ISSUE 52, ONIONS-SHALLOTS-GARLIC, Part 3: Danvers Yellow Globe Onion
Danvers Yellow Globe Onion
If the Red Weathersfield Onion was the first North American variety that won a national following, Danvers Yellow Globe was the first to be an international hit. Both were New England creations, the former from Connecticutt, the latter from South Danvers, Massachusetts. The Buxton brothers, Daniel (1811-1885) and David created the Danvers Yellow Globe variety in the 1840s, working with common yellow flat onions to fashion the first great “keeping” or storage onion. The yellow flat onion was German in nativity, sometimes called the Strasbourg and sometimes misnamed by New Englanders the “silverskins,” a name properly applied to the White Portugal. James J H Gregory, Onions How to Raise Them (Salem, 1865), 12-13. Indeed Daniel Buxton himself misnamed the onion he improved in a statement published in April 1851 when he received the first premium award for onions by the Essex Institute and an accolade of the Massachusetts Ploughman for his onion crop.
Daniel Buxton did not set out to create a new variety; rather he took a respected old variety and by seed selection transformed its characteristics to conform with his sense of a desirable onion. He commented upon his method in October of 1850: “The onions were not large but were remarkable for uniformity of size, and excellence of quality. They were of the species called Silver Skin. They were thick and plump, which form has been produced by careful attention, in selecting such seed for several years. I raise my own seed, and am particular to set such only for this purpose, as I wish to raise. In this way I find their form can be modified nearly as I prefer it to be.” “Daniel Buxton Jr’s Statement,” Massachusetts Ploughman (April 26, 1851), 1.
Daniel Buxton bred to make the onion spherical, early in maturation, and prolific. Its extraordinary keeping quality was a serendipitous added benefit. Its shape, short growing season, and storage qualities made the Danvers Yellow Globe an international sensation. English and French breeders used it as a parent strain for many of the important storage onions of the last half of the 19th century (Befordshire Champion. James’s Keeping Onion, Australian Brown, Cranston’s Excelsior). In certain strains of the Danvers there was a reversion to the oblate configuration of the ancestor onions; these came to be known as Danvers Yellow Flat.
The Danvers Yellow Globe was largely responsible for creating a consumer preference for yellow onions over white and red in the mid-19th century, a predilection that would only be challenged in the 1890s with the Bermuda Onion boom. The yellowness refers to the color of the onion skins, not the flesh, which is white and fine grained. In 1869 the writers of the Hovey garden catalog characterized it thusly: “sugary, comparatively mild and well-flavored” Hoveys’ Illustrated Catalogue and Guide to the Flower and Vegetable Garden (Boston, 1869), 117.
The description by Vilmorin: “Bulb spherical or slightly flattened, coppery yellow, and a little redder than the Brown Portugal, or Vertus, Onion, usual from 2 2/3rds to 3 1/3rd inches in diameter, and nearly the same in thickness; coats numerous and closely set; neck very vine, as is al the disc or plate from which the roots issue; leaves medium-sized, and light green.”