Sweet Vidalia

Sweet Vidalia

When I was a kid my dad scored a huge sack of Vidalia onions and to preserve them over the coming months he’d heard panty hose was the key, so we knotted them up one after another in panty hose and hung them in a hall closet. They weren’t as readily available back then in the early 1980s, so Dad getting a sack of them was indeed a score, and from there he was chopping onions and putting them in everything from tuna salad to salmon croquettes.

Something about my family on my dad’s side, the Wester’s, that I’ve come to understand since my grandmother died is how our love of good food is pretty uncommon. Now, most people like stuff that tastes good, don’t get me wrong, but I would say that most people aren’t concerned about good food if McDonald’s counts as good. In our family, Mama Ione, our beloved matriarch, my grandmother, did trial and error on every recipe she ever tried until she perfected it and could cook it blindfolded. The effect of that was Sunday lunch at her house was dish after dish of perfection, from her fried okra to her creamed corn to her dinner rolls. She thought about every ingredient and every proportion and it was serious business. Her food was how she expressed her love, you see. And we just showed up and ate her cooking by the plateful and took it for granted that this was how people ate.

I remember looking up Vidalia in the Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedia set that dad had purchased one volume at a time until he’d pieced together the entire thing. What is it about maps? I think about that sometimes, how staring at Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings maps fires up the imagination in its own particular way, how I used to stare at a map of Neverland and daydream about the beautiful mermaids, and I remember staring at Middle Georgia and having those kinds of imaginings. The land of the magical sweet onions.

When I moved here, visiting Vidalia, the sweet onion city, was among the first things I did, and buying a sack of onions from a farmer at his onion stand was a profound accomplishment.

They are just sweet onions. Yes, they are sweet. They lack the bite that can make one cry when cutting them. Since they are so mild and sweet, a cook might feel freer to throw them around much more liberally than regular onions. Any dish cooked with vidalias is more special than it would be otherwise.

Vidalia Sweet Onions are lore and unique Southern-ness, a reason to nickname a city and throw a festival. They are something to protect by law. They’re one of the little things that makes life bearable to the degree that it ever is. Vidalias can only happen here on this chuck of much mythologized land in the middle of the great state of Georgia.