Onions were never a big deal at home when I was a kid. One or two turned up in the occasional stew, floating in the languid stock along with thickly sliced carrots, parsnips, and a bay leaf, but they were not stalwarts of our kitchen. In my teenage years I was finally introduced to the liver and onions so hated by most of my school friends, the onions cooked lovingly in our battered aluminium frying pan, blackened from years of Sunday fry-ups, until they took on the color of varnish and their flesh turned from acrid to a deep, honeyed sweetness. I took to this marriage of the intensely savory meat and sugary-sweet onions straightaway, though more for the glistening alliums than the panfried organ. My first attempts at cooking onions to match those luscious little nuggets I had been enjoying at home failed for lack of a heavy-bottomed pan and a little patience. The gorgeous, caramel-edged stickiness of a fried onion needs time in which to develop. A quick ten minutes in the thin frying pan that accompanied my crummy bedsit was never going to work. To make perfect fried onions, you need a shallow, heavy-bottomed pan. The temperature should be low to medium and the onions should be allowed to soften slowly. Winter onions, which contain less water, will produce a sweeter and deeper gold result. Summer onions, full of water, will produce rather a lot of liquid, which will have to be evaporated away by turning up the heat. The essence of frying onions is to let them soften in an unhurried manner with only the occasional stir to stop them sticking. You want their sugars to caramelize on the bottom of the pan; it is what gives fried onions their characteristic gloss and sweetness.

　　

Ingredients

enough for 2 or 3

　　large, golden onions – 3

　　butter – a thick slice

　　oil – a small glug

　　

Step 1

Peel the onions. Cut them in half from root to tip, then slice each half into thick segments. Melt the butter in a shallow pan, add the oil, and then the onions. Cook over low heat until the onions are sweet and soft enough to squish between thumb and forefinger. Salt only at the end of cooking, otherwise they will fail to soften.

　　

Step 2

There is no hurrying this. Turning the heat up will result in the onions browning, and what you are after is onions that are deep honey gold rather than the color of creosote. Stir them as they soften so they do not stick, but not so often that they fail to leave a glossy, sticky residue in the pan. There will be much flavor there.

　　Tender