FACTORALY - E60 ONIONS

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Simon knows his. Bruce chops his. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello bruce hi simon hello everyone who happens to be listening i'm glad you've accidentally stumbled across us i wonder where you were actually trying to get to If they're not listening there's no point to this There's not is there It's just two blokes sitting in cupboards Having a chin wave With something running off in the background That they're not listening to Called Factorally

Factorally? I think I've heard of that Tell me more So Factorally is a podcast Which we do every week We come up with a subject Which is either very dull or very interesting. And we make it very interesting for about half an hour. That sums it up.

Sometimes that's really easy to do because it's a really interesting subject. And the facts and the stories and the anecdotes just trip off the page. They do. It's really easy. And sometimes not quite so much. Yeah. Like today. Yeah.

Today's subject, we've had to really dig in the earth to find some interesting facts. We've had to peel back a few layers to get to where we're going. Don't. Just don't. It's onions.

It is onions. We are talking about onions. We're talking about onions. What fun. it's onions it is onions we are talking about onions what fun now we all know that i i'm rather partial to a bit of etymology where do these words and phrases come from yes um originally the onion is a is a funny one the latin name for onion is cepa or sepa c-e-p-a um which didn't sort of last the distance except for when you know botanists refer to a particular plant and they use its latin name the various variations of of onions always have the word cepa in it um but then a little later on around the

14th century again in latin they started using the word onionum u-n-i-o-n-e-m onionum onionum to refer to an onion but that word also um gives rise to the word unio meaning unity or oneness or wholeness okay because all of the different layers of the onion come together to make one whole. So onionium led to the French onion, and that leads to onion. Other varieties of onion also have their own etymologies. The scallion, which we'll come on to later, it's another word for spring onion, scallion also has the same root as shallot, because in Old French they had a word called escalote,

and therefore that gave us scallion and also shallot. And in turn, that escalote was originally called an Escalonian onion, which was named after the ancient city of Escalon, which was near Israel. And those particular type of onions came from that area, or at least that's where they discovered them. And so they called them an Escalonian onion. That led to Escalot, which led to both Escalion and Shalot. There's an onion called a Welsh onion as well.

Is there? Yeah. I just thought that was a leak. Well, exactly. But it uses the word Welsh in a way that i didn't realize it was so welsh can also mean foreign oh can it really yeah oh so onion not from around here right so it wasn't specifically from wales it was just from wales at all it was from abroad yes huh how interesting

so onions where do onions come from? Where did it all begin? They come from everywhere. Do they? Yeah, I mean, prehistoric man was eating onions. I mean, actually sort of cultivating onions was done by either the Egyptians or the Romans. And then this time, it's the Egyptians. Hooray! Well done, Egyptians. About 3000 BC, they were farming onions and they were using them for all sorts of good stuff.

Great. Okay. It's interesting, isn't it? We go in search of absolute cast iron rock solid facts. And invariably, we both come up with completely different cast iron rock solid facts. I found that in the wild, onions probably first came from Central Asia. I found records saying that they were first cultivated in China around 5000 BC. Okay.

Egyptians certainly did use them. The ancient Egyptians saw onions as a symbol of eternal life. Right. Because of all the layers. One layer of life disappears and then there's another and then there's another and then there's another. Yeah. Obviously, they use them for food, obviously. Yeah.

But they use them for medicine. They use them in sort of religious acts and things. Okay. The body of Ramesses IV, when they uncovered it, they found traces of onion in his eye sockets. Yes. So apparently he was buried with a couple of onions in his eyes symbolizing eternal life yeah exactly that yes yeah and also these surround the sarcophagi with um sort of onions and onion flowers and things like that okay sarcophagi

is that the plural of sarcophagus unfortunately yes it is that's beautiful that's much better than sarcophaguses i wouldn't enjoy that at all apparently uh alexander the great uh first brought onions from egypt and the surrounding areas to greece uh and then from greece they sort of entered the rest of europe around the fourth century bc yeah um so they've been around for a while plinny the elder um who was writing we should put a note plinny the elder never believe a word the man says sure but he does write quite a lot of stuff and a lot of historians have taken it into consideration so i'm going to quote him anyway okay what does pliny say pliny the elder when writing about life in pompeii he documented the roman beliefs about onions and their ability to cure all sorts of ailments they were used for bad eyesight they were used to help you sleep they were used to cure oral sores toothaches dog bites

lumbago and dysentery okay i take that back because most of what blinney just said is actually true is it yeah go plenty spot on onions seem to be like the ultimate health food they are amazing things as medicines they contain a lot of antioxidants and that kind of lowers um inflammation They reduce cholesterol. They reduce the risk of heart disease. They lower blood pressure. They are just ridiculous. They also contain stuff which stops you going bold.

