Despite knowing why I felt the way I do about onions, my father couldn’t understand my attitude. He loved onions. In fact one of his favorite dishes was black-eyed peas and rice, completely covered with chopped onion. An entire, medium-sized onion. I could barely stand to be in the same room with it, and his failure to understand my position was the source of much internecine conflict, up until I left home for good.
Sorry folks, I still don’t like raw onion, nor most of the ways onions are prepared; but after I finished graduate school, I did discover that not all onions are the same, and that one need not consume an entire raw, medium-sized, yellow onion in order to derive some flavor benefits.
Once upon a time, there was in Gainesville, Florida, a small but popular hamburger stand called In & Out Hamburgers. It is my belief that this stand was a local “Mom and Pop” operation and not part of the California-born chain with a similar-sounding name. At any rate, when you ordered a burger from them, by default it was dressed with a couple of extremely thin slices of a (very!) sweet, red onion. I came to enjoy those burgers a lot.
Later on, my Honey (who likes cooked onions) introduced me to the Onion Roll, and I found that I could enjoy a sandwich made with same. Over the years, I added fried onion rings and onion straws to the repertoire of allowable onions in my diet, and ultimately, even came to enjoy other fried, fully cooked onion dishes, like the famous “bloomin’ onion” and its imitators.