Josh Barrie’s dishes that can do one: Caramelised onions

In 2006, caramelised onions were necessary. No longer, says Josh Barrie
Life is like an onion: Absolutely awful when caramelised
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In my teens, I had a job in the kitchen of a country pub in Oxfordshire. It was a place where ruffled, red-trousered men spoke in corduroy whispers, shotguns aloft, where wooden floorboards creaked beneath the strain of real ale.

The pub was excellent and at the time owned by a kind woman who first had me washing up for £3.50 an hour, but soon moved me to cooking. Her husband was a musician from LA. As I washed salad leaves and chopped potatoes, for hours at a time, he would regale me with stories of playing with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Alice Cooper. We would smoke cigarettes outside by the tomato plants and admire the produce as deliveries came in. The smell of fresh poppy seed bread never got boring. I imagine it still, white loaves and wafts of tobacco smoke.

Sometime into my tenure, I was entrusted with the burgers. Naturally, they were popular. Picture a large garden, dizzy with umbrellas, and burgers, stacks of them. They were classically egalitarian. And fabulous. I’ll spare you the sandwich details, other than to say the mince was good, the lettuce crisp, the cheddar cheese enveloping. And no, they were never too big.

For whatever reason, caramelised onions were, for a time, dolloped on top of the patties. A large mound of them, slippery little sugar bumps on fine-aged beef.

I would be tasked, some Saturday mornings, with preparing the allium cauldron. The process was this: slice the onions, tears streaming, then add a little garlic, a bay leaf or two, invariably too much sugar, balsamic vinegar and a hefty glug of diabolical wine (two for the cook, don’t forget). Reduce it all down until sweet — exceptionally sweet.

Perhaps you’ll proffer the idea that my loathing of onion chutney is down to all that stirring. Not so. I didn’t hate them then. In those days I felt a sense of pride, a feeling of responsibility for all those customers who would look at the menu, gaze upon such options as lemon sole with butter and capers, or lamb chops with romesco, and then order a burger. People needed the burgers. They still do.

I think all of those easy wins in pubs and restaurants were all part of Britain’s feted dining renaissance — which began in the early noughties and finished maybe last week

But caramelised onions should be left to that kitchen, to my teenage years. They are pre-Credit Crunch — in the realms of balsamic glaze straddled salads, goat’s cheese and red onion tartlets, bolshie onion rings, and chicken and chorizo skewers. Relics, the lot of them.

Yet where these other assortments have been fading away, caramelised onions persist. Sometimes they are redressed as “onion jam”. I’ve seen “onion marmalade” too, actually. It’s all the sodding same. But this is not 2006. It is 2023, yet here we are still topping burgers with calamitous gloop, still leaning drastically on sugar and putting said sugar on something that doesn’t call for it.

I think all of those easy wins in pubs and restaurants were all part of Britain’s feted dining renaissance — which began in the early noughties and finished maybe last week — when people were having to be urged out of their three-bed semis and taught how to eat. “Are the monkfish cheeks good?” they would say, quizzically, when encouraged to try the goujons. “Yes, they are tender,” I’d say, before talking about the zesty tartare. “Oh, well I’ll go for the burger, please, and some chilli and garlic prawns.”

Such nonsense cannot be allowed to continue. We live in a country today that has no need for a crutch by way of chutney-ed onions. They are singular and dull and obnoxious in their persistence. After all, in 2006, Tony Blair was still in power. James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful reached number one. Top Gear? Back then, unmissable. Christ. Do we really want to relive any of that? No. Please allow menus to move on.

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