40 Fun Facts About Onions

Which major US city takes its name from a Native American word for a wild relative of the onion?

Chicago comes from šikaakwa, a pungent woodland plant that the French explorer Henri Joutel found growing thickly in the area in the 1680s.

Which Atlantic island exported so many onions in the 1800s that its people are still nicknamed Onions?

Bermuda earned the nickname the onion patch, and Mark Twain called the crop the island's pride and joy; exports ended in 1946 once American growers had taken the market.

Which chemical element is at the heart of the gas that makes a freshly cut onion sting the eyes?

Sulfur taken up from the soil is stored inside the onion, and slicing frees enzymes that turn those compounds into a vapour that drifts up to the eyes.

Which ancient people saw the onion's rings as a symbol of eternal life and buried bulbs with their dead?

Egyptians revered the bulb so much that traces of onion were found in the eye sockets of the mummy of Ramesses IV.

Onions are toxic to dogs and cats because compounds in them destroy what in the animal's body?

Red blood cells rupture after oxidising compounds in onion damage them, so a dog can turn anaemic days later; raw, cooked and powdered onion all carry the risk.

Which member of the onion family is a national emblem of Wales, worn on St David's Day?

Leek badges go back, in one legend, to a Welsh king who had his soldiers wear the vegetable on their helmets to tell friend from foe in a battle against the Saxons.

By law, Vidalia sweet onions can be grown only in a defined part of which US state?

Georgia passed the Vidalia Onion Act in 1986 to protect the name, and four years later made the sweet onion its official state vegetable.

Which US restaurant chain put the deep-fried Bloomin' Onion on its menu when it opened in 1988?

Outback Steakhouse made it a signature starter and registered the name as a trademark, even though blooming onion is widely used as a generic term for the dish.

The fleshy layers of an onion bulb are modified versions of which part of the plant?

Leaves build up food reserves in their swollen bases as the onion matures, so each ring you peel away is one of them, wrapped around a short, squashed stem.

In which 1998 children's novel do two runaway boys survive on a mountaintop by eating wild onions?

Holes sends Stanley and Zero up God's Thumb, where a week of wild onions keeps them alive and later keeps deadly lizards at bay.

China's People's Daily ran a 55-page photo spread in 2012 after The Onion named which leader Sexiest Man Alive?

Kim Jong-un got the full treatment from the Communist Party paper's website, which repeated the spoof's gushing praise as if it were real; The Onion then hailed the paper as its subsidiary.

In which country were soaring onion prices blamed for bringing down the national government in 1980?

India treats the onion as a political vegetable: prices were also seen as decisive in two state elections in 1998, and a 2010 spike drew 20,000 protesters onto the streets of New Delhi.

Which church on Moscow's Red Square is crowned by a cluster of brightly patterned onion domes?

Saint Basil's Cathedral was built on the orders of Ivan the Terrible, and each dome sits over a separate chapel; the whole is shaped like the flames of a bonfire.

Which anonymity network takes its name from the way it wraps traffic in onion-like layers of encryption?

Tor is short for The Onion Routing project, and the idea came from US Naval Research Laboratory staff in the mid-1990s, who nested encryption like the layers of an onion.

Cajun cooking's 'holy trinity' combines onion and celery with which third vegetable?

Bell peppers take the place that carrots hold in a French mirepoix, the flavour base the Louisiana version grew out of.

Which Frito-Lay snack, launched in 1969, is a cornmeal ring flavoured to taste like fried onion?

Funyuns were going to be called OnYums until that name turned out to be another company's trademark, so a professor who also worked as a copywriter coined the new one.

Which Stax Records house band had a 1962 hit with the organ-driven instrumental Green Onions?

Booker T. & the M.G.'s came up with it only because another tune needed a B-side, and it was quickly reissued as an A-side in its own right.

Which band's 1968 song Glass Onion lent its title to a Daniel Craig murder mystery in 2022?

The Beatles put it on the White Album, and the film returns the favour by playing the track over its end credits.

Which Game of Thrones smuggler became the Onion Knight after slipping food into a besieged castle?

Davos Seaworth ran onions and salted fish past a blockade to the starving garrison of Storm's End; Stannis knighted him, then cut off his fingertips for his smuggling past.

The satirical newspaper The Onion was started in 1988 by two students in which Wisconsin city?

