness in your tricep, and you joke to yourself that you’ve already started getting in shape and you’re well on your way to recovery.

You taste one of the chopped pieces, so you can get a sense of the transformation that will eventually occur. Bitter, isn’t it? Pungent. This is your starting point. Your job is to coerce each one of these slivers of the moon to be its best self.

Step 2

You find your largest and heaviest Dutch oven. You’re a little light headed so you resent its weight, but you put your faith in its sturdiness to anchor you. It’s cast iron, obviously. You rest it on the stove element closest to you, and set the burner to medium-high. The radiant heat of the gas flame warms you.

When the pot is hot, you use your fingers to slide the pat of butter into the pot. The coolness and creaminess of the butter on your fingertips are soothing, like ice cream on a hot day. Right away, the butter sizzles and glides playfully across the pot’s scalding floor.

Unlike the onion, the butter offers no resistance, believing in a higher purpose and offering itself willingly to you. The crackling of the melting butter makes your skin tingle, and you want the goosebumps to permeate within. You let yourself live in that sizzle, holding on to that feeling as tightly as you can, knowing it will only last a minute.

Step 3

You pour your mountain of onions into the pot. Using your fingers, you sprinkle the tablespoon of salt into the pot. You distribute the salt evenly, creating a snowstorm over the mountain caps. You use your spatula to mix up the salt and the onions. The salt will help draw the water out.

You cover the pot. This will allow the onions to steam and soften uniformly. It is much easier to ask sweetness of onions when they are softened. 

You have about twenty minutes to do whatever you’d like while the onions steam. You consider cleaning your knife and cutting board, but that may be asking much. After all, you narrowly avoided eating a bag of potato chips for dinner. No, instead, you opt to make some changes to prepare yourself for what’s required of you in the next step. 

You turn the television off, and the relief from the idle chatter and contrived laugh tracks makes you immediately feel lighter. The pitter patter from the rain outside cozies in to your eardrums, and you’re grateful that you’re spared a silent suffering. You swing the balcony doors open, and you’re greeted by a crisp and candid fall breeze. You find yourself hypnotized by watching the opera in front of you. The crescendo of the rainfall, the sway of the trees in the wind, the relentless fall of water that could bring life to Mars.

You put on some smooth jazz, optimistic that its sultry sound waves will help soften the onions, and return to the stove. For the first time in a while, the solitude feels comforting.

Step 4

You remove the lid of the pot, and a geyser of onion vapour rushes out. With your wooden spatula, you toss the onions about. You do this for a while, until the excess water from the steaming process evaporates. 

The onions are now a very light golden color, indicating that they have consented to caramelize with you. This is not an invitation to be careless, however. In fact, the hard work begins now. If you become impatient, your pot of gold will turn to char, and all will be for naught. This step is an act of patience, and cannot be rushed. You turn down the stove burner to medium, and continue to stir the onions around.

As the onions become darker, you will need to stir more often. You will start to see the fond, the dark bits of sugary onion pulp stuck to the bottom of the pot. You don’t want the sweetness of the onions to succumb to the elemental heat, so you use your spatula to work the fond off the bottom of the pot before it sticks and burns. Add a splash of water as needed to deglaze the pot.

At first, you find it easy to watch over the onions and stir them every few minutes. The novelty of it is enough to keep you engaged. But after an hour of this, your mind begins to fall into old patterns. Minutes begin to feel like hours, and your mind feasts on feelings of loneliness, self-doubt, and meaninglessness. You will be tempted to turn the TV back on so that you can hear someone talk to you, or in the very least, to raise the heat so as to bring dinner theatre to a close.

Did I do something wrong? you ask yourself. Who am I now?

No matter, now is not the time to drown in such questions. Finding one’s self is not an errand of the mind. It happens when you least look for it, when a nourished soul collides with life being lived in the present.

These onions need you, and you don’t know it yet, but you need them too. You return your attention to the pot, stirring again, taking the onions right to, but not over, the brink of darkness.

Step 5

The onions have turned into a hickory, schmaltzy, jam, so you turn off the stove. It’s time to eat. 

The sweet, nutty scent that has lingered in the air made you hungry hours ago, and you’re tempted to down the onions like a bowl of soup. But you don’t, for the same reason that you didn’t turn the heat on the stove to high.

You avoid using a spoon as your utensil of choice, because it lacks ceremony. You stare at the other utensils in your drawer, and elect to use a fork because you remember a rare happy moment from a time period that feels prehistoric. It’s a memory from a restaurant; twirling pasta, two pairs of smiles.

The house affords you the option to sit at the best seat. You stay far away from the crater in your sofa. Perhaps beside the window, or at your dining table, the one that hasn’t been used in so long that it seems new again. You sit on the living room carpet next to the fireplace. 

You twirl a few of the velvety, oozy, onions with your fork, and with your lips and never your teeth, you slowly rake the food in to your mouth. You take a bite, barely needing to chew, the onions melting on your tongue. 

That’s dinner for one tonight. It’s warm, sweet, rich, and earthy. It’s the fall of a million miles of rain, it’s the crashing chords of a jazz standard. Somewhere inside you, in a part of the body you can’t point to, you feel something sizzle.