Few jobs in the kitchen are quite as miserable as chopping onions. Your fingers smell for the rest of the day, your eyes stream uncontrollably and, no matter how many television chefs tell you there’s a foolproof trick, there isn’t.
Onions fight back.
Unfortunately, they’re also the foundation of just about everything worth eating. Curries. Stews. Chilli. Pasta sauces. If you’re my commis chef, your first job has always been, “Right… chop the onions.”
Needless to say, Wanda and Jan had both spent years doing exactly that.
One Sunday we were all together for one of our regular family get-togethers. Our families had grown up together; the kids had known each other from almost the day they were born and were much more like cousins than friends. As always, everybody naturally drifted into the kitchen.
I don’t know why kitchens work like that. You can have a perfectly good sitting room with comfortable sofas, but everybody still ends up standing shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen with a glass of wine in one hand and an opinion in the other.
We’d decided to make chilli, so everybody was given a job. I had the big pot. Somebody was browning the mince. Someone else was measuring spices. Another person was opening tins. It was organised chaos, exactly the way I like cooking.
Then Jan wandered over to the fridge. She opened the door, reached inside and calmly produced four bags of ready-chopped onions. She dropped them on the worktop as though this was the most natural thing in the world.
Wanda stopped dead. She stared at the bags. Then she stared at Jan.
“What do you mean… you’ve got chopped onions?”
Jan looked completely puzzled. “I don’t like chopping onions,” she said. “So I buy them already chopped.”
There was complete silence.
Then Wanda slowly turned and looked at me. It wasn’t an angry look. It was far worse. It was the look of a woman who had suddenly realised she’d spent years crying over chopping boards for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
“So…” she said very quietly. “You mean I could have bought chopped onions all these years?”
I thought about defending myself. For about half a second. Then I realised I didn’t really have a defence.
If you quietly give somebody the job you don’t like doing, and they keep doing it… why would you ever volunteer to take it back?
From Eat a Second Helping — A Life, Reheated. Out October, Free Rein Press.