Oh, that one is actually true? That is actually true. Oh. Yeah. I could have sworn that was the one that was going to be false. No, if you put onion oil on your head, onion juice or onion oil, you get thicker hair. And it's anti-dandruff. Wow.

Mind you, you'd smell of an onion, but regardless of that. It's a trade-off, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's good for mouth. Did you talk about mouth health? I did, yeah. I said mouth sores.

Yeah, perfect. And toothache. Yeah, raw onion or even gently cooked onion. Brilliant for mouth ulcers. Onions are antibacterial. So if you're eating any sort of rogue bacteria in your mouth, they're sort of neutralised by onions. Right, okay.

I mean, the big one, which I heard, it's a bit like an old wives' tale, but it's true. If you cut an onion in half and stick the half against your ear, if you've got earache, and you squeeze the onion, it will cure earache. But why? How? What? Again, it's antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, all that stuff. How interesting. I need to make your earache.

I would like to point out that neither Bruce or myself are trained physicians and any advice that we may or may not give is to be taken with a large pinch of salt. We're not even quacks. We're not even quacks. However, we do know stuff. So for example, if you get bitten by a mosquito, again, chop an onion in half,

rub the mosquito bite with an onion and instantly no pain no itching wow yeah that's clever isn't it isn't it clever you just need to carry an onion around with you basically you know if you rather than carry a first aid kit like a sack of onions yes we'll do you very nicely wow oh and you said plenty said it helps sleep yeah that's true too really there are people who if you basically chop up a whole load of onions and put them in a jar and see it yeah and then before you go to sleep open the jar and immediately put your nose in and take a good long sniff yes that actually will help your sleep patterns that's crazy

yeah how interesting i mean if you eat them they're very good for loads of vitamin c yes they're vitamin a vitamin e they're really good for acne oh fantastic if you're if you're a teenager listening to this go go and grab some i mean you know the breath obviously is not great well yeah but you know and things like you know it's really great. Well, yeah. But, you know, and things like, you know, it's really good for brain function. If you eat raw red onions. I mean, you know, you can put them in a salad. Yes. Best not to chop them up too thin, you know, so you get a decent chunk on an onion.

Yeah. But with a bit of dressing and stuff. The dressing doesn't affect the efficacy of the onion. Yeah. They're just so good for us. I mean, they're great for us. Unfortunately, as a dog owner, they're not great for a number of pets, including dogs.

I mean, they are very, very toxic. They reduce the red blood cells in a pet's blood. I read this. They're toxic to dogs, cats, and particularly guinea pigs. Guinea pigs? Guinea pigs, which I was surprised by because I'd have and particularly guinea pigs. Guinea pigs? Guinea pigs, which I was surprised by, because I'd have thought a guinea pig would just munch into any raw vegetable you give it, but apparently not onions.

There's onions and onions as well, you know, because you've got the basic onion, the brown onion and the white onion, and then you've got the red onion. Yeah. And then you've got things like, you know, got things like spring onions and leeks and garlic. And they're all part of the same family. Yes, they are. Chives as well, I think, are related, aren't they?

Yeah. They're all sort of onion-esque. Yes, it's one of those vegetables where they're all related. There are some that are so closely related that it's really difficult to tell them apart and determine whether it's actually its own individual species or not. Yeah. I would think of a spring onion, you know, the long cylindrical thing with a small bulb at the bottom and big cylindrical green leaves at the end. Chop it up, put it in a salad or a potato salad, whatever. That's a spring onion.

