ISSUE 52, ONIONS-SHALLOTS-GARLIC, Part 2: Bermuda Onion
Bermuda Onion
My grandfather E P Shields loved a good onion. He’d cut a thick disk of raw sweet onion to put on his improvised sandwiches—peanut butter & onion, tomato and onion, and fried egg and onion with mayo. When it came to onions he had a preference—the red Bermuda. I went produce shopping with him on numerous occasions and saw him gauge purple red globes for girth and heft. He left us long ago, at age 93, in 1987. So he won’t be disappointed to learn that his favorite onion was a fraud.
The Red Sweet was not a Bermuda Onion, but an independent strain of onion, rounder and sassier than the sweet crystal wax white and flat yellow onions grown on the island of Bermuda from the 1840s on. In the 1880s American seedsmen, banking on the strongly positive associations with quality and sugariness that the Bermuda onions had in the public mind, rebrand a European red sweet onion “the Red Bermuda” and started selling seeds for it. No red sweet onion was grown on that Atlantic island during its heyday as the “onion patch.”
When Texas in the first decade of the 20th century determined to steal the onion trade from Bermuda, securing seed from Bermuda and the Canary Islands they onion grew the sweet yellow and sweet crystal wax white. They also engineered the passage of 40 cent per bushel import duty on onions imported from Bermuda. Texas farmers were so successful that entire counties on the Mexican border produced early season white and yellow Bermudas. The American sweet onion industry was built on the Bermuda and thrived until something happened to the genetics of the Bermuda onion in the 1920s—seed began failing, and growth irregularities increased. The onion would bolt more quickly.
It was this that set growers looking to the Spanish grano sweet onion as an alternative. Improvement of the grano strain produced first the Texas 502 and then the Granex—the sweet onions that you know as Vidalia and Walla Walla and whatever other local southern sweet you had. Bermuda onions still had a name and demand and were grown throughout the 20th century-but try as you might you won’t find a classic yellow or crystal wax at a grocery store. The granex sweets are more productive and less prone to bolt. You can still get the Red Bermuda. But alas it is not a Bermuda.