ISSUE 52, ONIONS-SHALLOTS-GARLIC-Part 4: Of Scallions and Shallots
Of Scallions and Shallots – Of Bunching Onions and Nesting Onions
A number of popular onion varieties grow in clusters rather than as individual bulbs. There are the bunching onions such as scallions/Spring onions—and the nesting onions such as the old potato onions and the shallots.
Many bunching onions (Allium fistulosum) are perennials that reproduce for the most part by tillering, that is, by sprouting additional stalks from a core root bundle. Many bunching onions don’t form bulbs. The most popular varieties of bunching are the Welsh White, the Chinese Cong, and the Japanese Bunching onion. The white fleshed stalks gradate into tubular green leaves; both portions are edible raw or cooked. These are scallions, or “green onions.”
Certain of the Japanese bunching onions deserve particular attention. The Ishikura long winter has an extended long white stalk and a sometimes minty note along with the bracing onion. I found the He shi Ko heirloom bunching onion rather too mild for my tastes. But I can imagine it performing well in soups and hot pots. I think southern growers would do well to try out the very heat resistant tsukuba bunching onion. All generate classic scallion forms.
But the term scallion has been applied to other onion types as well. Indeed for most of the 20th century people have been marketing the immature form of Allium cepa var. cepa, harvesting the young onion plants before the bulb forms. Recently produce managers have been selling adolescent plants as Spring onions—green stalk on a modest bulb.
Though the bunching onion most common to American growers has been the “Welsh onion”—the plant itself is not native to Wales, but to China. There a range of bunching onion varieties have evolved, the smallest resembling chives, the largest rather like leeks on a diet. All bear scapes. All have an odor and flavor that has the sharpness and vegetal freshness of a good onion.
Another onion family that has sometimes been sold under the label scallion is the potato onion (Allium aggregatum). It was sometimes called a mother onion or a hill onion. If you ever dig one up from the soil you will never forget it, because onion bulbs of various sizes are clustered willy-nilly in a mass. Because they reproduce by division of bulbs, unlike most bulb onions which reproduce by seed, they were easy to cultivate, particular in the north where short or whimsical growing seasons sometimes thwarted a plant coming fully to seed. With potato onions you did have to worry about that. What you do have to worry about is that taking apart the clusters/nests takes time and effort and does not lend itself to mechanical solutions. Then too the bulb seldom exceed two inches in breadth. That’s why you don’t see potato onions in cultivation hereabout in onion fields—only in experimental gardens. If a nest comprised a number of shoots with skinny bulbs, these were harvested and sold as scallions. My friends at the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange sell a yellow version suited to the climate of the upper South.
Now the shallot is a kind of Allium aggregation—its slipper like bulbs form in a nest. It is a perennial like the bunching onion. In the 19th century growers and consumers in the South didn’t recognize named varieties: there were yellow, white, and red shallots. Those which best lent themselves to sale as scallions were “long shallots.” The yellow tended to derive from old Dutch landraces, the red shallots came from France, and the white was brought from England and remained the favorite American shallot until the latter half of the 20th century made the French red shallots a fine dining staple.
Which chef was responsible for identifying the shallot as the secret ingredient of fine dining is a matter of debate. I hear Julia Child extol the delicate flavor of the shallot sometime in the 1970s. The revelation stimulated a gargantuan effort at breeding new shallot varieties—so that instead of yellow, white red, we have three dozen named varieties. Many of them new. But if you are looking for heirloom French, you want the Zebrune, a pale red shallot in the classic banana/slipper shape. For a modern variety Red Sun takes only 80 days to maturing instead of the usual 100. Many of the old white varieties have been rebranded Gray.
Rules of thumbs about shallots:
1 Shallots always multiply in clusters
2 Shallots never grow a large round bulb
3 Shallots have longer and slenderer leaves than onions—even most potato onions
4 Shallots are mild flavored
5 Shallots will keep without rotting for almost a year if kept dark and dry
In the South they are planted in two seasons. An old saying was that you planted a shallot on the shortest day of the year and harvested it on the longest. This may work for the southernmost parts of the US, but not anywhere north of Virginia where you would do well to plant in February and harvest in July. A second cycle is often undertaken by planting in early autumn and harvesting in Spring. The beauty of the shallots delicate stems is such that kitchen gardeners use it to form borders in the garden. You punch a clave or a division of a shallot bunch so that the bulb is half buried in the soil. This bulb will ramify, so spacing the plants is important. 8 inches minimum. Each plated clove will produce a cluster of nine or ten shallots. When harvested and stored, do not heap them on top of one another but lay them out separately on a surface or in a container.
Shallots were marketed in two forms: some were harvested when the bulbs were slender, gathered in bunches of eight to ten, and sold as green onions. Almost invariably these were forms of the white shallot.