I don’t want to cry

I read somewhere that the stinky-ness an onion exudes as it is cut indicates how many tears you might shed during the cutting operation. Interested? So was I because chopping onions for an onion tart or onion soup is worse than death by a thousand paper cuts. I end the job snivelling, blinded, and demented (more so than usual). Something had to be done.

It was straight to the fridge to get an onion. Yes, I believe chilling onions mutes the toxic tear-inducing mist they fire off when cut. I’ve tried everything else — wearing a mask (it helps a little bit), wearing glasses (I always do, anyway), and lighting a candle nearby (I don’t know if that worked because the tea towel caught on fire, and I had to extinguish it). Blowing the mist away with a fan kind of worked, but it’s definitely not convenient, and I still needed the mask and glasses and had to keep my mouth closed to get a passable result. And the fumes ended up getting me in the end, anyway. I read that the tears come as a mechanism to wash away the irritant. Well, thank you, tears, but I’d rather you didn’t because mixed with the irritant, I end up with slush and can’t see a thing. I’m at risk of slicing off a finger as I cut my onions.

This morning, I got out a board, a sharp knife and an onion. I peeled the onion and cut it in half through the root, then cut one half into strips, cutting from the root but not through it (apparently, there’s a whole bag of stink-bomb naughtiness tucked in there), and the smell was stinky but not super pungent. It was 7.30 am. I couldn’t force a sliver in my mouth, so the taste test result is void. I cut the other half onion into half-round slices (kind of thing; look at the pic), and, oh Lordy, that’s when the stink heavens opened. I had to run for the hills and couldn’t return to the kitchen for hours. The sun had dried out the onion by then, and the whole kitchen smelled of very bad body odour. Sort of like an athletes’ changing room at the Olympics, I imagine.

But I think I proved something: the less you cut an onion, the less cell damage occurs, and the fewer meanie stink cells get released. It’s not scientific, as you can probably tell, but I think cutting onions into slivers or strips rather than finely chopping them could help. If you see Shared Kitchen recipes appearing with onions cut into strips and slivers, you will know why. Let me know how you get on, and, oh, perhaps continue with the mask, glasses, fan and closed mouth routine, and of course, keep the onions chilled. That last one, I know, does work.