The Americans call those green onions, but then there is actually something called a green onion. So are they the same thing? Are they not the same thing? It seems that spring onions, in their truest sense, are just regular onions that have been harvested earlier. They've been plucked out of the ground before they've had the chance to fully grow that large bulb that we know as an onion. What else do you know about onions? Well, I know that they have flowers. I didn't know this before. I was looking into how onions are actually grown. So it's one of those root vegetables. It's the kind of thing that has leaves above ground and a bulbous root below ground. We eat the bulbous root and we ignore the leaves right they start off quite small they go through the spring onion

phase as i mentioned earlier the green leaves eventually sort of flop aside uh the bulb in under the ground gets bigger and bigger it moves itself towards the surface the outer layer becomes brown or red depending on the variety yes and you get that sort of lovely crispy skin on the outside if you don't dig it up at that point in order to eat it um eventually the center of the onion grows a stem which grows a little bulb of flowers i've had that i've had that happen when i when you saw onions too long they kind of sprout don't they yeah they do and they they create this thing i'd never heard this word before in my life. I love it. It's called an inflorescence.

Oh, wow. An inflorescence is a little gathering of flowers. And it roughly looks like the shape of an onion, but in floral form. Representation. Tiny little white flowers in this sort of spherical inflorescence at the top of the onion. I have seen onion flowers. They are very pretty. They are.

They are quite cute, aren't they? And then that's how they propagate. You know, our way of growing onions is that you plop an onion in the ground and it grows into an onion, you know. Yes. The natural way, it turns into these flowers. These flowers spread. More onions come up. Fantastic.

I remember at school you could grow onions. It's like a glass jar that had like a waste near the top of it so you could put an onion in yeah fill the water up to just under the under the the waste if you like of where the glass jar was and you could see the roots actually extending into the bottom to get get the nutrient and then then you get a flower off the top brilliant i'd never realized before and it makes sense because if if they are related to sort of um you know garlic and things like that they they have flowers don't you when you see wild garlic flowers yes um so it kind of makes sense that they would have but yeah because we always dig them up just before that happens

you never get to see it they're also good at predicting the weather kind of okay if you dig up an onion when it's ready if the outer skin of it is quite thick yes or even the layers are quite thick layers yeah the weather's going to be bad coming up all right okay whereas if the skin's very thin especially the papery out outer layer it's very thin um then that means that there's good weather on the way right did you know that there is a rhyme to support what you have just said? I did not. It's in the similar vein as Red Sky at Night, Shepherd's Delight.

Okay. Red Sky at Morning, Shepherd's Warning. And this goes, Onion skins very thin, mild winter coming in. Onion skins thick and tough, coming winter cold and rough. Well, I never. They're great. There's always a poet somewhere.

We eat a lot of onions, don't we? How many onions do we eat? Seven. In a lifetime? What time period are we talking about here, Bruce? Do you know what? I can only find figures for Americans. I had trouble with that as well um there are statistics galore on how many onions americans

eat very few in england i came across the website of a group called the bopa the british onion producers association oh bopa bopa apparently they provide good medical care as well. Mainly through onions. Onion-based medical care, yeah. And the Bopa have a wonderful sounding event, the Onion and Carrot Conference. Okay. And according to them, in the UK, we eat around 11.5 kilos of onions each per year. That doesn't sound like a lot to me. It doesn't, does it? I mean it doesn't does it i mean well that's

all onions that's not just how many brown onions so that's how many brown onions red onions spring onions how many pickled onions um all that sort of thing i mean my consumption of pickled onions alone i would think would take that quite high up to the 12 kilo area but it's not just you know if you look at ingredients and stuff onions are an ingredient in everything yes they are aren't they yeah yeah you get um onion powder in an awful lot of processed food these days it makes it taste better yeah i had a little look around pickled onions as i just mentioned uh-huh um and again i i had always assumed that the onion that you use for a pickled onion i'm picturing the big chunky eye-watering pickled onion that you get in a fish and chip shop or a plowman's lunch or a plowman's lunch yeah you used to get them just