Madison is home to the University of Wisconsin, where students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson launched it as a weekly print paper.

Which future US president, then a Michigan congressman, sponsored the 1958 ban on onion futures trading?

Gerald Ford acted after two traders cornered the market, then flooded it until a 50-pound bag of onions sold for less than the sack that held it.

Which gin cocktail differs from a classic martini mainly by swapping the olive for a pickled onion?

Gibson may honour the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, who in one telling dared a New York bartender to improve on the martini.

Which curry, widely served in British curry houses, has a Persian name meaning 'two onions'?

Dopiaza uses its onions in two ways: boiled into the gravy, then scattered raw or fried on top as a garnish.

Which French menu term, as in sautéed potatoes, signals that a dish is cooked with plenty of onions?

Lyonnaise means in the style of Lyon, and the best-known example is boiled potatoes sliced, shallow-fried and served with fried onions.

The 'Onion Johnnies' who sold onions door to door from their bicycles came from which French region?

Brittany's farmers around Roscoff found a better market across the Channel than at home, and their striped shirts became the stock British image of a Frenchman.

French onion dip was created in 1954 with dried soup mix; by what name was it first widely known?

California dip came out of a Los Angeles kitchen; Lipton pushed the recipe on television and from 1958 printed it on its onion soup packets.

The cheese-topped version of French onion soup took shape in the 1800s around which Paris food market?

Les Halles restaurants grilled the soup under a thick layer of grated cheese; earlier recipes were just fried onions, water and croutons.

The Walla Walla sweet onion of Washington state grew from seed a French soldier brought from which island?

Corsica supplied the seed around 1900, and growers then spent generations replanting only the sweetest, largest and roundest onions from each crop.

Which Hawaiian island gives its name to a sweet onion that is trademarked as 'Kula-grown'?

Maui growers raise them in Kula, a farming district that stretches across the western slopes of the Haleakalā volcano.

Which Roman author, later killed by the eruption of Vesuvius, recorded onions as a remedy for poor eyesight?

Pliny the Elder also set down Roman claims that onions aided sleep and healed toothache, dog bites and even dysentery.

Which antioxidant flavonoid, named after the oak genus, is concentrated in the outermost rings of red onions?

Quercetin is also plentiful in capers and kale, and within an onion the highest concentration of all sits in the part closest to the root.

Which family of pigments, also abundant in blueberries, gives red onions their purple colour?

Anthocyanins shift with acidity, showing red, pink, purple, blue or black depending on pH, and a red onion holds at least 25 different ones.

Which glands flush the eyes with tears when vapour from a freshly sliced onion reaches them?

Lacrimal glands make the tears that dilute and wash out the irritant; slicing under running water, or leaving the root end intact, cuts down the crying.

Which seasonal signal, rather than the plant's age, tells an onion when to start swelling its bulb?

Day length is why seed is sold as short-day or long-day: mild-winter types start bulbing at 11 to 12 hours of light, while traditional European ones wait for 14 or more.

The word onion comes from unio, a Latin term for oneness that Romans also applied to which gem?

Pearl and onion shared the word, perhaps through the image of a string of onions; the bulb's united layers set it apart from garlic, which splits into cloves.

Shallots and scallions both take their names from Ascalon, an ancient seaport in which present-day country?

Israel's coastal city of Ashkelon stands there today; Romans called the bulb the Ascalonian onion, and Old French wore the phrase down towards the words used now.

Which Old Testament book has the Hebrews in the wilderness pining for the onions of their captivity?

Numbers records the complaint in chapter 11, where the people, sick of manna, also list the fish, cucumbers and melons they once ate freely.

Which German Nobel laureate in literature gave his 2006 memoir the title Peeling the Onion?

Günter Grass revealed around the book's release that he had served in the Waffen-SS as a teenager, something the author of The Tin Drum had kept quiet for decades.

In which Nintendo strategy series do tiny plant-like creatures shelter at night in motherships called Onions?

Pikmin ships double as nurseries: carry food back to one and it scatters seeds that sprout into fresh recruits ready to be plucked from the ground.

Which pop-culture review publication began in 1993 as the entertainment section of The Onion?

The A.V. Club was set up by Stephen Thompson to run genuine interviews and reviews alongside the parent paper's invented news.