ISSUE 52, ONIONS-SHALLOTS-GARLIC, Part 1: Sweet Onions and the South
Sweet Onions and the South
The sweet onion became a southern thing in the 20th century. The old onions—the ones grown by truck farmers and planters before 1900—the classic Creole onion of the Gulf Coast or the Red Weathersfield—were peppery alliums. Toward the end of the 19th century, however, the nation experienced a salad boom. A sharp onion could throw off the balance of a well constructed bowl, so a premium was placed on a “mild” salad onion. The sale of Bermuda onions—both red and white began to climb in the South, indeed everywhere.
Now sweet onions have existed since antiquity. The Greeks nurtured a low-sulphur variety to mix with wine (it is sulphur that gives certain onions a tear inducing pungency). But under the old Galenic philosophy of health, in which the four humors had to be balanced, the watery phlegmatic north Europeans needed something hot to balance their placidity. So the crying onions enjoyed particular favor in their cookery.
The Bermuda Onion was grown under a stringent quality control system on the island of Bermuda, producing a superlative product that commanded high prices at the market each April. American vegetable producers chafed at the prices and preference the Bermudas enjoyed so engineered in 1897 a 40 cent per bushel duty on any onions imported from Bermuda. The intent was to drive the sale price up past a tipping point.
In Texas another approach to competition took place. Using Bermuda onion sets produced in the Canary islands growers in Catula, TX, in 1899 began growing Bermudas for the domestic market. They ignited an agricultural industry, as south and southwest Texas became large scale suppliers of Bermuda onions—so successful that they stole the market from the island in twenty years. As the cultivation of onions in Texas expanded, so did the seed onion production in the Canary Islands until the scale and demand pushed seedsmen to careless expansion to meet quotas. The Bermuda Onions began to decline in quality in the 1920s. Agronomists began looking to the Spanish Grano Onion as a backstop in case the Bermuda variety collapsed.
In 1944 the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station (Crystal City, TX) released an early maturing sweet onion that would change the tastes of Americans and make the entire South a region committed to producing mild, sugary onions. The Texas Early Grano 502 was a strain developed out of the Spanish Grano Onion (Babosa), a variety imported into Texas in 1925.
Plant scientists in New Mexico and Texas began improving the imported Grano strain in the 1930s. Work by Dr. Henry A. Jones and Ernest Mortensen in selecting and developed an early maturing, highly productive Grano came to fruition in 1940 when a group of plants at Winter Garden Station were found to reach maturity 12 days before the earliest Bermudas.
The general configuration of the Texas Early Grano 502 is familiar to many, since it is replicated in many sweet onion varieties. They are uniformly round, yellow-skinned white onions. The large bulbs approach the size of grapefruits and weigh as much as a pound apiece. The Texas Early Grano 502 is a short day variety and comes to maturity “The bulbs are top shaped and have very few thin to medium-thick pale-yellow scales. The flesh is soft and very mild in flavor. Early Grano is somewhat resistant to thrips, but very susceptible to pink root fungus. The variety bolts much less readily than Yellow Bermuda and Crystal Wax in Texas when planted at the same time. It is a heavy yielder in the absence of pink root.”
Larger than a Bermuda, milder, and earlier the Texas Early Grano 502 won wide acceptance. It did, however, have one liability that the Bermuda did not—a tendency for individual layers in the onion to rot under certain storage conditions. So the 502 was crossed with a strain of Bermuda to form the Granex sweet onion. In 1952 the Granex began begin shipped to growers in Georgia. After the construction of a farmer’s market depot in Vidalia, GA, in 1960, the Granex became the engine driving the now famous emergence of “the Vidalia Onion.” The rest is history. With the grocery chain driven national availability of high quality sweet “Vidalia” onions, tastes shifted, and the sweet supplanted the sharp as the ideal onion flavor.