There was a time when an onion was buried with kings.
People have been growing onions for at least five and a half thousand years, somewhere across the stretch of land that runs from Iran through to India and central Asia, though the plant itself leaves almost no trace behind, so nobody can say exactly where it began. What we do know comes from Egypt, where onions turn up everywhere, painted on tomb walls, left as offerings on altars, packed into ordinary meals alongside bread and fish. The Egyptians saw something in the shape of it. Cut an onion in half and you find ring inside ring inside ring, no visible end, and they read that as eternity itself. Onions were tucked into mummies to carry that idea into the afterlife. When the tomb of Ramesses IV was opened, onions were found resting in his eye sockets.
Greek athletes ate onions before competing, convinced they thickened the blood and gave strength. Romans valued onions too, using them to treat everything from poor eyesight to sleeplessness, and as the empire spread across Europe, the onion spread with it. It kept doing what it had always done, feeding people through hard seasons when little else would grow or store, cheap, reliable, and impossible to exhaust.
Cutting one still has a strange power over the body, though not the kind the Egyptians imagined. Slice through the cells and you release a set of compounds that mix in the air and form a gas, one the onion makes deliberately, as a defence, the same way it discourages the creatures that would dig it up and eat it underground. That gas reaches your eyes, turns to a mild acid on contact, and your body responds the only way it knows how, flooding the surface with tears to wash it away. It is not sadness. It is the plant protecting itself, working exactly as it was built to.
There is no single onion doing all the work in a kitchen either. The yellow ones are the ones stews and slow bases are built on, sharp raw, sweet and mellow once cooked down. Red onions carry more of that raw bite, kept for salads and quick pickles where colour matters as much as flavour. White onions sit somewhere gentler, common in Mexican cooking, in salsas, in anything meant to stay fresh and light. And the small ones, banana shallots, pearl onions, the little walking onions that root themselves wherever their stems happen to bend, all carry the family's usefulness in a smaller, sweeter form.
The real transformation happens slowly. A raw onion is sharp enough to bring tears from across a room, but low heat and enough time turn all of that sharpness into something deep and sweet, the sugars drawing out as the onion breaks down, until half an hour or more later you have something that tastes almost like nothing else in the pot, the base note that most good cooking is quietly built on.
I have wept over an onion the way everyone has, and gone on cooking anyway. Some things are worth the sting.
