1712: Les Oignons

There are, as you’ll know if you’ve been reading this blog a while now, many things that I do not like and wish to change about myself. Some of these are things I probably could change if I tried hard enough. Others are things that appear to be hard-wired into me, and I couldn’t change them now even if I tried.

One of the most frustrating things in this latter category is my dislike of onions.

I have hated onions for as long as I can remember. Initially dismissed by my parents as me just being a fussy eater — like most children, I was fairly fussy about a lot of unfamiliar foods when I was young — I continued to insist that not only did I simply not like onions, but they actually made me want to be sick.

That’s not an exaggeration, either; even today, if I can so much as taste a bit of raw onion, it makes me retch and completely puts me off whatever it is I am eating that has turned out to be stuffed full of onion. I won’t even eat something that has had raw onion on it, because I remain convinced that raw onion infects the flavours of everything around it, making everything else taste of onion even when the offending slices themselves have long been removed.

The strange thing about my violent dislike of onion is the fact that, in many cases, I’m absolutely fine with it if it’s been cooked into something. I don’t mind a pasta sauce that incorporates a bit of onion, for example — so long as it’s not too much — and I don’t mind a curry or Chinese dish that has a bit of onion in it — though again, not too much. Basically if I can taste it, it’s out; I cannot think of a single dish that is improved by the presence of onion, but handled correctly I can at least tolerate it.

What’s even stranger is that over the last couple of years or so, I’ve started to find even specifically onion-based things more palatable than I have done in the past. I can eat and even quite enjoy an onion bhaji, for example — though in most cases these have been deep-fried to such a degree that any resemblance to actual onions is by that point purely coincidental — and I have been known to have battered onion rings with steak and the like, too — though I will add to that that I usually smother them in so much sauce that it becomes impossible to discern their oniony origins.

Despite these changes in the last few years, though, I’m doubtful I’ll ever be able to eat onion in the same way as a lot of other people I know — and I certainly doubt I will ever get to a stage where I like it enough to specifically want to add it to things. This is frustrating, because it’s surprising quite how much food out there — particularly stuff designed for lunchtime consumption like sandwiches, wraps and the like — is absolutely rammed full of onion, in many cases ruining what sounds like an otherwise delicious item of food for me and, more often than not, making it completely unpalatable.

Oh well. I’ve survived 33 years without onions; I’m pretty sure I can probably go the rest of my life without them, too.