WASHINGTON — Back when Miles Davis walked the earth and plied his trade, exceptionally talented musicians toiled in the background: Herbie Hancock, for example. Dave Holland. John Scofield. Coltrane.
They were jazz’s “sidemen,” and their job was to make the song and the bandleader sound good.
If you’ll excuse the simile, good recipes are like a skilled combo, and the modest onion is almost always relegated to a sideman role: an essential ingredient, but not the featured one.
After a while, so many of Miles’s guys took center stage and thrived. Likewise, the onion has long been ready to thrive in the spotlight. And a new cookbook from husband-and-wife authors Kate Winslow and Guy Ambrosino, “Onions Etc.,” places it front and center.
The genesis for it, Winslow said, was her experience working at a cooking school in Sicily.
“We realized that pretty much everything we were starting with cooking started with the red onions that they grew there on the farm,” she said. “We just realized how much we were relying on them.”
A mind-bending taco
At a taco shop in her native Pittsburgh, Winslow saw a glimpse of the allium’s real potential: an onion taco.
“That blew my mind,” she said. “It was so simple, and it was just grilled onions and a corn tortilla with just a little bit of quesa fresco. And it just kind of made a light bulb go off, and ever since then we’ve been just collecting onion recipes until we had a stack big enough.
“And we thought: ‘Hey I think that there’s something here. Make a book.’”
Why are alliums (which also include garlic, chives, shallots and leeks) so ubiquitous in cooking?
They store easily, they’re affordable and they’re easy to find at the supermarket, Winslow said.
And, of course, they add all that flavor, which can change throughout the year.
“People don’t realize they’re seasonal,” Winslow said. “Spring onions are going to be sweeter. They’re going to be a little milder and juicier, and they’re great for eating raw or cooking very quickly.”
Storage onions, on the other hand, are more pungent and have that classic flavor that works well for cold-weather recipes.
“We want to cook things low and slow,” she said. “Put them in the oven and forget about them for a while … and they take beautifully to that, because as they cook really slowly, they get much sweeter and mellower in flavor.”
Beyond salad
The creations in “Onions Etc.” go beyond salads, and include such dishes as curried onion fritters and roasted onions stuffed with lentils. They also include not one, not two, not three, but four different takes on onion rings. See the gallery below.
Another is near and dear to Ambrosino’s family: fried water.
“All you do is take one onion per person that you’re cooking for, slice them, cook them slowly in a bunch of olive oil until they’re nice and golden and soft, then you add some water to make the simplest of broths and you turn it into a soup of sorts,” Winslow explained.
Lightly whisk in some eggs, drizzle them into the soup while you’re stirring, then pour it all over husks of stale bread.
“It’s so simple,” she said. “But it’s just an incredibly comforting thing to make when you have almost nothing in the house.”
Onions and comfort indeed go hand in hand. The smell of one sauteing, after all, can be as evocative as a beloved jazz standard.
“To me, it just smells like home,” Winslow said. “You just knew that something delicious was going to come your way,” she reminisced. “You knew that you were loved because someone was making something delicious for you.”
