Know your onions

Shallots are like tiny onions, but sweeter and more subtle. They take hours of peeling, but then you remember the flavour of a shallot for months or years after. Sauté them gently and slowly in olive oil till soft and incredibly sweet; add to braised meat, fold into omelettes, add a tablespoon of chilly jam and serve them by themselves to eat slowly and savour.

The other way to eat shallots is to harvest their tops, which are less coarse than those of spring onions and softer than chives, and available now in mid-winter when the chives are dormant. We eat them most days, again in omelettes, scrambled eggs and finely chopped in mashed potatoes. I’ve rather gone off spring onions - too coarse, except possibly in potato salads where their crispness contrasts nicely with the soft potatoes.

To get shallots you need to plant shallots. They multiply like daffodil and other bulbs. These days I harvest all I can find when the tops die off, but there are always enough small ones I miss to give us our next crop, so it’s a continuous supply of shallots – the bulbs in summer and the tops in autumn, winter and spring.

Any good nursery should supply them and many mail order places too. Plant them as deep as they are long, or a bit deeper if you aren’t going to mulch them, skinny bit upwards as that’s where the shoots will emerge. I mulch ours as soon as the green tops are as long as my finger (or when I get around to it) – shallots don’t like to be crowded out, and in wet humid summers the bulbs can rot in a mess of weeds. Treated right, you’ll get at least three times as much as you have planted, and often far more.

Harvest when the tops die back. Leave them spread out in a dry spot for the skins to truly dry out. I then leave ours in a cardboard box in the larder till I remember them. Which this year was when I tripped over them getting a couple of egg cartons.

Eat them through winter and plant a few too. It is almost impossible to have too many shallots. They come in gold or red fleshed varieties, with subtle flavour differences in both and both have brown skins.

And perhaps plant some spring onions now, just in case you want potato salad come summer. And onions, because a home-grown onion is as different from a supermarket one as a garden tomato is from a pink golf ball. They may not be shallots, but they still make a stunning onion soup with real onion flavour, or soak them overnight in vinegar and olive oil before adding them to salads. (Onions need the marinating to lose their savageness and become savoury instead.) Or bake a couple of onions slowly next to a roast chook, or a pile of gold shallots. There’s nothing like the scent of slow-baked onions to cheer up winter.