How Carrots Won the Trojan War

How Carrots Won

Onions

A small (but tangy) excerpt from the chapter on onions in
How Carrots Won the Trojan War by Becky Rupp Illustration By Linda Cook Devona

“It’s hard to imagine civilization without onions.”

—Julia Child

Onions were among the earliest of civilized foods and probably among the firstd vegetables routinely nabbed by primitive hunter-gatherers, who could have easily identified them by their distinctive smell. They are believed to have originated in central Asia and have been domesticated for at least 6,000 years. Moslem legend imprecisely dates them tot eh exit from the Garden of Eden; as Satan hastily departed, the angel with the flaming sword hot on his heels, onions are said to have spring from his right footprint and garlic from his left.

The earliest known written reference to the onion is a Sumerian cuneiform tablet from about 2400 BCE, in which the onion appears as an innocent bystander in a complaint against the city governor, who had illegally co-opted the temple oxen to plow his onion and cucumber patches. Culinary onions are featured in the Yale Babylonian Tablets, which date to 1700-1600 BCE and constitute what may be the world’s first cookbook. The tablets are a collection of caramel-colored clay slabs listing forty recipes for such Babylonia specialties as gazelle, pigeon, partridge, and goat, all heavily supplement with onions, leeks, and garlic.

According to Herodotus, sixteen thousand talents (960,000 pounds of silver) were spent on onions, radishes, and garlic to feed the laborers for the twenty years it took to build the Great Pyramid at Giza, completed in 2650 BCE and the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Onions appear on a wall painting in the pyramid of Pepi II (circa 2200 BCE), and Ramses IV, who died in 1160 BCE, went to his rest with onions placed in his eye sockets.

The Greeks and the Romans ate onions, though in both societies onions were generally viewed as fare for the lower classes. The first-century Roman cookbook Apicius shuns onions and garlic but does include four recipes for leeks, variously stewed in oil, wrapped in cabbage leaves, cooked with laurel berries, or boiled with string beans. No matter what one’s personal opinion, it would have been politically inexpedient in the first century CE to sneer at the leek: the volatile emperor Nero, who fancied himself a vocalist, consumed them in such quantities to sweeten his singing voice that he was nicknamed Porrophagus, or “Leek Eater.” Nero, who murdered his mother and stepbrother and tossed multitudes of Christians to the lions, was not an emperor to cross in the matter of vegetables.

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