Recipes Ideas for an Authentic Thanksgiving Dinner, The Core of an Onion Interview
In our Thanksgiving dinner prep this week—and whenever possible—we will endeavor to remember the fact that this holiday is painful to many of the ancestors of the First Nations people living amongst us in North America. It doesn’t take an empath to know why.
One meaningful way you can do to honor the great Indigenous cultures that were violently eradicated from this continent is to add Native American cuisine to your menu on Thursday. In a sense, you already do: turkey, squash, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, and cranberries were all pre-Colonial food. But we’d like to take this opportunity to remember a past Foreword This Week interview with Sean Sherman, author of The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, which was reviewed by Eric Patterson in the pages of Foreword a few years ago. In the book, Chef Sherman offers Maple-Brined Smoked Turkey, Acorn and Wild Rice Cakes, Hazelnut Maple Sorbet, and dozens of other Indigenous recipes that will add authenticity to your festive holiday table. That’s the sort of food that will keep you from talking about politics with your family.
On to today’s interview between Rachel Jagareski, and Mark Kurlansky, author of The Core of an Onion, which earned a starred review from Rachel in our November/December issue.
Your vibrant storytelling conveys the ubiquity of the onion throughout so many cultures and historical eras. Onions are central to so many cuisines, but it was also fascinating to learn of their use in folk medicine, dyeing, proverbs, and even in popular culture. Who knew an Errol Flynn movie about George Armstrong Custer would be so onion-centric? What was the most surprising thing you unearthed about onions during your research for this book?
I was most surprised to learn the importance of onions in Indian politics. Also that the British used to get French onions delivered on bicycles.
Onions typically star in savory dishes, but you show how they also feature in sweeter recipes. The medieval recipes for sweet onion soups and other concoctions were intriguing. Did you cook up any of these recipes?
I like William Ellis’s eighteenth-century apple and onion pie, or in his case pye, but that may be because I am always game for an apple pie.
I savored your portraits of historical cooks both because you quoted their more rhapsodic recipe prose and because you offered details of their lives, including how many of the women cookbook authors were also social activists. Do you have any personal favorites among their ranks?
Hannah Glasse, from 18th-century England, whose books were so popular some could not believe she was really a woman. Her richly written recipes reveal a British cuisine before the industrial revolution ruined everything. And Lydia Maria Child’s simple old New England cooking. A leading abolitionist, she was one of the most interesting Americans of the nineteenth century. Also she knew how to write a good recipe.
If you were to host an all-onion feast what dishes would be on the menu?
An all-onion meal would include a soup, maybe the traditional Paris one or maybe my childhood favorite Vichyssoise, a roast, a roasted onion, possibly one of the stuffed ones, and a pie. Somewhere I would also include encebollada, a Peruvian favorite with red onions and lime, which brightens a dish with its brilliant fuchsia color and sharpens your palate with its tartness.
Your pen-and-ink illustrations accent the text so delightfully. Are you self-taught or did you study this technique?
All my life I have done drawings, watercolors, a few oils, some woodcuts, and even cast bronze sculptures. I have never been taught any of this but then I have never taken a writing class either.
What kinds of onions are currently stocked in the Kurlansky pantry and why?
Sweet onions and red onions for opposite reasons, the mild and the forceful.
Your books include titles for children and adults, and cover a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, with subjects as disparate as Basque culture, paper, oysters, Motown, and fly fishing. What literary projects do you have planned for the future?
My next book is about a group of nineteenth century abolitionists in Boston who were dedicated to nonviolence, tried to prevent the Civil War, and believed that if the slaves were emancipated with violence it would take more than a century for them to get full rights. Unfortunately, they were right. Maria Child figures prominently in this book and I even include a couple of her recipes. It’s always a good idea to have one or two nonviolent recipes. After that I am doing a book about lobsters and they are defiantly not nonviolent.
Rachel Jagareski
