The waft of cooking onions
Onion and potato galettes à la Marché Raspail with pear, lime & tamarind chutney
Onion and potato galettes
Makes: around 16-20 galettes
Takes: at least an hour, patience is the key ingredient here
Ingredients
700 g waxy potatoes
1/2 lemon
500 g brown onions (7 small-medium onions)
200 g gruyere
2 t black mustard seeds
2 eggs
3/4 c flour*
pepper and salt
butter or light cooking oil
*Use the flour of your choice here. I used chestnut flour because I happened to have it. Buckwheat or chickpea would also work a treat.
Method
Grate potato, skin and all. Salt lightly and sprinkle over lemon juice to prevent browning. Leave over a colander to drain excess liquid, giving it a few squeezes with your hands.
Skin and top and tail onions. Then either mince finely by hand or pulse a few times in a food processor for the same result.
Combine all ingredients in a bowl.
Heat up a large frying pan with a splash of oil or knob of butter. Shallow fry the galettes in batches of around 4. Flatten them out with the back of your fish slice (i.e., a metal pancake turner). Leave to cook on a low-to-medium heat for at least five minutes before flipping; by which stage the golden skin on the bottom should be formed. Then cook for around 5 minutes on the other side.
Heat the oven to 80°C. Place the galettes on a tray in the oven to keep them warm until ready to serve.
Serve with a spicy chutney or a thin tamarind and coriander sauce, and a green salad.
Pear, lime and tamarind chutney
Makes: at least 1 jar of chutney
Takes: 40 minutes (excluding pre-soaking tamarind)
Ingredients
400 g pears
2 onions
1/2 c raisins
1 clove garlic
50 g sour tamarind pulp
1 c cider vinegar
1 t fresh nutmeg
1 cinnamon stick
zest and juice of 1 lime
pepper and salt
2 T brown sugar (optional)
Method
At least an hour (and ideally the night) before making chutney, cover tamarind paste in boiling water and leave to soak. Once soft, push through a sieve with a spoon, discarding seeds and retaining the liquid.
Core pears and chop roughly.
Skin and top and tail onions, then pulse a few times in a food processor until well minced, or mince by hand.
Add all ingredients into a large pot and cook on a low heat for at least 30 minutes until the pears have broken down. Taste and adjust spices, sugar, vinegar or salt.
Carefully spoon your chutney into sterilized jars while still hot. The metal lid should pop once the chutney begins to cool, sealing until you wish to use. Once opened, this should keep in the fridge for 1-3 months.
The story behind the recipe…
It was around this time of year, five years ago, that I moved to Paris. The leaves were just beginning to turn brown at the edges, the streets starting to get their wet Autumn slick. Down by the Seine, loose arrangements of students were still congregating, jazz fusion playing on a portable speaker, sprawled out across wooden-crate furniture with baguettes and cheese, bottles of rosé, ignoring the darkening skies.
We went to Marché Raspail the weekend I moved in. It was a short cycle from my apartment in the 7th. Past the gilded dome of Invalides, the rococo angel lanterns, the sculpted bridges; jiggling along cobbled streets, narrow canyons walled by tall creamy limestone buildings, brief glimpses of hidden courtyards behind. The market lured us in with its smell. Cooking onions and fried cheese wafted towards us and we followed our noses to its source.
The man who made the onion galettes had his stall at the entrance of the market. In front of it stretched a long queue. His was a solo operation and he was not to be hurried. He cooked the galettes in batches. Dolloping out the gloopy batter onto his round black crepe irons, taking cash and then nodding at you to wait at the other end of the stall. He did not speak much. He took his time, methodically checking one of them to make sure it was properly browned before he would turn it. Then he would turn them all in succession. Five minutes passed. Ten. The group of people waiting at the end of the stall grew larger and still he kept accepting money for more galettes, kept prodding the ones on the irons. Mouths watering, the smell of cooking onions everywhere. Then suddenly they were ready, he slides them into greasy brown paper bags, handing them out one after another to the waiting crowd.
My galette is dark golden brown, crisp, cheesy edges, it almost shatters as I bite in it. The onion and cheese melded into a fine shell, the insides soft, almost hash-brown like. I’ve tried many times to recreate these galettes at home. This is the latest iteration. Not the same as the man makes them at the Marché Raspail. But in homage to them. In homage to that smell. The smell of cooking onions might just be the nicest food smell in the world, or a close second only to the smell of baking bread.
At the smell of onions, I am thirteen years old again. My first job is delivering the evening paper after school. The papers were printed in Wellington and then a chain-smoking newspaper man would drive them by van to us, huddled together in an aluminium shed in our school uniforms, our bikes parked outside. I was the only paper-girl. The van was invariably late. By the time we started our rounds, more often than not the afternoon was already slipping away. I would cycle to the other side of town for my route, wearing my backpack on one strap so I could swing it forward, grab a paper with one hand, fold it over and poke it through the letterbox in one movement, trying not to let my feet graze the ground. Sometimes the papers came with a plastic sleeve, but most days they were naked and as you folded them, the ink would cling to your fingers, the particular acrid, hot chips smell of those newspapers. I was always racing to get to the last stop, a nineteenth century villa that sat on a small hill by itself, then home, home.
By this time, it would already be getting dark. I would be ravenously hungry. Winding its way through the cool evening streets came the the smell of cooking onions. Savoury and full and round. Unmistakeable. Carrying along subtler notes, minted peas and roasting potatoes. I would cycle through other people’s dinners, breathing them in, trying to picture them in my head, to pick the house, hoping that dinner would already be waiting when I got finally got home.
That paper run book-ended an era. I was one of the last kids to deliver the evening paper. It was the year we got internet at home. MSN messenger was the new buzz word at school. We would pass notes to our crushes in class with our usernames scribbled on them. The evening paper merged with a morning paper not long after I finally quit, and the remaining paper-boys were paid $60 each as redundancy pay, nearly four months of earnings.
In some strange way, the paper run served as an apprenticeship for my cycling life in The Netherlands. I learned to keep my tyres pumped, how to mend a punctured tube, how to cycle without hands, with little idea that these might one day be skills I would turn to. That I might one day do all of my grocery shopping by bike, balancing the shopping bags behind me just as I used to balance my school backpack, stuffed full of papers.
Circling back to the galettes, there is something universal about this recipe. I think of it as Parisian, because this is where I encountered them for the first time. Though in truth, it is venturing perilously close to rösti territory. And so many different food cultures have their own version of fritters. Tweak this recipe only a little and you end up with an Indian onion bhaji, or perhaps you are in Jewish latke territory, celebrating the beginning of Rosh Hashanah today, or you are making a Sichuan potato pancake. The sauces and the spices are crucial culinary clues.
Thanks for reading this week.
Amelia.