served as a snack in in pubs back in the day i can't remember the last time i saw that they are just regular onions that have been grown in a specific way to make them small they're not a separate variety at all they're just onions sort of giving less space to grow it yeah that sort of thing or a small onion has been bred together with another small onion and that's created an even smaller onion okay um and then you just stick it in vinegar for an indeterminate amount of time and then you end up with this delicious eye-watering, throat-burning snack. You like them like that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But there's another type of onion that is used for pickling,

which actually is a separate variety, and that's the silver skin onion. The pearl onion. The pearl onion, yes, that's right. So the pearl onion is, you can picture it, can't you? You can picture picking up one of these small sort of almost translucent white onions. Yummy. The outer layer comes off really, really easily. They're apparently quite a volatile variety of onion. And therefore, they're not really used in any other area of life because they just sort of fall apart. But they are pickled and used as pickled onions. And you sort of get two or three of these little things on a on a ploughman's lunch or something like that less harsh than the big ones yes presumably because they've got less space to soak up all the vinegar yes i do like a silverskin onion they're very nice aren't they i like sort of a mixture of silverskin onion and cornichon cornichon referring back to our episode

on on cucumbers indeed cucumbers. Indeed. When I was young, there used to be guys who cycled around with strings of onions that they brought over from France, and you would buy onions off an onion seller. That's actually a true thing. I just thought that was a terribly English, insulting, stereotypical image. No, no, no, there really were these guys that you bought onions right how interesting i know because the french onions were sort of tastier or i mean it was just a way of supporting these people they probably went and bought them down the local market but and then sold them as french onions yes but french onion soup do you like french onion soup i love french onion soup yeah very nice i would like it if it weren't for the cheese. Okay, fine. It's very good.

Cooking with onions is tricky, isn't it? Because you have to cut them up. You do. But chopping an onion is quite interesting. It is. They contain a thing called sulfoxide, which basically, when you chop an onion, what's released is like a sulfuric acid gas. Yes. On contact with something damp or wet yeah it

transforms into proper sulfuric acid yeah which is a very gentle mild one which is what activates your tear ducts yes i looked up the name of this thing and i've been rehearsing this all week here we go ladies and gentlemen the name of this stuff is synpropanethyls oxide yay thank you very much i'm here all week um yeah so as you say it's a it's a form of sulfur oxide um and therefore it stings and uh yeah it uh it's it's the it's the onion's natural defense mechanism basically it's the it's the sort of thing that um prevents it from being eaten you know the the plant itself doesn't know that it's popular to be eaten and therefore if someone comes along and cuts into it or an animal comes along and bites into it it releases this this gas and

that's its own defense mechanism um and that just happens to irritate our eyes and tears come in order to flush it away and that's why it's so difficult to chop an onion. Well, there are so many people who have like sort of cures for stopping your eyes from washing when you're chopping onions. What interesting ways have you found? Well, I mean, the one I use is biting a matchstick. Really? Yeah. Okay.

So because you're kind of grimacing, it kind of reduces the surface area of your eyes. Oh, okay. So you could just squint. But no, that's one way. A friend of mine puts a wet cloth next to the onion, which because the oxide is attracted to moisture. To moisture, yeah. So if there's a wet cloth near it

then yeah then it goes that way i've not tried that one i will give it a go i read uh some of the the top chefs um they splash uh white vinegar on the chopping board before they start cutting and again because purely because it's drawn to moisture it goes down instead of up um i've heard people suggesting that you um chew a piece of gum or pop a bit of bread into your mouth whilst you're cutting don't know what effect that has but apparently the one of the best ways to avoid it is um simply to leave the root end of the onion on whilst you're cutting because apparently um there's a higher concentration of i'm going to say it again synpropanethyls oxide in the root end of the onion. So if you chop from the other end and leave the root bits,

there will be less of it to disperse anyhow. Yes. Well, there's two schools of thought with that, aren't there? There's one where you leave the root on. If you're dicing an onion, you should leave the root on anyway because it gives you an anchor point. It's easier to chop, yeah. But some people say chop off the root and that's the main source.

Oh, get rid of that end. So get rid of that end first and then chop the anchor. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, you know, either leave it on or take it off. Yeah. Or, of course, the old failsafe, just wear a diving mask and then it won't hit your eyes anyway.

