With onion, everything is better!

I follow Nigel Slater on Instagram to be charmed. He’ll post a picture of a strip of his garden going a bit wild, his breakfast, or a quiche he’s made, with a line like the ‘wisteria outside my kitchen holding hands with the fig tree’ - and he’s got me. He’s always had a lovely way with both words and food.

We share a photographer, as it happens - Jonathan Lovekin - who’s shot most of my books and has worked with Nigel for even longer. They’re doing a joint interview for Vittles’ print magazine, out later this month, which I very much look forward to reading.

Back in 2009, Nigel wrote a piece for the Guardian called Confessions of an Allium Addict. That particular Spring, his row of spring onions was on hold, on account of “a blackbird nesting in the hedge… next to where I had planned to plant” them. He did eventually get to plant them, and get them onto his charcoal grill. He wrote about blackening the skin properly: “peel off the outer shell and inside will be soft, deliciously moist layers of flesh.”

I love eating spring onions, and other onions, cooked this way. In Spain, they take it to a whole other level. Their saying ‘con cebolla, todo sabe mejor’ puts it best - ‘with onion, everything tastes better’. Taken to its most devoted extreme, the Catalan festival Calçotada, built entirely around grilling calçots - a sweeter, fatter type of spring onion - over burning vine cuttings until blackened, then peeled by hand and dunked in romesco (bibs mandatory).

You don’t need vine cuttings or a bib to do the same at home, though - just a hot grill.

Raw, an onion is all sharp edges - sulphurous and a little aggressive. Which works in some ways: small pieces of raw white onion on a taco or red onion through a Greek salad. When you heat it up, though, the sugars come to the surface, the layers go slack and silky, and all that raw bite softens into sweetness. The outside chars and turns bitter in exactly the right places, while whatever’s underneath stays soft enough to fall apart on a fork. Very few vegetables do both at once quite as well as alliums.

Both of today’s recipes lean into this. The first is a very simple barbecue side - spring onions, grilled until sweet and a little smoky, finished with sweet soy, lime and a bit of crunch. The second is a little more of a centrepiece: charred white onion petals, dressed up with a cherry drizzle and a pistachio dukkah.

Cebollitas - the charred spring onions that turn up at every Mexican barbecue, piled alongside grilled meat - are the inspiration here, though this version goes with sweet soy and lime. Spring onions on the grill turn sweet and tender - the large bulbed ones are worth seeking out if you can find them, but regular spring onions work just as well (as pictured). Serve alongside toum if you fancy making some.

Grilled spring onions

Onions are at their best when they're charred - bitter at the edges, sweet in the middle. The cherry drizzle plays into that contrast, and the pistachio dukkah adds crunch and savouriness on top. If you only have raw pistachios, toast them lightly with a little salt before making the dukkah.