Simple. You wear glasses does it make any difference if you're wearing glasses do you know what this is how how sad i am i have experimented with this um my glasses are quite small and there are large gaps around the glasses and therefore the stuff gets up to my eyes anyway if you wear a nice big pair of chunky sunglasses which cover more of your eyes eyes and have sufficient illumination in the kitchen so that you can still see what you're doing, that helps me personally. Ah, there you go. So I chop onions with sunglasses on.

On me, not on the onions. Looking through the history and the spread of onions, we've come from Egypt, we've gone through Greece and we've gone into the rest of Europe. Onions were apparently one of the crops that the pilgrims took with them when they first settled America. Okay. Not knowing what they were going to find there, they took an awful lot of things with them in order to grow and eat, and onions was one of them. There is a variety of wild onion that that grows naturally in america um it's particularly pungent and um and they didn't like it so they they propagated their own british onions um apparently there was an old

native american word that described the smell of a rotting onion and this word was something similar to chicago okay and there was a particular area of america that the um specifically the french settlers as sort of happened upon and there was an awful lot of wild onions growing in that area and so they named that area after that smell of onions, Chikagua, and that became Chicago. Wow. That's how Chicago got its name, from stinky onions. Isn't that great? That's brilliant.

There used to be a belief in France that onions were an aphrodisiac. Everything's an aphrodisiac to the French. Indeed. In fact, this goes back to, well, originally it goes back to Greece. The ancient Greeks thought that onions were an aphrodisiac and they used them as such. But the French used to serve onion soup to a newlywed couple the morning after their wedding night because they thought that onions... Oh, this could have been to give them strength as well. Well, yes, that as well. Because the ancient Greek athletes before the Olympics used to eat onions to balance their blood.

Yes. They believed that actually made them stronger yes uh they also used to rub onion paste all over their bodies uh in order to strengthen their muscles apparently um or it could just be that you know the the chap running down wind of you got a whiff of all the onion paste and backed away a little bit who knows well i think given at that time people probably smelled anyway yes it was fine i have no context to frame this in i have no incredibly interesting story about this it just needs to sit there on its own so i'm just going to say it in a place called blue hill nebraska there's an old law that says no female wearing a hat that would scare a timid person can be seen eating onions in public i don't know what to do with that information bruce but obviously something

happened at some point that scared the hell out of some sheriff somewhere or yes or or a local lawmaker yes and they went right we're having that one in the statute book yeah and it's one of those laws that's just never been redacted so apparently that is still the case isn't that great a woman in a hat no female wearing a hat that would scare a timid person what kind of hat is that i don't even know but that person that person in question yes cannot be seen eating onions in public bizarre so that's a very precise combination of things. I'm just going to go out for a walk. I'll wear my incredibly scary hat

and I'll eat some onions in public. Nope, not allowed. Can't do that. Nope, not in Blue Hill, Nebraska, you don't. Okay. Have you got any good Guinness records for us us simon not as many as you would think i was looking for the world's largest sculpture made out of onions i was looking for a world record of how many onions were eaten in a certain amount of time i couldn't find any the only thing i found

world's biggest onion world's biggest onion yeah i mean that's a fairly standard thing isn't it i think it must be a bit like world's oldest man it's like it's a record that that continues well i see what you mean yes yes exactly yes it's constantly outdoing itself yes um the current record for the world's biggest onion um this was in 2023 so again as you say it was just a little bit heavier than the one that had the title previously. Yes. This was grown by a gentleman called Gareth Griffin of Harrogate. And his onion weighed 8.97 kilograms. Okay. Which is just under 20 pounds. That's a lot of onion.

I bet it doesn't taste very nice, though. No, I know. I wondered that. I'll put the link to a YouTube video of this onion actually being weighed and recorded. It's a big old thing. It's sort of the size of a rugby ball, maybe a bit bigger. I'll put a link to that up on factorally.com. Factorally.com?

You mean where the blog is? That's the one. That sort of dangerous place full of links to things that are actually more interesting than we are. Yes, that one. It's factorally uh gone mad yes yeah absolutely well i've run out of onion facts i've peeled off every layer now yes i my facts are all pickled as well uh-huh um i think it's i think it's safe to say that that's your lot. But at least now people who have been listening know their onions.

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